Three thousand years ago, a blind poet sang of heroes fighting in the epic Trojan War. Many centuries later, Roman-era embalmers in the Egyptian desert took those same verses and tucked them inside the gut of a dead man.
Death and burial in ancient Egypt represented a big deal. Priests spent weeks preparing bodies for eternity (as long as you weren’t a commoner). Yet, during a recent excavation at the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, archaeologists found a 1,600-year-old mummy that went beyond your typical embalming.
Resting directly on the deceased’s abdomen, completely incorporated into the embalming process, was a papyrus fragment containing Greek text from Homer’s epic poem, the Iliad. Researchers have never before found a piece of classical literature used in this specific funerary way.
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