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Oxyrhynchus (; (ギリシア語:Ὀξύρρυγχος) ''Oxýrrhynkhos''; "sharp-nosed"; ancient Egyptian ''Pr-Medjed''; Coptic ''Pemdje''; modern Egyptian Arabic ''el-Bahnasa'') is a city in Upper Egypt, located about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo, in the governorate of Al Minya. It is also an archaeological site, considered one of the most important ever discovered. For the past century, the area around Oxyrhynchus has been continually excavated, yielding an enormous collection of papyrus texts dating from the time of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods of Egyptian history. Among the texts discovered at Oxyrhynchus are plays of Menander, fragments from the ''Gospel of Thomas,'' and fragments from Euclid's ''Elements''. ==History== Oxyrhynchus lies west of the main course of the Nile, on the Bahr Yussef (Canal of Joseph), a branch of the Nile that terminates in Lake Moeris and the Fayum oasis. In ancient Egyptian times, there was a city on the site called Per-Medjed, named after the medjed, a species of elephantfish of the Nile River worshipped there as the fish that ate the penis of Osiris. It was the capital of the 19th Upper Egyptian Nome. After the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, the city was reestablished as a Greek town, called Oxyrrhynkhoupolis (Οξυρρύνχου Πόλις - "town of the sharp-snouted fish"). In Hellenistic times, Oxyrhynchus was a prosperous regional capital, the third-largest city in Egypt. After Egypt was Christianized, it became famous for its many churches and monasteries.〔 It remained a prominent, though gradually declining, town in the Roman and Byzantine periods. After the Arab invasion of Egypt around 641, the canal system on which the town depended fell into disrepair, and Oxyrhynchus was abandoned. Today the town of el-Bahnasa occupies part of the ancient site. For more than 1,000 years, the inhabitants of Oxyrhynchus dumped garbage at a series of sites out in the desert sands beyond the town limits. The fact that the town was built on a canal rather than on the Nile itself was important, because this meant that the area did not flood every year with the rising of the river, as did the districts along the riverbank. When the canals dried up, the water table fell and never rose again. The area west of the Nile has virtually no rain, so the garbage dumps of Oxyrhynchus were gradually covered with sand and were forgotten for another 1,000 years. Because Egyptian society under the Greeks and Romans was governed bureaucratically, and because Oxyrhynchus was the capital of the 19th nome, the material at the Oxyrhynchus dumps included vast amounts of paper. Accounts, tax returns, census material, invoices, receipts, correspondence on administrative, military, religious, economic, and political matters, certificates and licenses of all kinds—all these were periodically cleaned out of government offices, put in wicker baskets, and dumped out in the desert. Private citizens added their own piles of unwanted paper. Because papyrus was expensive, paper was often reused: a document might have farm accounts on one side, and a student's text of Homer on the other. The ''Oxyrhynchus Papyri,'' therefore, contained a complete record of the life of the town, and of the civilizations and empires of which the town was a part. The town site of Oxyrhynchus itself has never been excavated, because the modern Egyptian town is built on top of it, but it is believed that the city had many public buildings, including a theatre with a capacity of 11,000 spectators, a hippodrome, four public baths, a gymnasium, and two small ports on the Bahr Yussef. It is also likely that there were military buildings, such as barracks, since the city supported a military garrison on several occasions during the Roman and Byzantine periods. During the Greek and Roman periods, Oxyrhynchus had temples to Serapis, Zeus-Amun, Hera-Isis, Atargatis-Bethnnis and Osiris. There were also Greek temples to Demeter, Dionysus, Hermes, and Apollo; as well as Roman temples to Jupiter Capitolinus and Mars. In the Christian era, Oxyrhynchus was the seat of a bishopric, and the modern town still has several ancient Coptic Christian churches. When Flinders Petrie visited Oxyrhynchus in 1922, he found remains of the colonnades and theatre. Now only part of a single column remains: everything else has been scavenged for building material for modern housing.〔Parsons, Peter (2007). ''City of the Sharp-nosed Fish: Greek Lives in Roman Egypt''. Orion, Plate 5. ISBN 978-0-297-64588-7.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Oxyrhynchus」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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