When a Poem Replaced a Magic Spell: The Al-Bahnasa Golden-Tongued Mummy & Homer's "Catalogue of Ships"
For over a century, the rubbish mounds and Roman-era tombs of Al-Bahnasa (ancient Oxyrhynchus), 160 kilometers south-southwest of Cairo, have yielded thousands of Greek papyri. Yet what the University of Barcelona mission—directed by Dr. Maite Mascort and Dr. Esther Pons Mellado—uncovered inside Tomb No. 65 in Sector 22 is completely unprecedented in Egyptian archaeology.
Alongside mummies adorned with gilded cartonnage and fitted with symbolic gold-foil tongues (placed in the mouth during embalming so the deceased could speak before the tribunal of Osiris in the underworld), conservators found a Greek papyrus fragment folded directly into the linen wrappings over a mummy's abdomen:
- A Poem Doing Ritual Work: Previously, every Greek papyrus found embedded inside mummy bandages at Oxyrhynchus contained magical spells, protective invocations, or curses. For the first time in history, embalmers used a work of pure classical literature as a ritual talisman.
- Book II of the Iliad (The Catalogue of Ships): Deciphered by epigraphers including Prof. Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, the text preserves lines from Book II of Homer's Iliad—specifically naming the Greek commanders Tlepolemus (son of Heracles, leading 9 ships from Rhodes, Iliad 2.653) and Guneus (leading 22 ships of the Enienes and Peraebi, Iliad 2.748)—treating Homer's roll-call of heroes as a sacred passport to eternity.