The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish

Peter Parsons, Regius Chair of Greek at Oxford emeritus, has been an enthusiastic papyrologist since graduate school in the 1950s. This unlikely book is his popular presentation of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, thousands of mostly Greek fragments discovered in the dump of Oxyrhynchus, the "City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish," a now-leveled ancient town about hundred miles south of Cairo. After an introduction to the discovery, excavation, and interpretation of the papyri, and a chapter devoted to Greeks in ancient Egypt, Parsons provides an outline of city life and describes the place of the emperor and the Romans in city affairs. Most of the book, however, cleverly treats mundane matters, the records of which ended up in the city's landfill and were preserved (sometimes thirty feet deep) by the dry Egyptian climate: business contracts, legal paperwork, sympathy notes, handwriting exercises, magic spells. From these scraps, Parsons ventures shrewd guesses about medicine, religion, education, family relationships and the operation of bureaucracies. My own favorite chapter discusses the annual inundation of the Nile, which annually deposited new soil on the fields and was the basis for Egypt's reputation as the breadbasket of the ancient world. Parsons notes that while most ancient economies had two seasons, sowing and harvest, Egypt had a third, the season of inundation. This geographical bounty provided idiosyncratic records about dike building, grain shipment, tax levies, and even worship of the river. Parsons is a fine writer, and he makes good use of his considerable learning, not only in deciphering and translating the documents but also in his ability to synthesize their contents for the general reader--even though he can only rarely pull individuals from the detritus of centuries. Nevertheless, Parsons might have better pointed the differences between the people of Oxythynchus and ourselves. As Mary Beard noted in her review for TLS, the people of Oxyrhynchus "had coughs and colds, sore feet and blistered hands just as we do" but otherwise "lived in a world so different from ours as to call into question that superficial familiarity." After all, how can moderns understand a city that probably had no latrines or a citizenry that worshiped a fish. (The book provides a fine illustration of a figurine showing a worshiper kneeling before a giant effigy of the city's eponymous fish--with a nose better termed "droopy" than "sharp.") This book is well worth reading by anyone interested in the ancient world, but Oxyrhynchus was indeed a strange place, probably more foreign to the modern West than the most exotic spot in the world today.

The idea of archeology in Egypt brings with it associations of pyramids, hidden passages, mummies, and gold statues. The ancient city of Oxyrhynchos didn't have any such claims. All it had was its garbage dumps, and instead of Indiana Jones, it had two young Oxford dons to dig around in it in 1896. They did not find treasure as might be displayed under spotlights in museum cases, but treasure it was, nonetheless. It was a vast quantity of papyrus documents from the first to fourth centuries, preserved in Egypt's dry heat, and still legible. In _City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt_ (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), Peter Parsons has revealed some of what the papyri have to tell us. He is fully qualified for such a work; he is a professor of Greek and a lecturer in Papyrology at Oxford, as well as the former head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project. He says that when you open a box of unpublished papyri, "you never know what you will find - high poetry and vulgar farce, sales and loans, wills and contracts, tax returns and government orders, private letters, shopping lists and household accounts." It is quite a jumble, but his book has organized the findings by thematic chapters, and so provides a remarkable portrait of everyday life in a culture that turns out to be both alien and familiar. Accidental finds of papyrus a hundred miles south of Cairo and ten miles west of the Nile led to archeological interest in England. The two young Oxford archeologists, Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt, could not have known what they were getting into when they began their exploration, but they quickly learned that there were heaps of papyri to be unearthed. An excited Grenfell wrote, "The papyri were, as a rule, not very far from the surface. In one patch of ground, indeed, merely turning up the soil with one's boot would frequently disclose a layer of papyri." Volume I of the scholarly _The Oxyrhynchus Papyri_ was published in 1898, and six generations of scholars have been going through the finds ever since. Volume LXXII is due out only this year, and there will be forty more volumes of Hunt and Grenfell's findings still to come. So in many ways our understanding of these finds is fragmentary. Not only have only some of the papyri been examined and translated, but they are writings that the Oxyrhynchites threw away. All the work represented in Parsons's book is an academic study of rubbish. The writings are usually not elevated, but deal with daily life, like food. When there were celebrations, like the Festival of the Nile, the crowds wanted sweet foods like fritters and flat-cakes with honey. Street vendors distributed their version of fast food, which was a gruel or porridge, but just as now, fast food was thought to be sustenance for the lazy: "You should not be chomping porridge on my signature," grumped one correspondent. There were contracts for work, and contracts for apprenticeships, complete with stipul