Review – City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish

City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish: The Lives of the Greeks in Roman Egyptby Peter ParsonsGenres: History, Non-fiction Pages: 258 Rating: Synopsis: In 1897 two Oxford archaeologists began digging in a sand-covered mound 100 miles south of Cairo. When they finished ten years later, they had uncovered 500,000 fragments of papyri from the ruins of the city of Oxyrhynchus. The work of deciphering these fragments is still ongoing. Peter Parsons’ City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish paints a vivid picture of the Greek-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, using as evidence a wealth of papyri found by digging in the rubbish heaps of the ancient city. His introduction paints a vivid picture of the sheer amount of material, explaining that the first finds were made in 1896 by Grenfell and Hunt — and have yet to be fully published, and not for want of work on it! That said, most of the book focuses not on the papyri themselves, but the kind of details they offer us, and this wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, I must…