Many of these texts had previously been unknown to modern scholars. Īlthough most of the texts uncovered at Oxyrhynchus were non-literary in nature, the archaeologists succeeded in recovering a large corpus of literary works that had previously been thought to have been lost.

Details of a grain dole mirroring a similar program in the Roman capital.

Various and sundry ancient recipes for treating haemorrhoids, hangovers and cataracts.

The contract of a wrestler agreeing to throw his next match for a fee.

Administrative texts Īdministrative documents assembled and transcribed from the Oxyrhynchus excavation so far include: There is an online table of contents briefly listing the type of contents of each papyrus or fragment. A substantial number are housed in the Bodleian Art Library at Oxford University. Oxyrhynchus Papyri are currently housed in institutions all over the world. The most recent published volume was Vol. This is thought to represent only 1 to 2% of what is estimated to be at least half a million papyri still remaining to be conserved, transcribed, deciphered and catalogued.

Since 1898, academics have collated and transcribed over 5,000 documents from what were originally hundreds of boxes of papyrus fragments the size of large cornflakes. Texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac and Pahlavi have so far represented only a small percentage of the total.

Īlthough most of the papyri were written in Greek, some texts written in Egyptian ( Egyptian hieroglyphics, Hieratic, Demotic, mostly Coptic), Latin and Arabic were also found. Most of the papyri found seem to consist mainly of public and private documents: codes, edicts, registers, official correspondence, census-returns, tax-assessments, petitions, court-records, sales, leases, wills, bills, accounts, inventories, horoscopes, and private letters. Only an estimated 10% are literary in nature. The manuscripts date from the time of the Ptolemaic (3rd century BC) and Roman periods of Egyptian history (from 32 BC to the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 640 AD). The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt ( 28☃2′N 30☄0′E / 28.533°N 30.667☎ / 28.533 30.667, modern el-Bahnasa).

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