City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish Review

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City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish ReviewThe idea of archeology in Egypt brings with it associations of pyramids, hidden passages, mummies, and gold statues. The ancient city of Oxyrhynchos didn't have any such claims. All it had was its garbage dumps, and instead of Indiana Jones, it had two young Oxford dons to dig around in it in 1896. They did not find treasure as might be displayed under spotlights in museum cases, but treasure it was, nonetheless. It was a vast quantity of papyrus documents from the first to fourth centuries, preserved in Egypt's dry heat, and still legible. In _City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt_ (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), Peter Parsons has revealed some of what the papyri have to tell us. He is fully qualified for such a work; he is a professor of Greek and a lecturer in Papyrology at Oxford, as well as the former head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project. He says that when you open a box of unpublished papyri, "you never know what you will find - high poetry and vulgar farce, sales and loans, wills and contracts, tax returns and government orders, private letters, shopping lists and household accounts." It is quite a jumble, but his book has organized the findings by thematic chapters, and so provides a remarkable portrait of everyday life in a culture that turns out to be both alien and familiar.
Accidental finds of papyrus a hundred miles south of Cairo and ten miles west of the Nile led to archeological interest in England. The two young Oxford archeologists, Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt, could not have known what they were getting into when they began their exploration, but they quickly learned that there were heaps of papyri to be unearthed. An excited Grenfell wrote, "The papyri were, as a rule, not very far from the surface. In one patch of ground, indeed, merely turning up the soil with one's boot would frequently disclose a layer of papyri." Volume I of the scholarly _The Oxyrhynchus Papyri_ was published in 1898, and six generations of scholars have been going through the finds ever since. Volume LXXII is due out only this year, and there will be forty more volumes of Hunt and Grenfell's findings still to come. So in many ways our understanding of these finds is fragmentary. Not only have only some of the papyri been examined and translated, but they are writings that the Oxyrhynchites threw away. All the work represented in Parsons's book is an academic study of rubbish. The writings are usually not elevated, but deal with daily life, like food. When there were celebrations, like the Festival of the Nile, the crowds wanted sweet foods like fritters and flat-cakes with honey. Street vendors distributed their version of fast food, which was a gruel or porridge, but just as now, fast food was thought to be sustenance for the lazy: "You should not be chomping porridge on my signature," grumped one correspondent. There were contracts for work, and contracts for apprenticeships, complete with stipulations about holidays. But it wasn't all business. A wife wrote to her husband, "I do not see the sun, because you are not seen by me: for I have no sun but you." When a father left for Alexandria without his son, the boy wrote, "If you don't send for me, I won't eat, I won't drink, so there." There are examples of pedagogy; "Work hard, boy, or be skinned" was written out multiple times by a boy who was writing lines for punishment. The archeologists were hunting for religious texts, and they found them, but not all were consistent with Victorian orthodoxy. A written blessing to secure a house from vermin ("every evil crawler and thing") invokes Egyptian, Babylonian, Jewish, and Christian deities or saints; fifteen hundred years later, words from the Koran were used for the same purpose.
So there is plenty of indication that the more things change, the more they remain the same. It isn't a new lesson, but it is here imparted in an unusual way. Parsons writes, "Oxyrhynchos exists again today as a waste-paper city, a virtual landscape which we can populate with living and speaking people." His book is a fascinating collection of samples from a huge and continuing academic endeavor.
City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish OverviewIn 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging a mound south of Cairo. Ten years later, they had uncovered 500,000 fragments of papyri. Shipped back to Oxford, the meticulous and scholarly work of deciphering these fragments began. It is still going on today. As well as Christian writings from totally unknown gospels and Greek poems not seen by human eyes since the fall of Rome, there are tax returns, petitions, private letters, sales documents, leases, wills and shopping lists. What they found was the entire life of a flourishing market-town - Oxyrhynchos ( thecity of the sharp-nosed fish' ),- encapsulated in its waste paper. The total lack of rain in this part of Egypt had preserved the papyrus beneath the sand, as nowhere else in the Roman Empire. We hear the voices of barbers, bee-keepers and boat-makers, dyers and donkey-drivers, weavers and wine-merchants, set against the great events of late antiquity: the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and the coming of Christianity. The result is an extraordinary and unique picture of everyday life in the Nile Valley between Alexander the Great in 300 BC and the Arab conquest a thousand years later.

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