Signal The Met Puts Earliest Known Fragment of Homer's Odyssey on Public View

Summary

The Metropolitan Museum of Art put on public display a papyrus fragment of Homer's Odyssey made in the early Ptolemaic period, roughly 285 to 250 BCE. The artifact is about 2300 years old and was presented as the oldest confirmed fragment of the Odyssey known to survive. Curator Sean Hemingway described it as the earliest preserved fragment of the epic that exists today. The fragment preserves three lines from Book 20 that are absent from the modern standard text, showing how the poem changed as it was passed down over centuries. It was excavated in 1902 by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt at the necropolis of Hibeh in Egypt and entered the museum's collection in 1909 as a gift of the Egypt Exploration Fund. The fragment remains on view in the museum's Greek and Roman galleries through November 15.