City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: The Lives of the Greeks in Roman Egypt

by Peter Parsons

Genres: History, Non-fiction
Pages: 258
Rating:

Synopsis:

In 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging in a sand-covered mound 100 miles south of Cairo. When they finished ten years later, they had uncovered 500,000 fragments of papyri from the ruins of the city of Oxyrhynchus. The work of deciphering these fragments is still ongoing.

Peter Parsons’ City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish paints a vivid picture of the Greek-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, using as evidence a wealth of papyri found by digging in the rubbish heaps of the ancient city. His introduction paints a vivid picture of the sheer amount of material, explaining that the first finds were made in 1896 by Grenfell and Hunt — and have yet to be fully published, and not for want of work on it!

That said, most of the book focuses not on the papyri themselves, but the kind of details they offer us, and this wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, I must admit. I’d have loved to hear more about the process of piecing together the papyri for this kind of information, and a bit about the specific work to identify and preserve the papyri.

It’s not that the history of Oxyrhynchus is boring, though! It’s surprising how personal it can all feel, even when the scraps are equally often the remnants of literature, simple lists, court summons, etc. There’s a letter from the mother (?) of a child who is dying, urging the father (?) to come and see the child, because if it dies before the letter’s recipient arrives, “I swear you’ll find me hanging.” The desperation is so real, compared to the stiff formulaic letters I think even those with an interest know better.

Ultimately the sheer amount of detail makes it a slow read and sometimes a bit overwhelming, but a lot of it is fascinating — and to add to the credibility, there’s a bibliography, numbered footnotes, and an index, so often lacking from popular history books.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)