Scrap of 1700-year-old copy of The Odyssey washes up in Utrecht

A 1700-year-old scrap of parchment containing verses from the Odyssey has been discovered in the library of Utrecht University.

Researcher Mark de Kreij came across the fragile artefact two years ago while he was going through a collection of manuscripts that belonged to a German scientist.

The torn fragment measures just 6.6cm by 7.7cm, roughly the size of a playing card, and contains a handful of verses from book 12 of Homer’s epic work.

It describes the moment when Odysseus’s men kill and eat the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios, ignoring their leader’s warnings, which prompts Zeus to send a storm to destroy Odysseus’s fleet and kill his army.

De Kreij said the fragment had lain undetected in the library for years until he came across it while examining a collection of Coptic manuscripts that the university bought from a relative of the German academic Carl Schmidt.

The text, in ancient Greek, was nestled among a batch of Coptic papyri, Egyptian texts written in the Greek alphabet. It is thought to have been taken from a pocketbook edition produced in Egypt in the third or fourth century AD.

The university decided to publicise the discovery in the wake of the box-office success of Christopher Nolan’s recent screen adaptation, which has revived interest in The Odyssey and boosted sales of English and Dutch translations.

De Kreij, a lecturer in Ancient Greek, immediately recognised the verses when he came across the parchment. “Everbody who learns Greek learns Homer,” he told RTV Utrecht.

Enduring epic

Only a handful of fragments of copies of The Odyssey have survived from the period, but the discovery shows how the epic tale has endured and been passed down for millennia.

De Kreij said the fragment had probably survived because it comes from the midpoint of the book and so would have been protected by the outer pages.

“The strange thing about my job is that The Odyssey is about the least exciting thing you can find,” he said. “There are lots of boring passages in The Odyssey. But this is a great part.”