An Iliad fragment discovered inside an Egyptian mummy shows how Homer’s influence extended across Roman culture, from imperial identity and education to everyday life in Roman Egypt.
Archaeologists have found something unexpected inside a 1,600-year-old Roman-era Egyptian mummy: a fragment of Homer’s Iliad. It wasn’t placed beside the body but inside the mummy’s abdomen. But the real surprise isn’t just where the fragment was found. It’s how it got there. To understand, we must go back—to the Iliad itself and to what it became in the Roman world.
In The Iliad, a poem shaped in the 8th century BC and attributed to Homer, the Trojan War does not end in triumph or renewal. It ends in devastation. The poem closes at the edge of collapse, with Troy reduced to a landscape of heroic ruin. And yet, this is not where the story ends.
According to later Roman tradition, one Trojan escaped. Aeneas—son of Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite—fled the burning city carrying his father on his shoulders and the household gods in his hands. He moved west, across the Mediterranean, towards Italy, where he became the ancestor of Rome.
This continuation did not come from the Iliad itself. It was shaped centuries later, most famously in Virgil’s Aeneid. But it changed the meaning of the Trojan War entirely. The past, in other words, was actively reorganized—through stories that could be reworked, extended, and connected across time and space.
