Overview
- Archaeologists working at Al Bahnasa, the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt’s Minya province, uncovered a Roman-era burial known as Tomb 65 that held mummies, painted wooden coffins, and ritual items.
- Inside one mummy, the team found a papyrus fragment from Book II of the Iliad, the “Catalogue of Ships,” in a discovery confirmed by Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.
- The burial assemblage included gold tongue amulets and a copper sheet placed for rites meant to let the dead speak in the afterlife under the judgment of Osiris.
- Excavations near the earlier Ptolemaic Tomb 67 revealed a trench with three damaged limestone chambers that held cremated remains in large jars, infant bones, and cat skulls, along with figurines of Harpocrates and Cupid that point to blended Egyptian and Greco-Roman beliefs.
- The finds are now in conservation and epigraphic study, and researchers say the context is unusual for Oxyrhynchus because most known papyri there came from ancient trash mounds rather than from tombs.