A 1,700-year-old piece of Homer's Odyssey was found tucked inside a collection of old Egyptian texts at Utrecht Universi...

A 1,700-year-old piece of Homer's Odyssey was found tucked inside a collection of old Egyptian texts at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, discovered not by an excavation team but by a professor flipping through library holdings. Mark de Kreij, a Greek literature expert at Radboud University, came across the tiny scrap of parchment while studying early Christian manuscripts the library had purchased in the mid-20th century. The fragment measures just 2.6 by 3 inches and contains verses from Book 12 of the Odyssey. De Kreij joked to a Dutch news outlet that while plenty of the Odyssey drags, this happened to be one of the fun passages. Those verses describe the moment the sun god Helios discovers that Odysseus' starving crew slaughtered and ate his sacred cattle on the island of Thrinacia, despite Odysseus' strict orders to leave them alone. Zeus ultimately destroys their ship as punishment, killing everyone on board except Odysseus himself. It's one of the most dramatic turning points in the entire epic. The fragment likely came from a pocket-sized parchment codex produced in the Fayum oasis region of Egypt around A.D. 300. Only about 30 similar fragments from pocket editions of the Odyssey have ever been found. De Kreij believes it survived because it was sandwiched in the middle of the codex, protected by surrounding pages. How it ended up in Utrecht's collection remains unknown. This is the second surprise Homeric discovery in 2026. Earlier this year, archaeologists in Egypt pulled papyrus fragments of the Iliad from inside a Roman-era mummy. De Kreij first spotted the Utrecht fragment in 2024, and his full study of the university's Greco-Roman text collection is due to be published as a book. #Homer #Odyssey #GreekHistory