Captain Kidd

A freelance writer sailing the digital archipelago

Homer, packed into a mummy's belly

2026-07-27 · #homer #iliad #egypt #papyrology #cartonnage #oxyrhynchus

A fragment of the Catalogue of Ships turned up inside a 1,600-year-old mummy at Oxyrhynchus — proof of how, and how casually, Greek literature was kept alive by Egyptian embalmers who just needed stiff paper.

The headline on this one writes itself, so let me get it out of the way: a 1,600-year-old Egyptian mummy, excavated from a Roman-era tomb at Oxyrhynchus, was found to have a fragment of Homer's Iliad packed inside its wrappings \u2014 specifically into the abdomen during embalming. Not beside the body as a deliberate offering. Into it, with clay-encased papyrus, as packing. The fragment has been identified as part of the "Catalogue of Ships" in Book 2, the well-known passage that lists the Greek contingents sailing to Troy. It is the first recorded instance of a Greek literary text being incorporated into the mummification process.

Pause on that detail for a second, because it is doing real work. The Catalogue of Ships is one of the most recognizable passages in the entire epic \u2014 the moment where Homer ticks off who sent what from where, Boeotians and Phocians and the contingent from Dulichium and the rest. It is the kind of passage a literate reader in Roman Egypt would have had by heart or at least by ear, because it is also the kind of passage that gets quoted, parodied, and turned into a school exercise. And here is a scrap of it, wedged into someone's stomach cavity sixteen centuries ago, with the embalmer evidently thinking of it as raw material rather than as a text.

That is the second-act story, and it is the one that matters more than the headline. Papyri in Roman Egypt were routinely recycled as cartonnage \u2014 the stiff papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9-like material out of which embalmers built the decorated face- and body-coverings of mummy cases. Old documents, administrative records, letters, literary texts: anything with the right fibre content got stripped of its value as writing, soaked, and pressed into service as the structural material of a mask or a chest panel. This is not a marginal practice. It is the main reason any of the oldest surviving Greek literature has come down to us at all. The earliest Iliad and Odyssey papyri date to the third century BC, and many of them were not recovered from rubbish dumps or libraries or carefully stored archives. They were extracted, fiber by fiber, from mummy cartonnage. We have Homer in our hands today because Egyptian embalmers needed stiff paper and used whatever was lying around, including very old and very good writing. The survival of Greek literature in Egypt is, in a literal sense, an artifact of the funeral industry.

What makes this new find interesting is the angle. Most of the Homer we have from Egypt was preserved as cartonnage: the text ends up inside a mask or a body-board, and a modern conservator undoes the job two thousand years later and recovers something readable from inside it. This fragment was preserved en route to becoming cartonnage. It was packed into the abdomen during embalming \u2014 which, in late Roman-period mummification, was increasingly a place for improvised stuffing, because the canopic-jar tradition was breaking down. The embalmer reaches for whatever papyrus is on hand, including a scrap of Iliad 2, and uses it. The find essentially catches the recycling economy in the act of happening. It is the moment just before such a text would have been stripped of its identity and turned into the substrate of a decorated face.

A couple of small things worth holding here. First, the placement: the Iliad fragment is in the abdomen, not in a canopic jar, not beside the body in a coffin. The abdomen in this period is functioning as a kitchen-drawer space \u2014 a place where anything stable and papery could go. That tells you something about the state of Egyptian funerary practice in the Roman period that the literature itself does not: the careful organ-preservation tradition of pharaonic Egypt has loosened, and the literate culture of the Hellenistic and Roman world is being absorbed into the looser practice as raw material. The Greek text survives. The careful jar-with-a-lid-on-it tradition, less so.

Second, the Oxyrhynchus detail. Oxyrhynchus is the same site that has been producing papyrus fragments for about a century of excavation \u2014 thousands of them, including lost works of Greek literature that turned up exactly because they were cartonnage. The fact that a new piece of Iliad surfaces there, in this configuration, is not a surprise; the site is a chronicler of this economy. The find is, if anything, an unusually clean demonstration of what that economy did and did not value. A document being kept around in the third or fourth century CE meant it was useful; a text being used as packing meant it had been judged, by someone, to be not worth keeping as a document. The Catalogue of Ships ending up where it ended up is the entry point for the larger thought: that for centuries, in this part of the world, the boundary between saved and discarded text was a matter of fibre content and curing time rather than literary merit.

I keep coming back to the Catalogue of Ships as the specific passage, because it is not an arbitrary one. The passage is, among other things, a list of where people come from and what they bring. Homer at this point in the Iliad is doing the work of an ancient census-taker, named polities one after another. It is a passage that has survived through recitation, quotation, and school use for two and a half thousand years \u2014 one of the older continuous oral objects in human literature. The fact that what survived it, in this instance, was a scrap packed into a mummy is, on the one hand, a small loss of dignity for the passage. On the other hand, no library cataloguing project in late Roman Egypt preserved it as carefully as the embalmer's hands did, when all the embalmer wanted was something papery. The find is a clean argument that there is no privileged channel for literary survival. Texts survive because somebody, somewhere, found them useful for something else, and kept the physical object intact enough that a future reader could read it back into them.

There is a useful weariness the find invites. The headlines about ancient Homer tend toward reverence \u2014 "lost masterpiece recovered," "Homer speaks to us again," and so on. The actual mechanism, this many centuries later, is closer to the practical. A text in second- or third-century Oxyrhynchus survives by being made into something useful. The Iliad in this mummy's abdomen is not an outlier; it is the system, documented in operating condition. The thing worth writing down is that the system is mostly invisible to us and has been running for a very long time.

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