Oxyrhynchus polis� literally means �City of the Sharp Nosed Fish� (the fish in question was a sacred animal connected to the god Thoeris) and is the Greek name for the Dynastic settlement of Per-medjed. Oxyrhynchus was an important city in Greek and Roman controlled Egypt�the capital of the 19th Nome and described as the �third city of Egypt.�� Greek and Roman sources describe Oxyrhynchus as an important center for the religion of Christianity, with 12 churches, 10,000 monks, and 20,000 nuns according to one 4th century account.� Little remains of the city itself, which is thought to have been destroyed during or after the Arabic invasion around 640 CE.� It was later resettled after a period of dormancy and the city of el-Bahnasa still exists on the original site of Oxyrhynchus.� Located on the Bahr Yusuf, a branch of the Nile which leads to Lake Moeris, Oxyrhynchus is 160 km south of Cairo.
The ancient city is important archaeologically and also important to religious scholars due to the wealth of papyri found in its garbage mounds.� The papyri recovered, which number in the tens of thousands, were typically fragmentary and covered a wide variety of subjects over the course of Oxyrhynchus� history as an administrative and religious center:� legal documents, letters, literature, philosophical treatises, and Christian holy writings.� These papyri date from between 250 BCE and 700 CE.� Predominantly Greek and Roman examples are catalogued, though it is known that writings in Arabic were found and disregarded by some early excavators.
Excavation at the site of Oxyrhynchus began in 1896 by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt of the London-based Egypt Exploration Society.� Working on information that Egyptian peasants were finding papyri at el-Bahnasa and selling them on the black market, Grenfell and Hunt started excavation with 100 workers and 30 overseers in the winter of 1896 at the unpromising-looking refuse mounds near the remains of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus.� What they found was a scriptological mother lode.� Oxyrhynchus became the life�s work of the two men, and they continued excavation and translation well into the 20th century.� Scientific interest in the site continued beyond the efforts of Grenfell and Hunt.� Italian excavator Ermengildo Pistelli and his crew continued excavation at the archaeologically fertile Kom Gammon, retrieving papyri from the refuse mound and also discovering the medieval tomb of Sheikh Ali Gammon, for whom the hill was named.� William Flinders Petrie also excavated at el-Bahnasa in 1922, concentrating on the architectural remains of Oxyrhynchus.� Petrie uncovered the remains of the city�s Hippodrome, which is estimated to have seated 11,000 people, and also a long, double colonnade which was thought to be the remains of a colonnaded street or square.� Another Italian, Evaristo Breccia, excavated two private homes during two digging seasons between 1928 and 1932 and recovered still more papyrus documents during that period.� Later excavations continuing into the nineteen eighties and nineties included those by the Egyptian Antiquities Service, a Kuwaiti expedition concentrating on the medieval al-Bahnasa, and a Catalan expedition starting in 1992.The site of Oxyrhynchus provides a tantalizing glimpse at a world thousands of years removed from us in time.� Many writings by authors from the Greek and Roman periods thought long lost (such as the works of Greek poets Pindar and Callimachus) were found among the great city�s refuse. Other papyri found include ancient fragments of controversial religious texts, such as the Gospel of St. Thomas.� More valuable to the archaeological record than the works of lost poets and Christian gospels, were the papyri that deal with everyday life in the city of Oxyrhynchus.� Accounts of street repairs, letters to and from government officials, legal decisions, wills, shopping lists, and other papyrus and ostraka (clay shard) writings recovered from the site paint a vivid picture of life in a bustling Egyptian city.
