Oxyrhynchus

Oxyrhynchus, modern el-Bahnasa, was a city of Middle Egypt west of the Nile and the capital of a nome in Ptolemaic and Roman times. Excavations by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt from 1896 recovered hundreds of thousands of papyrus fragments from its rubbish mounds. They include tax records, letters and contracts as well as lost works of Greek literature and early Christian texts.