Grenfell and Hunt’s house at Bahnasa (Oxyrhynchus): 1903?

The excavators were provided with the relative comfort of this mud-brick house, illustrated in photograph in the exhibition, as their base during the excavations; this is where the nightly work of sorting and packing the day’s finds would have gone on, to release the baskets for the workmen to use the next day. No doubt they also spent time here in preliminary decipherment of some of the papyri, all by the light of paraffin lamps.

A photograph also shows their cook’s tent in the foreground.

The Site