A researcher looking through old manuscripts in a Dutch university library has found a 1,700-year-old scrap of Homer’s Odyssey, one of only about 30 known fragments of the poem from that era.
Mark de Kreij, a Greek language expert at Radboud University, found the fragment among a collection of early Christian manuscripts from Egypt held by Utrecht University Library.
It is damaged and discolored, about three inches across and written in very small, neat letters.
According to the university, it was once part of a pocket edition of the complete Odyssey, roughly the size of a Kindle, owned by someone living in Egypt’s Fayoum Oasis around 300 C.E.
The verses come from Book 12, at the moment the sun god Helios discovers that Odysseus’s crew has slaughtered his sacred cattle on the island of Thrinacia.
For de Kreij, the luck was in which page survived.
“There are so many boring parts in The Odyssey. This happens to be a really fun passage,” he told Dutch broadcaster RTV Utrecht, as reported by Smithsonian Magazine.
Fragments this old are scarce. Only about 30 known pieces of the Odyssey date to the third or fourth century, and another copy of a similar age, the Manchester Odyssey, is held at the University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library.
De Kreij describes his work in terms most people would envy.
“I have the best job in the world. I am a treasure hunter. Every day you find something nice. This is one of them,” he said.
