Discovered and re-discovered: using newly digitised items to find hidden stories—in Greek papyri
from Peter Toth, Curator of Greek Collections, Bodleian Libraries
The Bodleian’s two-year project, We Are Our History, has provided an excellent opportunity to explore diverse and rich collections through a new lens: highlighting the voices of underrepresented communities, groups, and individuals.
The Library’s extensive collection of Greek papyri offers particularly fertile ground for this work, enabling users of Digital Bodleian to rediscover people from the distant past whose voices are uniquely preserved, yet have often remained hidden within ancient documents or confined to specialist scholarly publications.
As part of the We Are Our History project, the curatorial team identified and digitised fifteen unique papyrus fragments that represent women, children, slaves, and other marginalised communities in the ancient world whose lives are often overshadowed by more prominent historical figures. This series of blogposts about Greek papyri presents some of these groups and individuals through the documents that preserve their stories.
The first group we turn to is an unusual one: the gravediggers of the Great Oasis in Egypt. Their documents, dating back some 1,800 years, have survived on papyrus fragments, many of which are now held in the Bodleian’s collections.
The Great Oasis, also known as the Kharga Oasis, was the furthest habitable region of Egypt’s Western Desert and an important centre of caravan routes in antiquity. It contained several small but thriving settlements, including Hibis, the capital, and the nearby village of Kysis. Around 1890, a group of papyrus fragments was excavated in this region, possibly as a single find, and quickly dispersed among collectors in Western Europe. Among the earliest buyers were the Oxford-based papyrologists Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt. Their collections were later acquired by the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and the Egypt Exploration Society in Oxford.
The “gravediggers”
The papyri — around 48 in total — appear to derive from a single family, a dynasty of gravediggers whose documents record aspects of their everyday lives over roughly 80 years (c. 237–314 AD). This was a family profession, in which men and women seem to have participated almost equally. Their work extended far beyond simply digging graves, as the Greek term nekrotaphos suggests. They were involved in a range of funerary activities, including mummification, embalming, and aspects of burial rituals. For this reason, they are often described in modern literature as the “undertakers” of the Great Oasis.
Other terms used to describe them reflect their marginalised social status. They are sometimes called exopylites (“those outside the gates”) or allophyloi (“foreigners” or “outsiders”), perhaps referring to their association with cemeteries outside inhabited areas, as well as their resulting separation from ordinary civic life after prolonged work in such spaces.
Although they appear to have been illiterate — their documents are consistently written and signed by others on their behalf — they were nevertheless active participants in a wide range of legal and economic affairs, including purchases, inheritance, and other forms of employment.
A gravedigger nurse
One of the nekrotaphoi documents in the Bodleian collection (MS. Gr. Class. C. 282 (P)) preserves part of a contract from around 308 AD. It records an agreement between a female “undertaker” named Thermuthis and a family who hired her as a wet nurse for a newly adopted foundling — a child described as having been “picked up from the dung heap.”
Wet-nursing was a well-established and relatively well-paid occupation for young mothers, subject to detailed legal regulation. This contract, now digitised, specifies a nine-month term of employment, with a fixed payment of two talents and full provisions provided to the nurse. It offers a vivid glimpse into the fate of abandoned children — who might be taken in and raised within new households, often as slaves — as well as the economic opportunities available to young mothers within this gravedigger family.
A mandate
Another fragment preserves a mandate from around 300 AD, issued by a woman named Aurelia, also a member of the gravedigger family. In it, she appoints a relative, Aurelios — himself a gravedigger — to represent her in a legal matter in the city. Unfortunately, the document is badly damaged, and the nature of the case remains unknown but we see a woman grave-digger actively engaged in public affairs outside her profession.
A receipt for the dead
A third fragment illustrates the family’s core occupation. It records the formal receipt of the body of a man named Heron, delivered to the gravediggers sealed and received in the same condition. Although the text is fragmentary, it suggests that issuing such receipts formed part of the administrative routines of their work.
Together, these documents offer a rare and intimate view of a marginalised professional group whose lives, preserved on papyrus for nearly two millennia, can now be rediscovered through the Bodleian’s collections.