The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish by Peter Parsons

The City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish by Peter Parsons (2007)
Read: October-November 2008



This book was given to us by a good friend shortly before we left England for Cairo. It was a really thoughtful gift, as we are both interested in non-fiction books and wouldn't have been moving out here if we weren't interested in Egyptology!! The by-line for this book is "Greek papyri beneath the Egyptian sand reveal a long-lost world" It is the Greek connection here that will always mind me of our friend, because she lived in Greece for a number of years herself.



This was a non-fiction book, but it was also a rather academic book, which meant I had to concentrate a lot of make sure that I understood and picked up everything I was reading. The book is really a study of a huge find of papyrus near Cairo which dated from the time of Alexander the Great (332BC). The book starts by talking about the way the papyrus were found just South of Cairo and that it was calculated that they belonged to the Greek city there, Oxyrhynchos, the Glorious most Glorious City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish. Although the find was initially made in 1897, it took ten years for the many many fragments to be shipped to Oxford for study, and many more years for sense to be made of all the findings.

The book gives a good overview of the Greeks in Egypt - a time that can be easily overlooked when history books and programmes on Egypt are overwhelmed by the Pharaohs. This was still a proerous time, and the Nile Delta became a real mixing pot for Greek, Roman and Egyptian iconography and traditions (something we have seen ourselves at the amazing Catacombs in Alexandria).

I can see why it has taken so long for a study of this amaing find to be published, as these really were only fragments of writing that were found. On top of that, the find is believed to have been a rubbish dump, and therefore finding consistency in the content of fragments has been a huge undertaking, as every piece of life in Oxyrhynchos was mixed in to one huge mound.

The book then looks at different aspects of City life in turn; with the evidence for each of these being based on the papyrus writings found. The papayrus evidence makes this a very different book to your typical how-did-people-used-to-live book, becuase the evidence is so minuetly specific and there is so much of it. When Parsons examines The Market, he not only knows that there wa a bustling market, but how each vendour would price their goods, what days trading too place on, how much each vendour had to pay to hold a stall there, and of course, the good old shopping lists of the market's patrons.

The book also includes pictures of the statues and paintings found at the site ofthe old city, and some wonderful photographs of the original papyrus found. These pictures emphasise the difficulty in making sense of the wealth of information at the site, but my favourite picture also provides a lighter side to the story; a schoolchild's doodling of a picture and writing "King Midas has ass's ears"