The excerpt from Homer’s epic poem features his catalog of ships, a famous passage listing the Greek forces that sailed to Troy. It may be the first Greek literary text found in the context of mummification

April 23, 2026 11:07 a.m.

The papyrus fragment with a passage from Homer's Iliad Ignasi-Xavier Adiego

In the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus , archaeologists recently discovered a 1,600-year-old tomb with several mummies inside. Some of them were decorated with gold leaf or geometric patterns—features commonly found in burials of this kind.

But one of the mummies was unearthed alongside a particularly unusual artifact: a papyrus fragment from Homer’s Iliad , the epic poem set during the Trojan War .…