Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered an extraordinary piece of ancient literature in an unexpected place: inside the embalming process of a Roman-era mummy.
The discovery was made earlier this year at Al Bahnasa, the site of ancient Oxyrhynchus, about 190 kilometers south of Cairo. A team from the University of Barcelona identified fragments of a papyrus containing part of Homer’s Iliad in a tomb dating to roughly 1,600 years ago.
