I scrolled through reblogs with commentary to see if anybody had added this context and surprisingly no one had so it falls to me.
This is why it frustrates me when people write 'ancient Egyptian' on articles about Roman Egyptian anything, but mostly funerary practices. It's not good archaeology journalism. People then imagine this:
When what they actually need to imagine is this:
These are two very different eras of Egyptian funerary practice. I'm just gonna link the Fayum Mummy Portraits because it's neat and then keep going with the Homer because the reason this was done is cool. It also has very little to do with what most people think of when they think "ancient Egypt." The article itself even calls it out: Greek Magical Papyri.
Magical and religious traditions around writing are nothing new to Egypt, but they take on a special character in Late Antiquity. Syncretic traditions formed around the act of writing letters. The letters do not actually have to mean anything because the act of writing them was, itself, basically witchcraft. This was commonly done with charaktĂȘres. The basic idea is that even if you could not read you get the magical protection that comes along with having writing buried with you.
This tradition was not restricted to mummies and jewelry! It turned up quite a bit as atropaic amulets woven into clothing of the era:
Some textile examples. If charaktĂȘres in Late Roman clothing is interesting to you, I recommend Dress and Personal Appearance in Late Antiquity by Faith Pennick Morgan for a chart of charaktĂȘres she found used in her research. This textile tradition is not unique to Roman Egypt but was just what people wore across the entire Roman Empire during this era. What seems unique to Egypt are the use of charaktĂȘres, though even this is a bias of evidence, because we don't have much preserved clothing of this era from other parts of the Roman world.
Notable exception the Thorsberg tunic and trousers, which are another thing people conveniently pretend aren't from the 4th Century CE you know, when Germany had been Roman for about 300 years:
Here is a contemporary 4th Century German mosaic for context:
These are Romans. This is Roman fashion. It is not "Pagan Germanic." There is some variation in local fashions of course! The Thorsberg tunic is absolutely a local style, with its split sides. It also appears in Gaul.
But the pants are basically identical to what people were wearing in 4th C. Egypt. We've unearthed trousers with the same pattern as the Thorsberg trousers, they just don't have the footie-pajama bit, they are shorts. Because, you know, it's Egypt and not Germany where it snows.
I just hate the way people report on and write about Late Antiquity. It's extraordinarily disingenous. Magical writing was so common in Roman Egyptian religion and mysticism that they sewed it into their clothes. The charaktĂȘres tradition comes from Hellenistic syncretism. Many of the people using charaktĂȘres seem to have been only semi-literate, and the act that it was writing was important. Homer is also an important text in Greek mysticism, people used it for bibliomancy. So, yeah, your relative dies, you bury them with Homer. This is extremely normal for Roman Egypt. This is very expected. What's interesting here is that it's a full text and not a specially made amulet.
But the way this article presents it is "OMG weird!!!! A Greek!!! Greek???? Text inside an Ancient Egyptian mummy????!??"
