Oxyrhynchus

Oxyrhynchus (Greek: Ὀξύρρυγχος; "sharp-snouted or sharp-nosed"; ancient Egyptian Pr-Medjed; Coptic Pemdje; modern Egyptian Arabic el-Bahnasa) is a city in Upper Egypt, located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo, in the governorate of Al Minya. It is also an archaeological site, considered one of the most important ever discovered. For the past century, the area around Oxyrhynchus has been continually excavated, yielding an enormous collection of papyrus texts dating from the time of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods of Egyptian history. Among the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus are plays of Menander and fragments of the Gospel of Thomas, an early Christian apocryphal document with doubtful authorship.

Etymology

The town was named after a species of fish of the Nile River which was important in Egyptian mythology, though it is not known exactly which species of fish this is. One possibility is a species of mormyrid, medium-sized freshwater fish that figure in various Egyptian and other artworks. Some species of mormyrid have distinctive downturned snouts or barbels, lending them the common name of elephantnoses among aquarists and ichthyologists. A figurine from Oxyrhynchus of one of these sacred fish has many attributes typical of mormyrids: a long anal fin, a small caudal fin, widely spaced pelvic and pectoral fins, and of course the downturned snout.

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