The Sunken Papyrus

Bernard Grenfell, Arthur Hunt, and the Trash Heaps of Oxyrhynchus

Outside the village of Behnesa on the western rim of the Nile Valley, one hundred miles south of Cairo, thirty-foot-high mounds of ancient garbage stretched for over a mile along the desert edge. In December 1896, Oxford classical scholars Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt rode up to the site on donkeys. Both fellows of The Queen's College, Oxford, had been sent by the Egypt Exploration Fund not to hunt for royal tombs, but to dig through the rubbish dumps of the Greco-Roman provincial capital of Oxyrhynchus, named after the sharp-nosed fish sacred to the district.

Over the previous two centuries, classical scholars had confronted a grim reality: more than ninety-five percent of ancient Greek and Roman literature had perished. Of the 120 plays written by Sophocles, only seven survived the Middle Ages. Of Euripides' ninety plays, only nineteen remained. Of the nine lyric books of Sappho admired across antiquity, only one complete poem had been copied into medieval parchment codices. Across Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor, the standard writing paper of the ancient Mediterranean—sheets made from the sliced pith of the marsh reed Cyperus papyrus—rotted within decades whenever exposed to rain or soil humidity.

Even in rainless Egypt, Grenfell and Hunt realized that traditional archaeologists were digging in the wrong microclimate. Stone temples, palaces, and tombs inside the Nile floodplain sat below the annual percolation level of the Nile inundation. Rising groundwater soaked the foundations and turned stored papyrus rolls into mud. Looking across the desert edge behind Behnesa in January 1897, Grenfell and Hunt deduced where the dry paper had gone. For a thousand years—from Alexander the Great's conquest in 332 BCE until the Arab conquest in 641 CE—the Greek-speaking administrators, teachers, merchants, and Christians of Oxyrhynchus had cleaned out their bookcases and filing offices. Whenever papyrus rolls grew frayed or tax ledgers expired, servants carried baskets of torn paper outside the walls and dumped them onto trash mounds (called koms in Arabic) well above the Nile damp line, where desert sand buried and sealed each layer.

After digging test trenches in the cemetery for three weeks, Grenfell and Hunt shifted their seventy workmen to a low garbage mound on January 11, 1897. Within hours, a workman handed Hunt a crumpled leaf of third-century CE papyrus written on both sides in Greek uncials. Brushing off the dirt, Hunt read the header IESOU LOGIA (Sayings of Jesus), a collection of unknown sayings of Jesus matching the lost Gospel of Thomas fifty years before the Nag Hammadi discovery. The next day, they pulled out the oldest surviving fragment of the Gospel of Matthew (P.Oxy. 1 and P.Oxy. 2).

Across six winter seasons between 1897 and 1907, employing up to two hundred diggers, Grenfell and Hunt trenched through the Oxyrhynchus koms down to thirty feet until damp subsoil appeared. Papyri poured out so fast that the two scholars sat inside their tent until midnight damping twisted rolls between wet towels and packing them into tin biscuit boxes:

• - *The Stratigraphy of the Afsh Layer: Experienced diggers learned to spot the subterranean soil texture that preserved papyrus—a porous mixture of dry sand, decayed palm leaves, ash, and potsherds called afsh. Wherever a stratum of afsh* sat capped beneath a hard crust of upper sand above the water table, wads of third-century library rolls emerged so crisp they crackled when unfolded.
• - Vanished Classical Masterpieces: From the baskets of torn book-rolls came four hundred lines of Sophocles' lost satyr play Ichneutae (The Trackers), extensive scenes from Menander's comedies, lost poems of Sappho and Pindar, a lost epitome of Livy, and the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, an unknown fourth-century BCE Greek history continuing Thucydides.
• - The Unfiltered Documentary Archive: Ninety percent of the haul consisted of everyday administrative and private paperwork. The mounds yielded horoscopes, wet-nurse contracts, gladiatorial programs, tax receipts, and private correspondence. Among them was a petulant letter from a Greek schoolboy named Theon threatening to refuse to write, speak, or wish health to his father if he was not taken along to Alexandria.

Stored in seven hundred biscuit boxes at Oxford's Sackler Library, the five hundred thousand fragments from Oxyrhynchus have restored lost poems of Sappho, plays of Sophocles, early Christian gospels, and seventy percent of all surviving literary papyri.