Archaeologists examining a 1,600-year-old Egyptian mummy found something no one had ever seen before: a page of Homer’s Iliad, used as embalming material — meaning one of the most famous poems in human history spent sixteen centuries wrapped around a body, doing a job no librarian could have imagined

The papyrus was still on the mummy’s abdomen when they found it. Not folded up next to it. Not preserved beside it in the tomb. Placed deliberately, during embalming, on the front of the body, as part of the specific set of materials wrapped around and packed inside the corpse before the outer bandages went [...] The post Archaeologists examining a 1,600-year-old Egyptian mummy found something no one had ever seen before: a page of Homer’s Iliad, used as embalming material — meaning one of the m