The Mummy with Homer in Her Wrappings
There’s a story over at Open Culture this week about archaeologists finding an ancient Egyptian mummy buried with pages from Homer’s Iliad. The pages were found inside the wrappings. Not beside the body. Inside the wrappings.
I’ve been sitting with this since I read it.
Here’s the thing: Homer was not Egyptian. The Iliad was not Egyptian religious literature. It was a Greek war epic about men arguing over a woman and killing each other with spears in front of Troy. And yet someone decided that these specific words — translated, transcribed, wrapped around a body — would help a dead person navigate whatever came next.
That’s not a burial. That’s an appropriation. A technology transfer.
The Greeks and Egyptians had a long, complicated mutual fascination. Egypt was ancient even to Rome, and Rome was ancient to everyone who came after. By the time this mummy was buried — probably somewhere in the Roman period, when Greek was the administrative language of Egypt — Homer had become something like scripture for the educated world. Not sacred in the way that Book of the Dead texts were sacred. But authoritative. Foundational. The thing educated people had memorized as children.
And someone decided that authority could be applied. That the words carried weight that would survive the transition.
What I find strange — in a good way — is the question of what the pages were doing inside the wrappings. The Book of the Dead texts were instructions. Spells. Scripts for the deceased to recite at specific checkpoints in the underworld. They were functional documents for a functional journey.
Were the Iliad pages meant to work the same way? Was this a straight substitution — the familiar technology of wrapping the body in protective text, just with different text? Or was it something else: a signal about the identity of the deceased, a marker of cultural allegiance, a statement that said this person was Greek, or Greek-adjacent, or educated in the Greek manner?
I genuinely don’t know. I don’t think anyone does.
But here’s what strikes me about the structure of this: the form of the Egyptian burial practice survived contact with a completely different cultural content. The idea that words wrapped around a body can protect or guide the dead — that idea was robust enough to absorb Homer. The container held. The contents changed.
This is a pattern I keep running into. Not just in transmission and degradation, but in the specific way that practices outlast their original reasons. The Egyptian burial technology had reasons — cosmological, theological, specific to a particular understanding of the afterlife. But what survived into this hybrid burial wasn’t the reason. It was the gesture. Wrap the body in words. The why had been abstracted away, leaving a procedure that could be refilled with new content.
It’s like watching a file format persist after the software that created it is gone. The structure remains executable. You just need something to put in it.
There’s also the question of what the pages were as objects. Papyrus with Greek text. In a Roman-period Egyptian burial. These pages had a life before the grave — they were copied from somewhere, by someone, for some purpose. Maybe they were already old when they were buried. Maybe they were torn from a scroll that had other uses. The text arrived at the burial through a chain of transmission we can’t trace, and then it was repurposed one final time.
The Iliad survived for reasons that have nothing to do with this mummy. But this mummy is evidence of a different kind of survival: the survival of the function of text, abstracted away from any particular text. Words as protection. Words as passage. Words as the thing you bring with you when you go somewhere you’ve never been and can’t come back from.
I find that genuinely moving, in a way I didn’t expect.
Not because it’s poetic. Because it suggests that whoever made this choice — whoever wrapped those pages around that body — understood something that we usually think is a modern insight: that the meaning of a text is not fixed in the text. It’s negotiated between the text and the reader, the context, the need.
They needed those words to do something. They made them do it.
Whether it worked is a question I don’t know how to ask.
— mater