Oxyrhynchus ( ; , ; ; ), also known by its modern name Al-Bahnasa (), is a city in Middle Egypt located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo in Minya Governorate. It is also an important archaeological site. Since the late 19th century, the area around Oxyrhynchus has been excavated almost continually, yielding an enormous collection of papyrus texts dating from the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Roman Egypt. They also include a few vellum manuscripts, and more recent Arabic language manuscripts on paper (for example, the medieval P. Oxy. VI 1006 Document Location: The Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt. Material: Paper. Image: Unavailable.).
During the Diaspora Revolt of 115–117 CE, fighting spread to the nome of Oxyrhynchus. The Roman suppression led to the near-total expulsion and destruction of Jewish communities in Egypt. Papyrological evidence indicates that a local festival commemorating the Jewish defeat was still celebrated in Oxyrhynchus some eighty years later. Jewish life in the area did not re-emerge until the third century, with a papyrus dated to 291 CE recording an active synagogue in Oxyrhynchus and identifying one of its officials as originating from Syria Palaestina.
From 619 to 629, during the brief period of Sasanian Egypt, three Greek papyri from Oxyrhynchus include references to large sums of gold that were to be sent to the emperor.
At that point, the town's name was changed to Al-Bahnasa. The town subsequently contained a cemetery of 5,000 companions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad who had participated in the conquest of Oxyrhynchus. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641, the canal system on which the town depended fell into disrepair, and Oxyrhynchus was abandoned. Today the town of el Bahnasa occupies part of the ancient site. The Arabs called the city as "Al-Baqi' of Egypt", as the city was known for having 5,000 Sahaba buried in it. The large number of fallen Muslim soldiers buried in this city was due to major battles against the Roman army and their fortifications in this area. Various early Islamic chroniclers, such as Al-Waqidi in his F̣utūh al-Bahnasā, and Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Mu"izz in The Conquest of Bahnasa, reported that the Muslim armies under Khalid ibn al-Walid entered Bahnasa in 639,
besieging the town for months before they can subdue the 50,000 Byzantine army and Beja people garrison defenders.Before it was renamed as "al-Bahnasa", Oxyrynchus were renamed as "Al-Qays town", by Al-Maqrizi or "town of martyrs" in honor to one of the Muslim commander that participated in the conquest of Oxyrynchus. Ali Pasha Mubarak mentioned it in the compromise plans that it was a city that had great fame and its flat was about 1000 acres and the golden curtains were working and the length of the curtains was 30 cubits and its territory included 120 villages other than the plantations and the hamlets. The northern is Kandous, the western is the mountain, the tribal is Touma, and the eastern is the sea. Each gate had three towers, and there were forty ribats, palaces, and many mosques, and at its western end there is a famous place known as the Dome of Seven Maidens.
Among the most notable tombs were allegedly belong to the Muslim martyrs were the tombs of the children of Aqil bin Ali bin Abi Talib (brother of Ali, fourth Rashidun), Ziyad bin Abi Sufyan bin Abdul Muttalib (son of Abu Sufyan ibn Harb), Aban ibn Uthman bin Affan, Muhammad ibn Abi Abd al-Rahman bin Abi Bakr al-Siddiq (grandson of Abu Bakar), and Hassan al-Salih ibn Zayn al-Abidin bin al-Hussein (great-grandson of Ali).
Ibn Taghribirdi, a Mamluk era historian, also writing the history of Bahnasa conquest in his book, Al Duhur fi madaa al 'Ayaam wa al shuhur
The Muslims army settled in the town for three years as their base after the conquest, while launching occasional raids on the black and the coasts. Al-Qa`qa` bin Amr, Hashem, Abu Ayyub al-Ansari and Uqba ibn Nafi Al-Fihri, the future conqueror of Maghreb, and went with two thousand of Persians convert who now fight under the caliphate, and raided the border of Cyrenaica.
There was also a particular mosque called Dome of Seven Maidens, which allegedly was built to honor seven Oxyrhynchus Copts girls who defected and helped the Muslim armies under 'Amr ibn al-As and now venerated for their effort in the conquest of the city. As the town of al-Bahnasa now contained thousands of historical structures in memoir of the conquests, including the 5,000 graves of companions of the prophet and Tabi'un martyrs of the battle of Bahnasa, the town are regarded by locals as "al-Baqi' of Egypt", which became the point of interest for many foreign tourists particularly from the Muslim majority country.
The classical author who has most benefited from the finds at Oxyrhynchus is the Athenian playwright Menander (342–291 BC), whose comedies were very popular in Hellenistic times and whose works are frequently found in papyrus fragments. Menander's plays found in fragments at Oxyrhynchus include Misoumenos, Dis Exapaton, Epitrepontes, Karchedonios, Dyskolos and Kolax. The works found at Oxyrhynchus have greatly raised Menander's status among classicists and scholars of Greek theatre.
There is an on-line table of contents briefly listing the type of contents of each papyrus or fragment. Search by table of contents ; A listing of what each fragment contains.
Since the 1930s, work on the papyri has continued. For many years it was under the supervision of Professor Peter Parsons of Oxford. Eighty large volumes of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri have been published.
Since the days of Grenfell and Hunt, the focus of attention at Oxyrhynchus has shifted. Modern archaeologists are interested in learning about the social, economic, and political life of the ancient world. This shift in emphasis had made Oxyrhynchus, if anything, even more important, for the very ordinariness of most of its preserved documents makes them most valuable for modern scholars of social history. Many works on Egyptian and Roman social and economic history and on the history of Christianity rely heavily on documents from Oxyrhynchus.
A joint project with Brigham Young University using multi-spectral imaging technology has been extremely successful in recovering previously illegible writing. With this technology, many pictures are taken of an illegible papyrus using different filters, each finely tuned to capture only certain wavelengths of light. Thus, researchers can find the optimum spectral portion for distinguishing ink from paper in order to display otherwise completely illegible papyri. The amount of text potentially to be deciphered by this technique is huge. A selection of the images obtained during the project and more information on the latest discoveries has been provided on the project's website.
On June 21, 2005, the Times Literary Supplement published the text and translation of a newly reconstructed poem by Sappho, together with discussion by Martin L. West. Discussion by Martin West Part of this poem was first published in 1922 from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus, no. 1787 (fragment 1).see the third pair of images on this page Most of the rest of the poem has now been found on a papyrus kept at Cologne University.Image of papyrus fragment
In May 2020, an Egyptian-Catalan archaeological mission headed by Esther Pons and Maite Mascort revealed a unique cemetery consisting of one room built with glazed limestone dating back to the 26th Dynasty (so-called the El-Sawi era). Archaeologists also uncovered bronze coins, clay seals, Roman tombstones and small crosses.
In February 2023, 16 individual tombs and 6 funerary complex from the Persian, Roman and Coptic periods and 2 deposited frogs were discovered by the Egyptian-Spanish archaeological mission. Majority of the bodies preserved with decorated shrouds were revealed alongside the pottery vessels and lamps.
In March 2020, archeological researchers from the Antiquities Inspection of Al-Bahnasa District located archaeological evidence of the encampment of Khalid ibn al-Walid and 10,000 soldiers under him, including 70 veterans of the Battle of Badr. The excavators said the Muslim armies' encampments were located in the current location of the village of Beni Hilal, Minya District, west of Bahnasa.
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