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Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
- nullbio 5mo agoI'm sure this is just a giant coincidence, given the timing of Chris Nolan's new movie, and couldn't possibly be fraud.
- bawolff 5mo agoI mean, this is one of the most important works of ancient literature. The movie probably doesn't move the needle on how important the find is. Also if it was fraud to capitalize on the movie, wouldn't they use the odyssey instead of the iliad?
- prawn 5mo agoOne possibility is that the finding as news is more likely to resonate and reach print given the looming movie?
- ajxs 6mo agoIn case anyone doesn't know, Oxyrhynchus is a major source of archaeological discoveries. Particularly ancient (Ptolemaic/Roman Egypt) papyrus fragments recovered from an ancient landfill on the outskirts of the city. Notably some of the earliest-known Christian textual artefacts were found there (the actual earliest fragments came from elsewhere in Egypt). It turns out that Egypt's hot and dry climate provides the perfect environment for their long-term preservation.
- thaumasiotes 6mo ago> It turns out that Egypt's hot and dry climate provides the perfect environment for their long-term preservation. Cold and dry would be just as good. It's the dryness that matters.
- vlovich123 6mo agoheat speeds up oxidation/ accelerates reactions but also decreases relative humidity for a constant moisture constant.
- tadfisher 6mo agoOnly because humidity is measured relative to the vapor pressure at a given temperature. It only matters for preservation when humidity reaches 100%.
- addaon 6mo agoIs this true? Paper (and I assume papyrus) expands and contracts with varying humidity even below the saturation point, and this motion embrittles and cracks it, no? So consistent humidity is key, and "consistently dry" is much more achievable than "consistently at an arbitrary other point."
- nerdsniper 6mo agoYour intuition is more correct: it is not true. The relative humidity of the air matters below 100% as well. I think the parent commenter mistakenly assumed that only "condensation" matters, but materials will absorb moisture from the air even if the water doesn't condense. Entropy drives the dispersion of moisture, and some materials are "hygroscopic", meaning they don't merely reach equilibrium with the air, but actually concentrate moisture from the air and get significantly more wet than the air which feeds it water.
- cjs_ac 6mo agoOne of the texts found in Oxyrhynchus is the oldest extant Western martial arts treatise: https://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyrus_(P.Oxy.III.466) https://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyrus_(P.Oxy.III.4...
- notorandit 6mo agoI Hope more and more fragments of anything lost is found. The burn down of Alexandria library was a pity
- jmyeet 6mo agoThis is a common refrain but in reality I'm not sure it made much difference. Papyrus just doesn't age well and most manuscripts from this era would've been on papyrus. What really decided what texts survived and what didn't was monastic traditions in in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages [1]. At this time, a monk might spend their entire life transcribing a particularly long manuscript. The materials were also expensive. So monasteries were selective in what got retain and unsurprisingly it skewed heavily to texts of religious significance and then to texts of significance to, say, Roman and Greek tradition and history given that monasteries were European. [1]: https://spokenpast.com/articles/medieval-monks-erased-preserved-ancient-world/ https://spokenpast.com/articles/medieval-monks-erased-preser...
- nonethewiser 6mo agoThanks for sharing. Maybe not as common as you think. I never heard that before.
- jrumbut 6mo agoIt was a little before that even. Greek was the language of most fields of learning besides law in the Roman Empire. But the Greeks themselves wrote works on these papyrus scrolls that crumbled fast, so anything not actively used by the Romans was quickly lost. There's a good chance that if the papyrus scrolls in any library (Alexandria or otherwise) weren't being copied regularly they were crumbling even before they burned or were lost to time for other reasons. Towards the end of the Roman Empire, a few philosophers took the time to transmit Greek knowledge in Latin as knowledge of Greek faded in western Europe. What these guys happened to translate was the basis of most of European learning in philosophy, math, and other fields for centuries. But they weren't monks (the most famous, Boethius, was not Christian either but a lot of later writers thought he was), the monks in scriptorium came later and grew slowly. St. Benedict said that monks should be taught to read and do so regularly, which required copying books, but he prioritized physical work (to create self-sufficient communities) and prayer. But future Benedictines responded to the incentives of the time and began scaling up the copying and doing less agricultural work as the years went on.
- lostlogin 6mo agoImagine digging in that material. Tunnelling that out would be awful.
- horsh1 6mo agoSo why would they bury a man with a book?
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- quantummagic 6mo agoWhy do we bury men in a suit?
- 0x1ceb00da 6mo agoPearly gates is basically an interview.
- castis 6mo agoPearly gates is the performance review.
- analog31 6mo agoSo your friends know you were standing pat when you died. (See "Saint James Infirmary Blues").
- IAmBroom 6mo agoIt's actually a modern innovation, AFAIK. Common people were stripped and wrapped in linens (or equivalent). Obviously, mummy wrapping would be the extreme example of it, but wills often designated who would inherit "my best tunic", because the clothes were quite valuable if still wearable. I'm speaking of the common people; kings and bishops were buried in finery. And it's not universal by any means. In times of disaster or plague bodies were buried quickly in their current clothes. This leads to some interesting finds, as when all that remains of an entire outfit is the silk stitching and things like metal buttons.
- callamdelaney 6mo agoMaybe it's more like how they used to wrap fish and chips in newspaper
- staplung 6mo agoSadly, the article says nothing about how old the fragment is or how it compares to other early copies of the Iliad. Somewhat amazingly, the earliest complete copy of the Iliad is from around 950 C.E. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetus_A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetus_A
- anon291 6mo agoIt's not that surprising. The earliest complete copies of many ancient texts is similarly dated. For example, the earliest copy of the Rg Veda is dated to about that age as well. It's hard to keep complete copies of big books.
- wavefunction 6mo agoAs well, both the Iliad and Vedas are originally oral traditions. Likely there were different versions and different parts of the stories were emphasized to appeal to their audiences and local tastes and current events. Something that can still be apparent in historical texts but probably greatly reduced by the function of printed versions presenting a singular "authoritative version."
- z3phyr 6mo agoThe Vedas are surprisingly uniform across a very long time period.
- oersted 6mo agoIt's likely that there have been bottlenecks, where a single written version became the main common ancestor to copy from. Long after the oral tradition died down and other written versions were lost. Or because some patron decided to fund the dissemination of a particular copy, like Guttemberg or King James, or the Toledo School of Translators. Or because a particular heir of the oral tradition wrote it down, like Homer. It doesn't necessarily mean that the story was stable, it's just the version that got to us.
- caycep 6mo agofor some reason this read like the "Headless Body in a Topless Bar" headline...maybe the antiquities equivalent
- andsoitis 6mo agoAccording to Iliad 2.645-670, in the direct vicinity of Egypt (notably 1000+ years before those mummies got wrapped) ships from Rhodes (Lindos, Ialysos and Kameiros) and also Crete had taken part in the Trojan War (Knossos and Gortyn, Phaistos and Rhytion).
- varjag 6mo agoOn the timescale it's like getting buried today with a copy of Beowulf.
- GnarfGnarf 6mo agoIt’s heartbreaking to think of what treasures were lost when they were using mummies as locomotive fuel in the 19th century.
- sashank_1509 6mo agowtf I’m going to wager that this is a local myth. Just using corpses as fuel feels a bit antithetical to human traditions
- Starlevel004 6mo agoThey were actually eaten (in the early modern era) or ground up for paint.
- Tanoc 6mo agoMost commonly used for paint or to colour bricks, yes. It's disgusting, but the British and Italians didn't really care at that point because anthropology and archaeology were not respected professions in the 1820s. They were just hobbies of wealthy gentlemen who liked to travel. Most disturbing is that apparently people kept using them for paint up until the last supplier ran out of mummies sometime around 1960. Yes. 1960.
- sashank_1509 6mo agoWas there no fear of being haunted by spirits?
- krapp 6mo ago[flagged]
- jaldhar 6mo agoThe trick is to find non-white people so indifferent to their traditions and culture* that they’ll sell it to white supremacists for material gain. *Also did 19th century Muslim Egyptians really consider mummies part of “their” culture? Or is the idea of “Egypt” also a White imperialist imposition?
- shevy-java 6mo agoThat's a head scratcher. Why did the person have that fragment? Was it like a comic book or something?
- rwmj 6mo agoImagine that paper is insanely expensive because it is very labour-intensive to make. People reused paper (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest). Cloth is also insanely expensive. People wore clothes long after we'd consider them worn out. Your job is to wrap mummies, so you use and reuse whatever is available, scraps of completely worn out clothing, or in this case some scraps of paper that happen to have writing on them. Which you cannot read because literacy rates are fairly low, especially amongst the poor working class.
- dekhn 6mo agoNow what would be great is if they found a complete Telegony- the ostensible "third book" of the Iliad trilogy.
- stevenwoo 6mo agoRecency bias probably colors my perception but I really enjoyed Stephen Fry's audiobook performance of his four book series on Greek and Roman myths, mostly dramatized by him but asides with etymology, history and other source references so it's a synthesis of many works into one coherent narrative, with about the last 45 minutes dedicated to what happened to Aeneas and the Telegony, for anyone else new to this, Telegonus was son of Odysseus via Circe.
- sjclemmy 6mo agoWorth mentioning Gene Wolfe’s superb Latro books (https://www.goodreads.com/series/49453-latro https://www.goodreads.com/series/49453-latro) I think the premise for the books is that the story is found on ancient papyrus.
- yowo 5mo ago1600 years old in Egypt isn't ancient
- baud147258 5mo agoI am a little disappointed the tomb where the mummy was found is from the time where Egypt was part of the Roman Empire. At this point ancient Egypt had been a colony of Rome for quite some time and beforehand a Greek/Macedonian colony for a few more centuries (under the Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by a general of Alexander the Great). If it was from a previous era, it would have been a much more interesting find (in my eyes).
- gerdesj 5mo agoThe article describes the veneration Roman -> (old) Greek -> (old) Egyptian and this finding appears to show that the veneration went both ways. Frankly I can understand that: Homer really did smash out an absolute banger with Iliad. I might ask for a copy in my grave too, when the time comes. The whole point of the article appears to be that when civilizations overlap, the "good old days" becomes a two way street (to gargle metaphors). I do find that interpretation very interesting and it fits in with my world view that history ("historia" - Latin for "story") is generally rather more complicated than many would like it to be to fit their current (or current as was) world view.
- NetMageSCW 5mo agoI’m thinking I would pick Snow Crash. Or maybe The Matrix DVD.
- gerdesj 5mo agoI'm going old school ... really old school 8)
- lkrubner 5mo agoThe Iliad was written after the classical era of Bronze Age Egypt, so no classical age mummy could be buried with the Iliad because it didn't exist yet.
- bee_rider 5mo ago
- stingrae 5mo agoThis reminds me of a piece I just saw at the Legion of Honor (SF) special exhibit on the etruscans. They have a Etruscan manuscript, written on linen, that was used to wrap a mummy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoIronically a huge percentage of the historical documents we had came from "the garbage", and/or other cases of people reusing documents for other purposes. In large part this was because paper was incredibly expensive back then, so it got used for one purpose, used again for another, and that continued until you were out of room ... at which point it may get used yet again (for say mummy wrapping). Another classic example: Jews believed you couldn't burn a piece of paper once you wrote the name of God on it, so there were special towers in ancient cities for Jews to throw away their paper. But again, because paper was so expensive, each paper often had lots of other things on it. Because these towers were sometimes preserved better than libraries were, historians have found huge treasure troves of saved papers in them. Like the mummy wrappings, they only still exist due to a special quirk of ancient peoples ... but because of the price of paper they have lots of other non-mummy-wrapping/non-God's name stuff.
- AftHurrahWinch 5mo ago> Jews believed you couldn't burn a piece of paper once you wrote the name of God on it, so there were special towers in ancient cities for Jews to throw away their paper. Fascinating! The Cairo Genizah Located in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo), Egypt, this particular Genizah was a massive, windowless attic room built high into the structure. To put papers in it, the synagogue's caretaker had to climb a tall ladder and drop the documents through a hole in the wall. Because the local community never got around to burying the papers, this high, hidden room acted like a time capsule for over a thousand years. When it was rediscovered in the late 19th century, it contained nearly 300,000 manuscript fragments.
- thelock85 5mo ago
- zulux 5mo ago>>If Christopher Nolan’s coming adaptation of the Odyssey happens to do well enough to get Hollywood back on its feet, A typical laconic reply works here: "If"
- felipellrocha 5mo agoBecause Nolan is known for his hits and misses
- mrec 5mo agoNot 100% sure whether you're being sarcastic but... yes? IMO more misses than hits, and the misses tend to miss by more than the hits hit.
- dyauspitr 5mo ago[flagged]
- AlotOfReading 5mo agoWould you be happier if they had cast the trans actor as the trans character (Tiresias), or would that also be a bridge too far?
- dyauspitr 5mo agoTiresias was magically turned into a woman. He may as well have been turned into a rabbit.
- michaelmrose 5mo agoIf a movie had a black actor in it would you say that the movie was about black ideology?
- vkou 5mo agoWhen a non-trans person stars in a film, nobody calls it a 'straight-cis' ideological hit piece.
- tiahura 5mo agoThe Catalog of Ships is certainly the section I want to be buried with.
- kombookcha 5mo agoActually, now that I think about it, I guess there is a certain type of Tolkien nerd who would choose the long listing of elf lineages as the section to have in their pocket for their funeral. I see your supernerd cred flex, mummified guy!
- stinkbeetle 5mo agoBack then, ships might almost have felt like the starships of our scifi today. Capsules that can transport mankind beyond the limits of the known universe to discover strange new worlds and civilizations. Certainly worthy of epic cataloging.
- brudgers 5mo agoUnearthed from a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb That's c. 400 AD. Closer to today, than to the time of King Tut...and King Tut was closer to the TFA mummy than to the First Dynasty. Ancient Egypt is really really old. The Great pyramid was 3000 years old at the time of the TFA mummy. The TFA mummy is about equidistant between today and the events of the Iliad and the book was already more than 1000 years old in 400 CE.
- mattfrommars 5mo agoThat sounds about right. People generally under estimate how old Ancient Egyptian really are, me included and think it sometimes around the era of Middle Ages.
- brudgers 5mo agoIn Ancient Egypt Ancient Egypt was ancient.
- adastra22 5mo agoAncient Egypt had archeological museums showing dug up artifacts of even more ancient Egypt.
- Melatonic 5mo agoIsn't that just like our normal museums now ?
- fecal_henge 5mo agoYes but much further in the future when someone else digs them up.
- tclancy 5mo agoNo, the artifacts stayed where they were found. Different concept.
- romanhn 5mo ago> the fragment contains lines from Book 2’s epic “catalogue of ships,” which lists all the vessels the Achaean army sends off to Troy It's been about 30 years since I've read The Iliad, but I remember that chapter as the worst part of the book. Just pages upon pages of names and where they came from. I wonder what significance it held for the buried individual to have been specifically included so.
- rsalus 5mo agooften times the classical Greeks + Romans would cite their family lineage using works of Homer and other poets
- psb5 5mo agoSounds like an Order of Battle that armies publish these days after a war which documents the entire list of units, unit size, commander, equipment, experience etc etc
- pmcarlton 5mo agoMaybe the undertaker agreed with you about it being the worst part, and that's why they used it for the burial!
- burnerRhodov3 5mo agoprobably traced his lineage back to one of those vessels.
- lubujackson 5mo agoThis is an old technique that appears in Beowulf and other classic texts that came from oral traditions: it is cataloging. It is often used to list treasured collected or in this case to show expansiveness of the fleet (and memory of the teller, perhaps?) Think about 10 year olds talking about all the different candies they are going to devour on Halloween night to get a sense of how it is meant to resonate with a crowd.
- kombookcha 5mo agoIf the only way you could hear about Napoleon's battles was having a guy recount them to you in verse, I bet it would sound pretty impressive when he started listing off all the regiments present for a battle, their commanders and deployments. There's a sense of scale to it, that probably isn't captured by just saying "such and such number of ships and such and such number of soldiers".
- BobbyTables2 5mo agoDied trying to read it all?
- adrianwaj 5mo agoThe article sounds convincing enough, but discoveries can easily be faked, just like crop circles can be made by farmers using rake-like devices. Luxor and Las Vegas = same thing. Not trolling, but it's worth keeping this notion in mind. It's great for tourism and building mystique. At least when there is fakery, it's makes the real thing all the more valuable. Fakery sells movie tickets - it can sell plane tickets too. People still love Milli Vanilli - so many don't even care because it's just entertainment. How much of history is real, how much is entertainment (and diversion) by vested interests and the "winners" ?
- justanotherjoe 5mo agoYou find it hard to believe...that Iliad was big? that 400 AD Egyptian medical practices involved quackeries?
- adrianwaj 5mo agoYou may be right about one observation, but that doesn't mean complimentary observations are genuine and all discoveries are real. In central Australia, and you find some indigenous rock paintings somewhere, and then someone else finds similar ones nearby a year later. Can't question that, right? The Grand Egyptian Museum (first year in) frequently hits "its maximum planned capacity of around 15,000 to 18,000 visitors per day." https://www.arabamerica.com/the-grand-egyptian-museums-first-full-year-what-2026-means-for-culture-and-tourism/ https://www.arabamerica.com/the-grand-egyptian-museums-first... It's not necessarily about Egypt, it's about questioning discoveries in general. I've even heard theories of the pyramids existing before "Ancient Egypt" even existed. If so, it may never have even been designed to be a tomb. I read in channeled information that it was to anchor the Earth in space and stop it wobbling. Others have said it is/was a jumping point into other dimensions. "Despite building them as a gift of love and light to humanity, Ra expresses deep regret over how the pyramids were used." https://gemini.google.com/share/cbddc708ef93 https://gemini.google.com/share/cbddc708ef93
- helsinkiandrew 5mo agoWasn't the Ptolemaic dynasty (300-30BC) Greek speaking and culturally Greek, presumably the Library at Alexandria had a full set of classic Greek texts.
- stevesimmons 5mo agoThere's a great article on the Ptolemaic dynasty in the latest issue of the London Review of Books. Tons of fascinating detail. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/robert-cioffi/pharaoh-in-all-but-name https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n09/robert-cioffi/pharao... For instance, the Library of Alexandria had up to 500,000 scrolls (which of course were all handwritten). And it was partly stocked by confiscating all the books from any ship that happened to dock in the nearby port.