Oxyrhynchus Story

On July 1st 1897 the Egypt Exploration Fund established the Graeco- Roman Research Account, ‘for the discovery and publication of the remains of classical antiquity and early Christianity in Egypt’.

Two young men in their late twenties, Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt, of The Queen’s College, Oxford, had been digging for papyri around the Fayûm. But for the 1896/7 season El-Behnesa, a sleepy village on the banks of the Bahr Yusuf, was the chosen site. It was once a city called Oxrhynchus, ‘City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish’. Papyrology was about to be invented.

The remains of the ancient town amounted to a lone Greek column, surrounded by a quiet Arab village that was exposed to the wind-swept desert. The limestone and bricks, with which the ancient city was built, had become a ‘thousand-years’ quarry for inhabitants in need of building materials. Only lines of stone and banks of sand betrayed the sites of former homes and buildings, the bare bones of a dead city.

At first, the site did not look promising for extracting papyri. Then they began to excavate various mounds around the city, which turned out to be the ancient garbage dumps.

With about 100 men from the local village, Grenfell and Hunt dug in the high winds roaring across the desert. But enduring this constant barrage of flying sand paid off. In early January of 1897 a papyrus containing the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas was unearthed, and then a fragment of St. Matthew’s Gospel.

The flow of papyri began. Within a few years not only Thucydides and Plato were delicately pulled from the sand, but also Greek lyric poetry that had not been seen or read in about 1000 years. Further, the private documents of this vanished city were collected en masse: private letters, accounts, wills, marriage certificates, land leases, etc. Ancient garbage became a modern treasure.

By 1907 the digging ceased. 700 boxes of papyri, potentially carrying about 500,000 fragments, made the long journey back to Oxford, where Grenfell and Hunt opened up a new branch of study: papyrology. A little over a century later, only a small percentage has been edited by scholars. The Oxyrhynchus collection is owned and overseen by the Egypt Exploration Society.

The study of this ancient city and its lives continues, and new texts are still waiting to be discovered.