In Egypt’s Al Bahnasa, archaeologists unearthed a fragment from a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb: pages from Homer’s Iliad, specifically lines from Book 2’s “catalogue of ships,” found packaged with a mummy and embedded in a burial tradition that already prized
Renaissance Europe’s habit of looking to Rome for inspiration—and then to Greece. and then to Egypt—suddenly feels less like a chain of borrowing and more like an older conversation carried across centuries.. Evidence from Roman-era burials in Egypt has long pointed to Greek texts traveling inland.. But this time. the connection is intimate enough to be held in the hand: a fragment of Homer’s Iliad found alongside a mummy.
The pages were unearthed from a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb in the Egyptian town of Al Bahnasa.. The fragment contains lines from Book 2’s epic “catalogue of ships. ” listing the vessels the Achaean army sends off to Troy.. The dating matters: the discovery comes centuries after the reign of Cleopatra. a Greek-descended ruler. when—at least in the period’s cultural imagination—Greek literary papyri could function as something like a credential.
The writer Franz Lidz. in coverage cited here. frames the idea plainly: “Greek literary papyri may have functioned as a crucial cultural passport.” The argument rests not on literature alone. but on what “Being Hellenic” meant in this world—an exclusive social status and financial privilege that had to be meticulously backed up.. The same passage describes how it would have to be documented through genealogies stretching across several centuries.
That helps explain why an Iliad passage would end up packaged with the dead. One possibility raised in the reporting is that pages from the Iliad were assumed to act as a kind of Greek passport, helping the deceased bypass the trials of the underworld described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Even beyond the afterlife question, Homer carried weight in practical life as well.. Physicians in the era credited Homer’s work with curative properties.. The cited example is direct: “For a bed-bound patient shivering with malaria. the prescription was simple: Brace your head against a papyrus scroll of Book 4 to break the fever.”
Whatever the real-world effectiveness of that remedy may have been—or whatever role literature played in guaranteeing safe passage into the world beyond—the fact that Homer continued to be studied widely more than a millennium and a half after it was already making its way into Egyptian tombs. and well over three millennia after its composition. is what lingers in the story.. The discovery. and the long afterlife of the text itself. suggests a kind of historical and cultural force that ordinary writing doesn’t always seem to carry.
The story’s numbers and details line up in a pattern: Greek texts appear in Egyptian burial sites. then an Iliad fragment turns up in a 1. 600-year-old Roman-era tomb at Al Bahnasa. and the period’s idea of “Being Hellenic” as documented privilege—along with the Book of the Dead’s afterlife trials—provides the reason this particular kind of text could be treated as a credential for what comes next.
And the reverence doesn’t stop at archaeology.. The passage ends by drawing a modern line to cinema: if Christopher Nolan’s upcoming adaptation of the Odyssey happens to do well enough to “get Hollywood back on its feet. ” the account suggests the ancient Egyptians may force today’s skeptics to concede that Homer “really does offer salvation after all.”
MISRYOUM Culture News Al Bahnasa ancient Egypt Homer Iliad mummy Book of the Dead Greek literary papyri Roman-era tomb cultural passport