Photo: Met Museum
This fragment dates back to the Ptolemaic era and is valuable not only because of its age. It preserves three lines from Book 20 of the *Odyssey* that are not found in the standard text of the poem that has survived to this day. They show that different versions of the work existed in antiquity. Later, scholars at the Library of Alexandria, having gathered texts from various sources, began work on creating a single authoritative version of the *Odyssey*. The papyrus preserves a fragment of an earlier version.
The papyrus is written in ink made from soot and water. The museum received it in 1909 from the Egyptian Research Fund, and it has been part of the Metropolitan Museum’s collection ever since. The fragment is currently on display so that visitors can see both sides of it.
Before Homer’s poems were committed to writing, they were passed down from generation to generation through the recitations of singers. These performers could alter and expand the narrative, so the same episode could exist in several different versions. It is precisely this diversity of early versions that accounts for the papyrus’s special value: it allows us to see what the *Odyssey* might have been like before its text took on the form we are familiar with today.
The exhibition also features ancient objects depicting heroes and scenes from the *Odyssey*: a terracotta plaque depicting Athena interceding on Odysseus’s behalf, a bowl depicting Odysseus and Circe, a fresco depicting Polyphemus and Galatea, and a carnelian scarab.
The exhibition opened on August 6, when *The Odyssey* was once again in the spotlight thanks to Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation released this summer. Seven exhibits from the Metropolitan Museum of Art trace how the story of Odysseus has endured for more than two millennia—from ancient Greek works of art to modern cinema.
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