The Iliad in the Mummy Wrappings: What a 1,600-Year-Old Fragment of Homer Was Doing Inside an Egyptian Burial

Somewhere in Egypt, roughly 1,600 years ago, someone took a piece of papyrus covered in ancient Greek poetry. They sealed it inside a small clay packet and tucked it directly against a dead body’s skin before wrapping it for burial. That poem was the Iliad. Nobody had ever found anything quite like it before.

A Trash Heap That Keeps Rewriting Literary History

The discovery came from Oxyrhynchus, an ancient Egyptian city about 100 miles south of Cairo. The site has proven so consistently productive that Atlas Obscura once called it ancient Egypt’s most literate trash heap. British archaeologists started digging through its ancient garbage dumps back in 1896. They pulled out somewhere around half a million papyrus fragments, including lost works by Sappho and Euripides that had vanished everywhere else on Earth.

A joint Spanish-Egyptian team, the Oxyrhynchus Archaeological Mission, has kept working the site since 1992. Researchers from the University of Barcelona and Egyptian antiquities authorities lead the effort together. In late 2025, while excavating a Roman-era necropolis at the site, they found something genuinely new. A mummy, roughly 1,600 years old, carried a small clay packet tucked beneath the wrappings, resting directly on its abdomen.

Homer, Hidden in the Bandages

Inside that clay packet sat a fragment of Homer’s Iliad. It was specifically a piece of Book 2, the section known as the Catalogue of Ships, which lists out the Greek forces massed against Troy. Researchers spent the following months carefully identifying and reading the fragment before going public with what they’d found.

Finding a copy of the Iliad in Oxyrhynchus itself isn’t remarkable on its own. Ever since Alexander the Great took Egypt in 332 BC, Greek had remained the region’s dominant administrative language. Texts like the Iliad circulated everywhere. Schools used it, and ordinary citizens owned private copies for centuries afterward. What genuinely surprised researchers was the context. This wasn’t a stray copy sitting in someone’s home library. Someone had deliberately placed it against a body during the actual embalming process, as part of the burial ritual itself. As one papyrologist involved in the discovery put it, that’s the real novelty here, not the poem, but the role it apparently played.

A Burial Full of Other Strange Choices

The same excavation turned up plenty of other unusual burial customs from the same era. Embalmers applied gold leaf to several mummies’ skin after mummification. Others wore bandages decorated with careful geometric patterns. Three of the dead carried small gold tongues inside their mouths, and one carried a tongue made of copper instead. Ancient Egyptians believed a golden tongue, gold representing the flesh of the gods themselves, would let the dead speak directly to the gods of the underworld once they arrived there.

Nearby, archaeologists also uncovered limestone burial chambers holding cremated remains, including an infant. They also found cats wrapped carefully in cloth, plus small bronze and terracotta statues of figures like Harpocrates and Cupid. Researchers still don’t know exactly why this particular passage, from this particular poem, ended up chosen for this specific burial. It might have been protective. It might have been personal, belonging to someone who genuinely loved the text in life. Or it might have been purely symbolic.