雅思阅读 11: A Library Under Wraps（裹在木乃伊里的书）

改编自考古学报道（2026年5月）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://simnabuleo.com/culture/2026/5/mummy-iliad-2026-05-04-en

Reading Passage

A. For more than a century, archaeologists opening Egyptian mummies have known what to expect inside the linen wrappings: a copy of the Book of the Dead, the collection of spells and instructions that guided the deceased through the dangers of the underworld. So consistent is this pattern that the discovery of any other text inside a mummy's bandages would be, to say the least, unexpected. That is precisely what a team working at Oxyrhynchus, in central Egypt, announced in 2026: a late Roman-era mummy, excavated from a tomb designated simply as Tomb 65, was found with a fragment of Homer's Iliad — specifically, the "Catalogue of Ships" from Book 2 — placed deliberately on its abdomen. It is, the researchers say, the first known case of a Greek literary text being incorporated into the Egyptian mummification process, and it overturns sixteen centuries of scholarly assumptions about what ancient Egyptians placed on their dead and why. Greek and Roman writers themselves knew little of Egyptian burial beyond what informants told them, and medieval Europeans, encountering hieroglyphs they could no longer read, filled the silence with legend. The Oxyrhynchus fragment matters partly because it is one of those rare moments in which the assumption, rather than the text itself, is forced to yield.

B. The find is the product of patience as much as luck. The mummy itself had been excavated decades earlier and stored in a museum basement, its wrappings still intact because previous curators chose not to unwrap it. Modern non-invasive imaging techniques — multi-spectral photography and X-ray scanning — allowed the team to detect the presence of a folded papyrus within the linen without cutting a single bandage. When the papyrus was eventually extracted and unrolled under laboratory conditions, the ink was so well preserved that the handwriting could be identified as a common Greek cursive script of the Roman period, and the text itself was readily legible. The "Catalogue of Ships" is a lengthy, somewhat dry passage listing the Greek forces that sailed to Troy; it is not the most emotionally moving section of the Iliad, which makes its selection as a funerary object all the more puzzling. The imaging work itself took more than a year. Multispectral photography, which records wavelengths invisible to the naked eye, had to be calibrated for the particular kind of linen and the particular iron-based ink the scribe had used; only when the contrast between ink and cloth was finally optimised could the folded papyrus be mapped in situ without disturbing a single thread.

C. Why would an Egyptian mummy be buried with a passage of Greek epic rather than a traditional Egyptian funerary text? The researchers propose several possibilities, none of them definitive. The individual may have been a Greek-speaker living in Roman Egypt, for whom Homer served as a kind of secular bible — a repository of cultural authority, moral example and collective memory. Placing a passage of the Iliad on the body might have been intended to invoke that authority in the afterlife, much as the Book of the Dead invoked Egyptian divine protection. Alternatively, the text may have served a more practical, apotropaic function: a fragment of a famous poem, written on durable papyrus, was considered talismanic, its mere presence protective regardless of whether the deceased understood it. A third possibility is more unsettling: the papyrus was simply a scrap of conveniently available material, chosen not for its literary content but because it was the right size and shape to tuck inside the wrappings. None of the three explanations is mutually exclusive. A person buried with a fragment of the Iliad may have valued Homer's cultural authority, regarded the papyrus as protective, and also, practically, had a convenient scrap at hand. Ancient funerary rites, the researchers note, rarely announce a single intention; they layer one motive on top of another, and it would be surprising if this burial were an exception.

D. The discovery resonates with a wider reassessment of Roman-period Egyptian culture. For decades, scholars depicted Egypt after Alexander the Great as a society sharply divided between a Greek-speaking ruling class and a native Egyptian majority, each preserving its own traditions, religions and texts with relatively little overlap. The Oxyrhynchus Iliad fragment complicates that picture. It suggests that Greek literary culture had penetrated the funerary practices of people who, on other evidence, participated in traditional Egyptian religious rituals. The mummy had been prepared using standard Egyptian embalming techniques; the Iliad fragment was an addition to a recognisably Egyptian procedure, not a replacement for it. The result is a hybrid burial — Egyptian in form, Greek in one of its symbolic contents — that defies the old model of two isolated cultures coexisting uneasily. Oxyrhynchus itself was, in the Roman period, a town where Greek and Egyptian names appear on the same papyri, and where documents mix Greek administrative forms with Egyptian religious observances. The mummy from Tomb 65 is, in this sense, not an anomaly but an unusually clear specimen of a hybrid culture that the old, polarised model had trouble seeing.

E. The find also carries methodological lessons. For over a century, unrolled mummies yielded predictable results, and the predictability itself shaped what researchers expected to find. The Oxyrhynchus papyrus was discovered only because modern imaging allowed conservators to examine an unopened mummy without destroying it, and because a team chose to investigate a tomb that had been excavated generations earlier rather than dig a new one. The catalogue of the Oxyrhynchus necropolis, in other words, is far from complete; many mummies remain unwrapped in museum storerooms, and each one is now a potential archive. The researchers caution, however, that not every wrapped mummy conceals a literary fragment — most, after all, contain either nothing or the expected Book of the Dead. But the first rule of archaeology, as this discovery demonstrates, is that the unexpected is always waiting behind the last assumption you thought you could trust. That lesson applies to museum basements as much as to fresh excavations. Hundreds of unopened mummies sit in storage drawers around the world, and each is now, in principle, a site waiting for the scanner rather than a closed case. The Oxyrhynchus fragment cost no new digging to find; it required only a better question asked of an object everyone had already dismissed.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. Why non-invasive imaging matters ii. How the mummy was studied without being unwrapped iii. Possible reasons for the unusual burial iv. What the find reveals about cultural interaction v. The history of the Book of the Dead vi. A warning about future expectations vii. How Homer's Iliad was composed

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What is unusual about the Oxyrhynchus mummy? A. It was buried with a Greek literary text instead of an Egyptian funerary text. B. It contained no papyrus at all. C. It was found in a previously unrecorded tomb. D. Its wrappings were made of Greek linen.

6. How did researchers discover the papyrus inside? A. They unwrapped the mummy immediately after excavation. B. They used multi-spectral imaging and X-ray scanning. C. A previous curator had left records describing it. D. The papyrus was visible through a tear in the linen.

7. Why is the choice of the "Catalogue of Ships" puzzling? A. It is the most famous section of the Iliad. B. It is a relatively technical, unemotional passage rather than a dramatic one. C. It was written in Latin rather than Greek. D. It has never been found on papyrus before.

8. What does the discovery suggest about Roman-period Egypt? A. Greek and Egyptian cultures remained entirely separate. B. Greek literary culture had penetrated traditional Egyptian burial practices. C. Most Egyptians had abandoned their native religion. D. Homer was primarily worshipped as a god.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Most Egyptian mummies contain a copy of the Book of the Dead.
10. The mummy was excavated in 2026.
11. The researchers are certain why the Iliad fragment was placed in the mummy.
12. The mummy was prepared using traditional Egyptian embalming methods.
13. Every unwrapped mummy now contains a Greek text.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The mummy from Tomb 65 contained a fragment of Homer's Iliad, making it the first known case of a (14) __________ text being incorporated into the (15) __________ process.

答案与解析

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