A tomb dating to roughly 1,700 years ago, when Egypt was under Roman control, has been found to contain a funerary poem written in ancient Greek along with protective spells for the dead, Live Science reports.
The poem opens with the words "Listen, father!", the phrase Live Science uses in its headline for the discovery. Its presence in the tomb places the burial within a period when Greek served as a language of literature and administration in Egypt, sitting alongside the older Egyptian traditions of the Nile Valley. Egypt had been ruled by the Romans since the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC, and Greek remained widely used across the country throughout that era.
Funerary texts were a long-standing feature of Egyptian burial, intended to guide, name or safeguard the deceased. What distinguishes this tomb, as reported by Live Science, is the combination of a poem composed in Greek with spells meant to protect the person laid to rest. The pairing reflects the mixed cultural world of Roman Egypt, in which Greek-language verse and Egyptian ideas about the afterlife could appear side by side in a single burial.
The report frames the find as a window onto how communities in Roman-period Egypt mourned and commemorated their dead. Poetry and protective formulae of this kind were part of a broader tradition of writing for the tomb, one that stretched back through pharaonic times and continued to evolve as new languages and populations settled in Egypt over the centuries.
By the time this tomb was furnished, hieroglyphs were no longer in everyday use, and Greek had become a common medium for inscriptions and literary composition. The survival of a poem in the tomb offers a direct trace of the voice given to grief and remembrance in this later chapter of Egypt's history, when the country's ancient religious customs met the language and literary forms of the wider Mediterranean world.
Live Science's report is the basis for this account. Readers interested in the older script that preceded Greek in Egypt, and in learning to read hieroglyphs for themselves, can explore the signs through the Hierolyte app.