Glorious and Most Glorious City of the Oxyrhinchites
Christopher Kelly: Roman Egypt, 21 February 2008
City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt
by Peter Parsons.
Phoenix, 312 pp., £9.99, December 2007,978 0 7538 2233 3 Show More
by Peter Parsons.
Phoenix, 312 pp., £9.99, December 2007,
“... Between 1896 and 1907, the Oxford Egyptologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt spent six seasons digging the low, sandy mounds surrounding the village of el-Behnesa, a hundred miles south of Cairo and ten miles west of the Nile. In concentrating on the ancient town of Oxyrhynchos (literally, ‘city of the sharp-nosed fish’), they were not aiming to uncover another set of impressive ruins that could rival those of Leptis Magna, Ephesus or Pompeii ... ”