Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibits ancient Odyssey fragment

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is exhibiting an ancient papyrus fragment of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. Dating from approximately 285 to 250 BCE, the fragment is considered the earliest discovered written piece of the epic.

The roughly 20-centimeter fragment contains three lines from Book 20 that are absent from the modern standard text. This provides material evidence that local variations of the work existed during the 3rd century BCE. The artifact was excavated in 1902 from the el-Hiba necropolis in Egypt and was acquired by the museum in 1909 as a gift from the Egypt Exploration Fund.

The exhibition follows the commercial success of Christopher Nolan’s recent film adaptation of the epic, which stars Matt Damon as Odysseus.