Oxyrhynchus Papyri

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by archaeologists including Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt (28°32′N 30°40′E / 28.533°N 30.667°E / 28.533; 30.667, modern el-Bahnasa). The manuscripts date from the 1st to the 6th century AD. They include thousands of Greek and Latin documents, letters and literary works. They also include a few vellum manuscripts, and more recent Arabic manuscripts on paper (for example, the medieval P. Oxy. VI 1006).

The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are currently housed in many institutions all over the world. A substantial number are housed in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.

Although the initial hope of finding many of the lost literary works of antiquity at Oxyrhynchus was not realized, many important Greek texts were found at the site. These include poems of Pindar, fragments of Sappho and Alcaeus, along with larger pieces of Alcman, Ibycus, and Corinna.

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 413

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 413 (P. Oxy. III 413 or P. Oxy. 413) is a manuscript of an adaptation of Euripides' Iphigeneia in Tauris (Iφιγένεια ἡ ἐν Ταύροις). The setting is shifted from Greece to India. The anonymous adaptation is known as Charition after the main character. The manuscript is held by the Bodleian Library as Ms. Gr. Class. b 4 (P). The manuscript is dated to the second century, possibly the Antonine period.

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Further reading

Oxyrhynchus

Oxyrhynchus (/ɒksɪˈrɪŋkəs/; Greek: Ὀξύρρυγχος Oxýrrhynkhos; "sharp-nosed"; ancient Egyptian Pr-Medjed; Coptic Pemdje; modern Egyptian Arabic el-Bahnasa) is a city in Upper Egypt, located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo, in the governorate of Al Minya. It is also an archaeological site, considered one of the most important ever discovered. For the past century, the area around Oxyrhynchus has been continually excavated, yielding an enormous collection of papyrus texts dating from the time of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods of Egyptian history. Among the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus are plays of Menander, fragments from the Gospel of Thomas, and fragments from Euclid's Elements.

History

Oxyrhynchus lies west of the main course of the Nile, on the Bahr Yussef (Canal of Joseph), a branch of the Nile that terminates in Lake Moeris and the Fayum oasis. In ancient Egyptian times, there was a city on the site called Per-Medjed, named after the medjed, a species of elephantfish of the Nile River worshipped there as the fish that ate the penis of Osiris. It was the capital of the 19th Upper Egyptian Nome. After the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, the city was reestablished as a Greek town, called Oxyrrhynkhoupolis (Οξυρρύνχου Πόλις - "town of the sharp-snouted fish").

Oxyrhynchus (genus)

Oxyrhynchus is a small genus of flowering plants in the legume family, Fabaceae. It belongs to the subfamily Faboideae. A key for the species in this genus has been published.

References

Oxyrhynchus Gospels

The Oxyrhynchus Gospels are two fragmentary manuscripts discovered among the rich finds of discarded papyri at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Unknown to most laymen, they throw light on early non-canonical Gospel traditions.

Oxyrhynchus 840

Oxyrhynchus 840 (P. Oxy. V 840), found in 1905, is a single small vellum parchment leaf with 45 lines of text written on both sides in a tiny neat hand that dates it to the 4th century, almost square, less than 10 cm across. It is kept at the Bodleian Library, MS. Gr. th. g. 11 (P). The text probably predates 200, but no more is determinable from this evidence. In his introduction in The Complete Gospels, Philip Sellew notes that this fragment was likely a talisman text, kept as an amulet, perhaps worn around the neck. Michael J. Kruger who did his PhD dissertation on this fragment concludes that this could not be an amulet but rather a miniature codex. The text itself has been dated to the first half of the second century. Sellew calls it "similar to the New Testament gospels in its style and tone."