Renais­sance Europe admired ancient Rome, ancient Rome admired ancient Greece, and ancient Greece admired ancient Egypt. But the admi­ra­tion could actu­al­ly go both ways in that last case, since the two civ­i­liza­tions’ peri­ods of exis­tence over­lapped. The Greeks made no secret of their regard for Egypt as a far deep­er well of knowl­edge and wis­dom (indeed, much of what we know about ancient Egypt today comes from Greek records), but archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence shows that the Egyp­tians, in turn, were hard­ly dis­mis­sive of Greek accom­plish­ment. Many Hel­lenic texts have been dis­cov­ered in Egypt­ian bur­ial sites, but only recent­ly has a Greek lit­er­ary work turned up pack­aged with a mum­my — and not just any lit­er­ary work, but pages from Home­r’s Ili­ad. Unearthed from a 1,600-year-old Roman-era tomb in the Egypt­ian town of Al Bah­nasa, the frag­ment con­tains lines from Book 2’s epic “cat­a­logue of ships,” which lists all the ves­sels the Achaean army sends off to Troy. It dates from an era in ancient Egypt, cen­turies after the reign of the Greek-descend­ed Cleopa­tra, when “Greek lit­er­ary …