The most important archaeological cite for manususcripts

Today we visited the site of the ancient Hellenistic Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus.

In 1895, Bernard Grenfell, fresh graduate from Queen’s College Oxford, along with his friend Aruthur Hunt, set out on an expedition from England to Egypt. Sponsored by the Egypt Exploration Fund, the goal of their project was unique for the time – a mission dedicated not to finding monumental architecture or statuary, which was a primary goal of archaeology at the time, but papyri in buried Egyptian towns.

On Dec. 20, 1896, Grenfell and Hunt arrived at Oxyrhynchus, now called El Bahnasa. After searching the remains of the town and its cemeteries with little success, Grenfell and Hunt turned their attention to the many high mounds of rubbish that dotted the landscape. It was here, in the midst of several centuries’ worth of accumulated trash, that success came in a swift and spectacular fashion. During the winter of 1896, while sifting through a number of papyrus, Grenfell Hunt noticed a piece of papyri written on both sides. After clearing it off he read from the neat, clean, capital Greek letters, identifying it as containing the first chapters of the Gospel of Matthew.

In fact, Oxyhrynchus to this day still has papyri from Christian and Classical origins being pulled from its sands, of the published papyri almost 5 ½ thousand have been published, but tens of thousands remain in waiting for examination, translation, and transcription.