The ruins of the ancient city of Oxyrhynchus, located at the edge of the Egyptian desert, were first excavated by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt in 1896. The site had up until then been considered of relatively little importance, and the two didn’t have high hopes for what they would find. However, when they began to dig in the city’s garbage dumps of all places, they stumbled upon one of the most important archeological discoveries of all time. Because the city was located far from the Nile and depended on canals for its water, there was almost no humidity at all, and this allowed a massive amount of discarded papyri to survive in the dumps. They include anything from previously lost Greek plays, poems and works of philosophy to public documents, census returns, court records, leases, horoscopes and private letters, and in this video I will showcase a few of them! Music: “Pre Dawn Meditation” by Gerald Jay Markoe “Hymn to Horus” by Michael Levy “Immortality” by Gerald Jay Markoe