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A fragile scrap of parchment bearing verses from Homer’s Odyssey, about 1,700 years old, has been discovered in the library of Utrecht University.
A chance find
Mark de Kreij, a papyrologist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, spotted the fragment two years ago while working through the Special Collections of the Utrecht University Library, cataloguing manuscripts that belonged to the German scholar Carl Schmidt and were bought by the university around seventy years ago. The torn piece measures just 6.6 by 7.7 centimetres, roughly the size of a playing card, and had lain undetected for decades, previously mistaken for an insignificant later text.
It was found in unexpected company. The verses, in ancient Greek, were nestled among Egyptian manuscripts, and the fragment is thought to have come from a small “pocketbook” parchment codex produced in Egypt in the third or fourth century AD.
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What it says
The surviving lines come from book 12 of the epic, and describe a pivotal, dramatic moment: Odysseus’s men kill and eat the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios, defying their leader’s warnings, an act that prompts Zeus to send a storm that destroys Odysseus’s fleet and kills his crew.
De Kreij recognised the Greek words pointing to Homer straight away. “Everybody who learns Greek learns Homer,” he told the regional broadcaster RTV Utrecht, describing his work as sifting through “little scraps from the desert”. Only around thirty comparable fragments from this period are known anywhere in the world, which makes the find a small but genuine addition to the record of how the poem survived. De Kreij was cheerfully honest about his luck with the passage: “The strange thing about my job is that the Odyssey is about the least exciting thing you can find,” he said. “There are lots of boring passages in the Odyssey. But this is a great part.”
Why make it public after 2 years
The find is two years old, but it is news now because of the timing. The university says it chose to publicise the discovery because of the renewed interest in the Odyssey following the box-office success of Christopher Nolan's recent screen adaptation, which has also driven up sales of English and Dutch translations of Homer's work. The fragment, the university notes, is itself evidence of how popular the epic already was in late antiquity. De Kreij is due to publish the wider Utrecht collection under the title Hieratic, Demotic, Greek, and Coptic Texts in the Utrecht University Collection.