Peter Parsons

How an ancient rubbish dump has given us a unique view of life 2,000 years ago In 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging a mound south of Cairo. Ten years later, they had uncovered 500,000 fragments of papyri. Shipped back to Oxford, the meticulous and scholarly work of deciphering these fragments began. It is still going on today. As well as Christian writings from totally unknown gospels and Greek poems not seen by human eyes since the fall of Rome, there are tax returns, petitions, private letters, sales documents, leases, wills and shopping lists. What they found was the entire life of a flourishing market-town - Oxyrhynchos ( the `city of the sharp-nosed fish' ), - encapsulated in its waste paper. The total lack of rain in this part of Egypt had preserved the papyrus beneath the sand, as nowhere else in the Roman Empire. We hear the voices of barbers, bee-keepers and boat-makers, dyers and donkey-drivers, weavers and wine-merchants, set against the great events of late antiquity: the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the coming of Christianity. The result is an extraordinary and unique picture of everyday life in the Nile Valley between Alexander the Great in 300 BC and the Arab conquest a thousand years later.

Greek Lives in Roman Egypt

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish

Tom isn’t anything to anyone, or at least he wasn’t until the dying wish of his father sent him on a seemingly impossible trek to find a lost wartime lover, unwittingly throwing Tom into a maelstrom of violence, death and romance. An exciting and sometimes humorous escapade which started when a bereaved son had nothing better to do.

The Last Wish

John Rea

Dirk Obbink

N. Gonis

This volume publishes a selection of texts prepared to highlight recent work on the Oxyrhynchus Collection. Part I includes papyri of the Old and New Testaments. Part II offers Comedy Old and New: Aristophanes, a sizeable chunk of Menander's Epitrepontes and Georgos . Part III presents previously unknown Greek literature, including a new papyrus of Empedocles, a work by Thrasyllus (Tiberius' court astrologer and philosopher in residence) on the classification of Plato's dialogues, as well as Dictys of Crete's account of the Trojan War in unpretentious prose, complete with its 'author's' own subscription. These add two new papyri of the Greek original to the two already known. They show more clearly the relation of the Greek original to the Latin version, casting doubt on the status of the letter as a straightforward translation. Part IV showcases texts of previously known Greek literature of the Roman period uncommon among the papyri, while Part V presents texts at the subliterary level. On the documentary side, Part VI includes: themes of extortion in petitions; a military muster, in Latin; a letter on recovery from illness in high-flown Greek; a certified copy of a petition to a prefect, which besides its impressive format has interesting though enigmatic implications for the use of Roman Law.

Peter Parsons

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