Found: the dustbin of history
By Khaled Diab
An
ancient Egyptian rubbish dump offers fascinating glimpses into life in the City
of the Sharp-Nosed Fish.
June 2008
Our collective memory of the past is mostly confined to grand figures
and epic events, while the vast majority of humanity ends up in the wastelands
of oblivion. Thanks to nearly half a million papyrus fragments uncovered in
Hellenic Egyptian rubbish dumps which are being gradually decoded, we are quite
literally salvaging fragments of ordinary people’s lives from the dustbin of
history.
The rubbish dumps in question belonged to the provincial but thriving
Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus (City of the Sharp-nosed Fish), about one hundred
miles south of modern Cairo, which was established during the pharaonic New Kingdom and became Hellenised in Ptolemic times, but was eventually reduced to a single
standing column. Most of the unearthed documents, discovered by two Victorian
archaeologists, date from the time when
Peter Parsons, an archaeologist who spent two decades leading the team
deciphering the papyri, has written a book which offers a fascinating
reconstruction of life in Oxyrhynchus.
“It is the pleasure of Greek Egypt that the accident of climate has preserved,
through papyri, the lives and voices of ordinary people with rare vividness,”
he notes.
For me, the mundane aspects of ordinary life highlighted in
correspondences and letters were among the most enthralling of all the finds,
because they reveal both how familiar and how different that lost world is.
Although most letters dealt with business and practical matters, many were of a
personal nature.
“… write to me about your health and what you
need from here,” Achillion exhorts his brother, Hierakapollon. “If you do this, you will have done me a
favour: for we shall have the impression, through our letters, of seeing one
another face to face.”
Not everyone was as friendly as Achillion.
Some letters reveal ancient snobberies and grievances. “You exult in your wealth
and your great abundance of possession and so you look down on your friend,” Theoninos chastises Didymos. In a written tantrum, Theon
warns his father: “If you refuse to take me to
Some letters expressed happiness and joy, while others articulated
grief and heartache. “The gods are my witness that when I heard the news about
my lord our son I was distressed and mourned just as for my own child,”
consoled Menesthianos.
Serenos
informs his wife, Isidora, of his sense of
abandonment: “From the time you went away from me I have been mourning, weeping
by night and grieving by day… You sent me letters that could shake a stone.”
These sentiments, are familiar and clear to
the modern reader. However, back then, living in another city was like living
in another country today, while moving to another country was tantamount to
departing for good. Nowadays, we are fortunate enough to have telephones,
e-mail and web-based tools so that we can actually chat face to face, as Achillion desires, at a distance.
With modern communication technologies, our verbal diarrhoea and
unprecedented levels of literacy, future historians ought to have a much easier
task reconstructing ordinary lives than their counterparts today. But this may
not actually be the case. Even if future civilisations are more technologically
advanced than our own, they may not be aware of how our computer systems worked
and may find the endless streams of binary code undecipherable.
In fact, this problem is already facing us today, with the rapid rate
at which information technologies are becoming obsolete. A classic example of
this runaway digital obsolescence is the BBC’s Domesday
Project. So, future historians and archaeologists,
may also be left rummaging around in our rubbish dumps, where our most enduring
artefacts are likely to be “disposable” yet strangely indestructible nappies,
Styrofoam boxes and plastic bags.
As you will have noticed, most of the names above sound Greek. That is because, following Alexander’s
conquest of
How “Greek” these urban dwellers were is open
to question, since their culture and lifestyle was a heady blend of Egyptian
and Greek elements. But they did speak Greek and studied the classics. “To some
extent the Greeks remade
At the same time, as a “foreign” ruling elite,
the Greeks of Egypt looked down on the native Egyptians and mocked their weird
beliefs and practices. Greek myth, like many strands of ‘Orientalism’,
stereotyped Egyptians as “cruel, perverse, depraved and treacherous”.
One area of particular venom was the relative freedom enjoyed by
Egyptian women. “Egyptians rear all their offspring,” one Egyptian Greek
mocked, referring to the fact that Egyptians did not dump their unwanted
children, particularly girls, in the city’s rubbish dumps.
Prior to the Hellenisation of Egypt, Egyptian
women enjoyed equal
legal rights with Egyptian men and “marriage” was an oral affair, easily
entered in to and easily dissolved. However, despite their legal status, social
constraints limited their ability to work and engage in public affairs. In
Hellenic Egypt, Greek norms in which women had no independent legal status from
men began to filter into the Egyptian system. Roman rule brought a certain
amount of relief for women because it allowed women with three children to own
property and conduct their own affairs.
So much about Oxyrhynchus is like contemporary city life but with a
peculiarly ancient twist. The city had its own town council, with a mayor (prytanis) and magistrates. However, the council was staffed
by prominent citizens who had to pay out of their own pockets if they failed to
meet their targets.
Tax collecting was outsourced to private individuals and the city implemented
a Roman version of the “dole”, but free rations were given to the wealthy and
prominent citizens, not the poor and needy.
Ancient
Oxyrhynchus,
like other towns, had the equivalent of banks, bank accounts and cheques, and
clients could order payments to be made or receive funds in other cities, too.
The twist here was that wheat was a recognised currency back then. People also
entered into surprisingly detailed and binding contracts.
For a provincial city, Oxyrhynchus had a surprisingly wide range of
goods – from food and beer to medicaments and books – and a large population of
specialists tradesmen and professionals: from bakers
and bathmen to doctors and donkey drivers. The city
also had pretensions to a higher status, with costly public baths and fountains
dotted all around. It also once took on the potential crippling burden of
hosting the Roman version of the Olympics, the Capitoline
Games.
Just as the ordinary people of Oxyrhynchus were ignored by history,
they also paid little heed, judging by the fragmentary evidence, to the grand
events of history going on about them: the rise and fall of different emperors
in
“We hear nothing about political attitudes, nothing about the deeds, characters
or deaths of great men. It may be a matter of prudence; it may be a matter of
indifference,” Parsons observes. In a way, that’s poetic justice.
This column appeared
in The Guardian Unlimited’s
Comment is Free section on
18 May 2008. Read the related
discussion.
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