Papyrus is an ancient writing material from Egypt. It was made from the pith of the papyrus, a plant which used to grow on the banks of the river Nile. Unlike the modern day paper that we use, papyrus was a thick, strong and durable material.

The rubbish mounds of Oxyrhyncus

Oxyrhyncus was an ancient town in the north of Egypt (situated near the modern town of al-Bahnasa), approximately 160km southwest of Cairo on one of the Nile's canals. Although it was a prosperous city during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, little remains of Oxyrhyncus today. However, its history has been preserved within the refuse of its inhabitants, discovered in enormous mounds outside the town.

Little attention was given to Oxyrhyncus as an ancient site of importance until the late 1890s when Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, two young papyrologists of the 'Egypt Exploration Society', began to dig up the rubbish mounds. There, beneath the drifted sand, they discovered a thousand years' worth of papyri which had been preserved in ideal conditions because of the town's location – it hardly rains in this part of Egypt, and although Oxyrhyncus was situated near a canal, it did not suffer from the annual flooding which was commonplace on the banks of the Nile.

The historical significance of the Oxyrhyncus Papyri

Traditionally, only grand, official documents carved in stone have survived from the classical world, but the Oxyrhyncus archive is unusual and unparalleled as it contained what the classical sites of Greece and Italy could not preserve – paper.