Over the winter of 1896/97, Oxford classicists Bernard Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt, financed by the Egypt Exploration Society of London, first excavated the formerly great city of Oxyrhynchus looking for papyrus documents. In the ancient world, Oxyrhynchus had been a capital city of the 19th nome in Egypt and had, therefore, produced voluminous quantities of bureaucratic documents. These and literary documents had been left on rubbish heaps at the desert edges of the city.
After their first extremely successful season, the pair returned to Oxford where they produced a pamphlet on religious papyrus material they had found at Oxyrhynchus and the first volume of Oxyrhynchus papyri in which they showed some pictures, but mostly their transliterations and critical notes about 158 Oxyrhynchus papyri they had unearthed. They estimated the Oxyrhynchus papyri were written mostly from the 1st to 9th centuries, during the Roman and Byzantine periods of Oxyrhynchus.
Grenfell and Hunt excavated for five more seasons running from 1903-1907.
In addition to plentiful administrative documents giving details about the business of routine, daily life, the Oxyrhynchus papyri provided fragments of previously lost literary and religious texts, written in the elegant uncial hand.
Over the last century, the Oxyrhynchus papyri have been analyzed and have revealed important, previously lost religious and literary texts.
Some Oxyrhynchus Papyri References
For a thorough, basic article on Oxyrrhynchus, see E. G. Turner's:
"Oxyrhynchus and Its Papyri"
E. G. Turner
Greece & Rome
Vol. 21, No. 63 (Oct., 1952), pp. 127-137
or "Roman Oxyrhynchus"
E. G. Turner
The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Vol. 38, (Dec., 1952), pp. 78-93
For Oxyrrhynchus documents, see: POxy Oxyrhynchus Online.
Despite the number of Oxyrhynchus papyri and the more than a century of work performed on them, Oxyrhynchus is a name little known to most people. It is a site familiar to me from one of the University of Minnesota's fragile Greek Oxyrhynchus papyrus fragments that I examined in proverbial kid gloves for a master's paper. My paper was on the mis-dating of one particular lacunose civil document (prepared by a scribe in the most common language of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, Greek), based mostly on reference to known magistrates.
