City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Papyri Beneath the Egyptian Sand Reveal a Long-Lost World

by Peter Parsons

In 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 ( the city 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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Egypt, Archaeology, Classics, Ancient History, Africa

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

Between 1896 and 1907 the British Egypt Exploration Fund employed Bernard Grenfell (1870-1926) and Arthur Hunt (1871-1934) to lead excavations in the Egyptian village of El-Behnesa, the site of the classical city of Oxyrhynchus (Sharp-Nosed Fish), with a view to discovering papyri from the city's Christian period when it was said to have been home to tens of thousands of monks and nuns.

The first digging season they discovered part of the then unknown Gospel of Thomas and over six seasons working from winter to spring, when the temperature was cooler and workers were not so busy in the fields, they went on to discover in the region of 500,000 papyri and writing on pieces of broken pottery, along with everything else that winds up in a town rubbish dump. The papyri ranged from tiny fragments to virtually complete rolls, mostly from the Roman period ( the time of the mummy portraits,which had all been dumped in the city's rubbish mounds which stood ten metres tall at the time. 70 volumes of the documents found had been published to 2006, Parsons estimates that at least another 40 volumes will be released over the coming decades.

Those documents are the basis of this book and give a picture of daily life in a forgotten town of Roman Egypt of largely Greek culture that can be reconstructed from that written evidence mostly discovered in the rubbish dumps of the abandoned settlement. Admittedly though most of the papyri are in Greek, rather than Coptic, and the lives of the literate are likely to be over represented. Each chapter looks at a different aspect of life: the river Nile, markets, family and friends, the bureaucracy, the Christians (among others). The end result is both detailed and indistinct, the past appears like a mirage, visible in a haze but not quite tangible. The culture of these people seems to have been mostly Greek with some Egyptian elements - for instance the worship of sacred animals, others adopted some Egyptian funerary customs or sibling marriage.

Plenty of details: a contract for hauling goods along the Nile that included a force majeure clause, sealed samples had to be sent with grain cargoes as a check on adulteration, the woman who thanks to decrees of Augustus (the edit granting legal equality to mothers of three or more children) and Caracalla (the edit granting Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire) had full equality before the law, evidence of people being removed from public record by Imperial decree, astrological predictions - The lucky, born between April 11 and 15, under the vulture-headed Nebu, might make their living by song and dance. Later in the year you would do less well, since your god 'causes old age, until a man be bent by old age; he produces hunchbacks or makes men bent by sickness, he causes dwarfs to be born and monstrosities shaped like a beetle and people with no eyes and like a beast and hardly able to speak and deaf and toothless'

Illustrated with colour plates - some showing papyrus documents discussed in the book. What world will be reconstructed from our rubbish?

[Giuseppe · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stelle

Saggio molto interessante, dall'andamento narrativo e discorsivo, per approfondire la vita nell'Egitto greco-romano, con particolare focus sulla città di Ossirinco, dai cui tumuli provengono innumerevoli papiri delle più disparate categorie.
Una lettura alla portata di tutti, anche di chi si sta approcciando solo ora alla disciplina.

[Greyeyedminerva · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been sitting on my shelves since it first came out, and I only now got around to reading it - and I wish I'd done it sooner! This is a fascinating and engagingly written book about the Greco-Roman town of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, and its papyrus finds. The book starts with a bit of the history of Egyptian exploration by modern Europeans, and then goes into more detail about the excavation of Oxyrhynchus itself (this was one of my favorite parts). After a chapter on pre-Roman Hellenized Oxyrhynchus, instead of following a strictly chronological structure, Parsons proceeds thematically, with chapters on the Nile, bureaucracy, education, and various other aspects of day-to-day life in Roman Oxyrhynchus. Dealing with such categories synchronically lets you see how much or (more often) how little life in a town of Roman Egypt changed despite the various political & economic vicissitudes of the Roman Empire as a whole. Parsons ends with an engrossing chapter on Christianity (tied for my favorite). The chapter on bureaucracy was a hard slog because I personally find it a dull subject, and although the book is aimed at a non-specialist reader, there are moments of obscurity (like when he refers to the Mouseion as "the All Souls of Alexandria" - perhaps unintelligible to anyone who doesn't know Oxford colleges intimately!). But overall Parsons does an excellent job of explaining relevant aspects of ancient history and literature clearly so that you always know what's going on. The best part, though, is the engaging way he deals with his material. If you've heard him lecture he's very engaging in person, and it's amazing how well this quality translates into print. You can tell how much he enjoys his work, and he draws you in to share his fascination as the minutiae of the lives of ordinary people some 2000 years ago jump off the crumpled, sandy pages.

[Drianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that's caught uncomfortably between audiences: although it claims to be for the general reader, I suspect that it would be better appreciated by, say, a Classics undergraduate. There were lots of interesting sections, but it suffered from trying to generalize too much (the long sections on the general history of Greco-Roman Egypt, which did not illuminate Oxyrhynchus specifically and which I suspect would go by much too fast for the unfamiliar reader) while still not being sufficiently accessible. I was hoping to learn more about Oxyrhynchus itself than I did; yet this is not the book I would recommend for a general introduction to Greco-Roman Egypt.

I would honestly probably skip most of the first half of the book and just look at the last few chapters.

The included plates were very nice, though.

Also there were a couple of sections that repeated almost verbatim that should've been caught by an editor.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If anyone ever tells you history is boring and irrelevant, have them read this.

[Anatolikon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic introduction to daily life and classical culture in the Graeco-Roman world.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Parsons (b. 1936), Regius Chair of Greek at Oxford emeritus, has been an enthusiastic papyrologist since graduate school in the 1950s. This unlikely book is his popular presentation of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, thousands of mostly Greek fragments discovered in the dump of Oxyrhynchus, the “City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish,” a now-leveled ancient town about hundred miles south of Cairo.

After an introduction to the discovery, excavation, and interpretation of the papyri, and a chapter devoted to Greeks in ancient Egypt, Parsons provides an outline of city life and describes the place of the emperor and the Romans in city affairs. Most of the book, however, cleverly treats mundane matters, the records of which ended up in the city’s landfill and were preserved (sometimes thirty feet deep) by the dry Egyptian climate: business contracts, legal paperwork, sympathy notes, handwriting exercises, magic spells. From these scraps, Parsons ventures shrewd guesses about medicine, religion, education, family relationships and the operation of bureaucracies.

My own favorite chapter discusses the annual inundation of the Nile, which annually deposited new soil on the fields and was the basis for Egypt’s reputation as the breadbasket of the ancient world. Parsons notes that while most ancient economies had two seasons, sowing and harvest, Egypt had a third, the season of inundation. This geographical bounty provided idiosyncratic records about dike building, grain shipment, tax levies, and even worship of the river.

Parsons is a fine writer, and he makes good use of his considerable learning, not only in deciphering and translating the documents but also in his ability to synthesize their contents for the general reader. There is little Parsons can do about the fragmentary nature of the Oxyrhynchus papyri; he can only make good use of what is available, and that rarely includes the ability to pull individuals from centuries of anonymous citizenry.

Nevertheless, he might have better pointed the differences between the people of Oxythynchus and ourselves. As Mary Beard noted in her review for TLS, the people of Oxyrhynchus “had coughs and colds, sore feet and blistered hands just as we do” but otherwise “lived in a world so different from ours as to call into question that superficial familiarity.” After all, how can moderns understand a city that probably had no latrines or people who worshiped a fish. (The book provides a fine illustration of a figurine showing a worshiper kneeling before a giant effigy of the city’s eponymous fish—with a nose better called droopy than sharp.) This book is well worth reading by anyone interested in the ancient world, but Oxyrhynchus was indeed a strange place, probably more foreign to the modern West than the most exotic spot in the world today.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers a deep dive into an often unexamined corner of the ancient world. Armies, philosophy, mythology, these are some of the most popular topics in antiquity. Daily life is harder to study. But we have recovered material from the sands of Egypt that allow us to view town-life and its seemingly unexciting minutiae. Truth be told, I did find this book kind of dry at times. Some of the chapters were right up my alley, especially the ones about families, poets, and religious practices. All of the chapters are based on Parsons’ magisterial familiarity with the thousands of papyri recovered from Oxyrhynchus. He cites many of them in full or in part (always in translation), and others he simply refers to and leaves the reference in the endnotes, so that scholars who read this book can peruse the primary sources themselves if they so choose. The book will be useful for both a lay audience who doesn’t know much about this topic, but also serves as a handy resource for specialists. There are also full color photographical plates, but these are never explicitly referred to in the text, so that as you read, you read one of the photographic sections and say, “ohhhh, that’s what he was talking about earlier,” or you see a picture of something that he hasn’t referred to yet and then have to remember to flip back when he refers to it later. It doesn’t some that hard to include a note like “see fig. 12” in the text, so this seems like an unforced error to me. But otherwise it is an incredibly fascinating and informative book. Chapters cover themes such as the discover and recovery of papyri in Egypt, the ecology of the Nile basin, the agricultural and economic management of this area by successive governments, and many other topics. There is something here for everyone. In particular, I think the chapter on the history of Christianity will be of interest to a wide audience. Parsons always offers a clear, concise historical context that then leads to a review of various papyri finds. Whether you are a relative novice to the topic or are maybe a graduate student or other scholar, you can get a lot from this book.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

The centuries of discarded Greek papyri from the Greek-Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchos (The City of Sharp-Nosed Fish) builds up a tremendous web of human relationships. In the city dumps of Oxyrhynchos excavators found decades of wills, city council minutes, business contracts, tax receipts, imperial orders, books, poems, gospels, magic spells, school work, love letters, and other such ephemera to paint an astounding picture of life in a Greek city located in Egypt. Parsons makes the point that there is nothing physically left of Oxyrhynchos; after the Arab conquest of Egypt in 639 C.E. the city was leveled and its cut stone and marble buildings mined to build new cities. The Greek bodies of the former residents of Oxyrhynchos have all returned to dust. In many ways Oxyrhynchos is the anti-Pompeii; where as Mt. Vesusvius froze all of Pompeii in an instant, Oxyrhynchos only exists in the jottings and legalese of its former citizens.

[Simon Coxall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating insight into the complexities and variety of evidence for life in Graeco-Roman Egypt. This book breathes life into its people in all their variety.
Too often we look back upon our ancient forbears as simple and one dimensional...the evidence here explodes that view providing faint echoes of real lives lived and lost.

[Richard Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating glimpse into the past.

[Maria Domenica (thaumazousa) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Traduzione ottima e scorrevole, rivedrei i riferimenti bibliografici o anche solo i riferimenti ai rinvenimenti papiracei

[saturn · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

helpful and interesting, this was a set text for a class this past semester.

[Juan Arboleda Rivera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me encantó este libro, de los mejores que he leído en toda la vida ❤️

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 5 out of 5]

For those of us who have encountered Roman-era Egypt primarily as a mysterious land of philosophers, clerics, and monks, Parson’s book provides a healthy corrective. As the author notes, “Patriarchs have their historians, monks have their devout anecdotes. Ordinary people leave their mark through the papyrus documents, the worm’s-eye view of Christianity on the march in Egypt, as seen in the lives of its followers and the circulation of its texts” (196). The wealth of material from Oxyrhynchus includes literature and poetry (still being published more than a 100 years after discovery), but also a vast amount of domestic and bureaucratic material which illuminates the everyday details of family, municipal, and religious life in this unique Roman province – a province which had its own currency, dating system, and travel restrictions, as well as a unique rhythm of life based around the yearly flooding of the Nile.

Christianity is considered in particular in the last chapter – Parsons discusses Gnostic texts (the most famous of which, the Gospel of Thomas, was a “sensational novelty” when published in 1897 as the first volume of publications from the site), persecutions, and the Christian preference for codices over scrolls and rolls: “The scroll was the vehicle of Jewish Law; the roll was the vehicle of pagan lore. By choosing the codex for their sacred books, early Christians set themselves apart from their origins and from their rivals” (200). Christianity also continued to meet a need for oracular advice: “The general handbook for the perplexed, the Sortes Astrampsychi, continued to circulate, with an introductory prayer and some Christian touches to the questions, just as it had in pagan times” (208).

As well as the general blending of Roman, Greek, and Egyptian culture, Parsons discusses a specific incident which resonated for more than a hundred years afterwards. This was the accidental drowning (or suicide) of Hadrian’s lover Antinoos in the Nile, which “created a modern legend, a Greek tragedy of beauty cut short, in parallel with the ancient Egyptian legend of Osiris dead and resurrected… Antinoos lost to Hadrian as other boys… to the gods who loved them” (64-65).

[Meaghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't think this book is as engaging as it could have been -- like, say, if Philip Matyszak had written it -- but it's far from dry either. The story is of a minor Greco-Egyptian city in ancient times that, through accident of location, wound up yielding an archaeologist's wet-dream in the form of a two-thousand-year-old city dump full of papyrus debris such as letters, receipts, petitions, schoolboys' notebooks, lists, cartoons, etc etc etc, that shows in a way that nothing else can what life was really like at that time and place.

The book is nothing if not methodical, carefully laying out the pieces of the society that formed the City of the Sharp Nosed Fish. Included were many quotes -- some quite long -- from the papyrus, and some photo inserts of the scraps themselves. So you see a boy threatening to starve himself if his dad doesn't come to see him, and a schoolteacher complaining that the city council hasn't paid him as promised, and little children struggling to learn their letters. I was particularly interested in the opening pages, where they talked about the difficulties of working with papyrus and reading it. I had no idea that the ancients did not put spaces in between their words.

I would recommend this to people with an interest in ancient history. It's written in a fairly serious way and I don't think it's the best book to introduce people to ancient history, but if you're already into the subject you'll love it.

[Grady · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1897, archeologists discovered the trash of the ancient town of Oxyrhynchos, well south of Cairo. The massive trove of papyrus unearthed from the site has taken over a century to translate -- the work continues even now. In this book, Peter Parsons, longtime head of the translation project, draws on the corpus to describe the social, economic, and political structure of the town in the first through the fourth centuries A.D. The book is interesting, but for a non-specialist, much of the detail will be hard to retain. Because of that, I found the most compelling passages were those setting the evidence from the Oxyrhynchos against what is known from other sources about the Roman world. The discussion of the literary riches revealed in the papyri -- fragments and sometimes whole works previously thought lost, both biblical and classical -- made me want to read translations of some of those, which Parsons doesn't provide - fortunately, some are available on line.

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A detailed and readable reference tool documenting life in Oxyrhynchus two thousand years ago.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

Surprisingly readable.