The Papyrus of Oxyrhynchus is the name given to a group of papyri discovered at the end of the 19th century by Grenfell and Hunt in the city of Oxyrinco, who decided to excavate here because the place was known as the center of Christianity and therefore they intuited that they could find texts related to it in their excavations.
The first papyrus they found was an apocryphal from the Gospel of Thomas until they completed a large collection of papyrus in 280 boxes in storage.
Grenfell y Hunt
Photographs of the Grenfell and Hunt excavation
After the excavations of Grenfell and Hunt, the Italian Pistelli continued working until 1913 and Breccia followed the work between 1927 and 1934 documenting more fragments of pairo, distributed at present between Oxford or Florence, etc.
The quantity of papyrus is such (500000) that there is today a collaborative project on line of the University of Oxford by means of which any person can help to its digitalization. (See Ancientlives project).
Papyri are dated from the 3rd century BC to the 7th century AD and are mainly found in Greek and Latin although we also find in hieroglyphic, hieratic, demotic, Coptic, Hebrew, Amharic, Syriac, Pahlavi and even in Arabic the most recent papyri.
They are collected in 72 volumes so far that can be consulted in part on the website Oxyrhynchus online being most in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
The topics are very diverse, from letters, to topics of astronomy, astrology, alchemy, biographies, poetry, plays, drama, tragedies, satires, shopping lists, records or contracts and all kinds of documents.
Elements of Euclyd. P Oxy. 50
Text S. I-II d.C. (Part of Sappho’s work) OP 2076
The authors of the original works copied here are among many others; Pindaro, Sappho, Aceo, Aristotle, Bakylides, Sophocles or Euripides.
In spite of this great quantity of papyrus and thematic diversity, we must emphasize the fact of having located works of the antiquity that are not known if not for the excavations carried out here, but also we must emphasize that it is the set of manuscripts on the biggest known primitive Christianity, which also speaks to us of the importance of the city in this chronology.
Peter Parson’s work, The City of the Elephant Fish, brings the reader closer to the daily life of the city of Oxyrhynchus through the papyri studied, allowing a description of daily life and social, as well as descriptive of some parts of the city in the third century AD.
