For centuries that sheet remained where the hands of embalmers had placed it: on the abdomen of a Roman mummy, inside a tomb in Al Bahnasa, in Middle Egypt. When scholars read it, Homer came out of those fibers. The fragment belongs to the second book ofIliad and contains the ship cataloguethe passage that lists the Greek forces headed towards Troy. The discovery marks a clear precedent: archaeologists describe it as the first attestation of a Greek literary text deliberately inserted into the mummification process.
A mummy brought Homer back into the material gestures of burial
The Ossirinco archaeological mission, entrusted to the IPOA of the University of Barcelona and led by Maite Mascort and Esther Pons, intercepted the fragment during the campaign between November and December 2025. Núria Castellano’s team was working in Tomb 65 of Sector 22 when they found a mummy with a papyrus placed on its abdomen as part of the embalming ritual. The same site had already returned Greek papyri inserted in similar positions, always with magical or ritual contents. This time a literary text has appeared, and it alone is enough to shift the axis of the entire discovery.
The study continued between January and February 2026 with the conservator Margalida Munar, the papyrologist Leah Mascia and the philologist Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, who directs the project. The recognition of the passage came from Mascia’s reading: book II of the Iliadthe famous catalog of ships, one of the best-known passages of the poem. Adiego explained that the new data does not lie in the presence of Greek papyrus in the mummification, already documented in the past, but in the fact that a literary text appears here within a funerary context. It is this gap that makes the find exceptional.
In the necropolis of Al Bahnasa, the ancient Oxyrhynchus, about 190 kilometers from Cairo and next to the Bahr Yussef, a branch of the Nile, excavations have brought to light a funerary complex with three limestone chambers. There, Roman mummies and decorated wooden sarcophagi emerged, often arriving today in difficult conditions due to the looting suffered in the past. The Homeric papyrus takes strength precisely within this landscape of stone, bodies and spoliations: a fragile object left still in the exact spot where someone had placed it about sixteen centuries ago.
For a modern reader the catalog of ships may seem like a long list, almost a pause in the story of the Trojan War. Within the poem, however, that passage has a precise weight: it widens the front, brings order to the Achaean world, transforms the expedition into a map of men, cities and power. Finding it in a Roman tomb in Egypt adds a very strong cultural friction, because a piece born for Greek epic memory ends up incorporated into a funerary gesture that belongs to another material and religious horizon. The precise meaning of that choice remains open to study, but the value of the discovery is already very clear.
Oxyrhynchus, the city of papyrus where books continue to emerge from the sand
Oxyrhynchus has always weighed heavily in the history of ancient texts. Since the end of the nineteenth century the site, today identified with Al Bahnasa, has yielded an enormous quantity of papyri: administrative documents, private letters, religious texts, literary works. The excavations launched by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt between 1896 and 1907 opened an immense archive of the Greco-Roman world, which was then studied without interruption for more than a century. In that mass, authors who were lost or preserved only in fragments also re-emerged. Precisely for this reason today’s discovery strikes with a different force: Oxyrhynchus had already accustomed us to books recovered from the sand and piles of waste in the city, much less to a passage from Homer incorporated into a burial rite.
The mission of the University of Barcelona has been working in Ossirinco since 1992, the year in which the project was started under the leadership of Josep Padró, and is considered one of the most stable Spanish presences in Egypt. The latest campaign, closed between November 2025 and February 2026, delivered finds that those responsible describe as of exceptional historical and archaeological importance. The city of papyrus continues to speak from its remains. This time he did it from the belly of a mummy.
