If one is to judge a book by its cover the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (distributed by Oxbow for the Egypt Exploration Society) seem unlikely candidates for a fascinating read. The current thirty volumes with their uniformly grey spines, and fragmentary texts in Greek seem forbidding to say the least. In The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish Peter Parsons shows that, on the contrary, what lies within represents one of the most vibrant and amazing bodies of texts, comparable to the ruins of Pompeii in the completeness of the picture they give us of the life of a city in the Roman Empire.

Oxyrhynchus is not, of course, in Italy at the centre of the Roman world, but in Middle Egypt. There in 1897 the excavations of two Oxford archaeologists, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, uncovered a rubbish dump. Whilst this may not seem the most spectacular of finds, the dry weather conditions ensured that the vast amounts of waste paper (papyrus) that the inhabitants of Oxyrhynchus had thrown away were amazingly well preserved and still legible. The process of transcribing and publishing them began in 1898 and continues to this day. Peter Parsons was one of the team of scholars working on this project from 1960 until his retirement and this book starts with a description of the papyrologist's art; the difficulty of deciphering these fragile scraps is made clear, but so is the pleasure of being the first person to read them for nearly 2000 years, and the thrill of discovery.

Among these discoveries are extraordinary additions to the cannon of Greek literature – plays by the master of new comedy, Menander where we had none before, pretty much everything we know of the poetry of Sappho, a satyr play by Sophocles, works by Pindar, Simonides and Callimachus. Valuable though all this may be, however, it is the insight into the ordinary people of Oxyrhnchus provided by the countless legal documents, receipts of sale, tax returns, financial transactions, private letters and even shopping lists on which the book focuses. A wealth of fascinating details is used here to build a coherent whole. The chapters are arranged thematically and each is a delight. In the sections on “markets”, for example, we learn not only of an agreement between the city's bakers with officials over the maintenance of a steady bread supply - the nuts and bolts of economic life, but also of attitudes to porridge: quick and popular, but viewed as lazy and unhealthy – the contemporary equivalent of chips perhaps.

Oxyrhynchus was a city of migrant Greeks in Roman Egypt and cultural transactions are everywhere. Egyptian Gods were worshiped, and astrology conducted using the Egyptian calendar, but the Julian calendar was used for business, and official documents were all in Greek. The theatre with its Greek plays sat alongside the Roman bath house. A final influence was that of Christianity – a traveller writing in the early c4th tells us that the city boasted “10,000 monks and 20,000 virgins” and early gospels as well as the previously unknown Gospel of St. Thomas have been found at Oxyrhynchus. As usual however it is the little details that leave an enduring impression, such as a brief note - “To my dearest lady sister, greetings in the Lord. Lend me the Ezra, since I lent you the small Genesis” - almost a kind of biblical book group. Perhaps the most incredible thing about the papyri, however, is that so much remains still undeciphered, and that new discoveries are still appearing all the time.

Also of interest:

Women's Letters from Ancient Egypt 300 BC-AD 800
by Roger S. Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore

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