Renaissance Europe admired ancient Rome, ancient Rome admired ancient Greece, and ancient Greece admired ancient Egypt. But the admiration could actually go both ways in that last case, since the two civilizations’ periods of existence overlapped. The Greeks made no secret of their regard for Egypt as a far deeper well of knowledge and wisdom (indeed, much of what we know about ancient Egypt today comes from Greek records), but archaeological evidence shows that the Egyptians, in turn, were hardly dismissive of Greek accomplishment. Many Hellenic texts have been discovered in Egyptian burial sites, but only recently has a Greek literary work turned up packaged with a mummy — and not just any literary work, but pages from Homer’s Iliad. Unearthed from a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb in the Egyptian town of Al Bahnasa, the fragment contains lines from Book 2’s epic “catalogue of ships,” which lists all the vessels the Achaean army sends off to Troy. It dates from an era in ancient Egypt, centuries after the reign of the Greek-descended Cleopatra, when “Greek literary papyri may have functioned as a crucial cultural passport,” as the New York Times’ Franz Lidz writes. “Being Hellenic connoted an exclusive social status and financial privilege — and had to be meticulously documented through genealogies going back across several centuries.” It’s possible that pages of the Iliad were assumed to act as a kind of Greek passport that would let the deceased bypass the trials of the underworld described in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. So venerated was Homer’s work at this stage of ancient Egyptian history, in fact, that physicians also credited it with curative properties. “For a bed-bound patient shivering with malaria, the prescription was simple: Brace your head against a papyrus scroll of Book 4 to break the fever.” Whatever the effectiveness of the Iliad against infe...
First seen: 2026-05-20 22:49
Last seen: 2026-05-21 12:59