Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Egyptian mummies were frequently embalmed using repurposed bits of papyrus with religious texts and other spiritual passages written on it. Amid the ruins of an ancient city roughly 120 miles south of Cairo, archaeologists have identified the first Greco-Roman papyrus fragment used in burial rites. It’s no obscure piece of writing, either. According to researchers at the University of Barcelona, a 1,600-year-old mummy includes a passage from Homer’s famous epic, The Iliad. The mummy was found at Oxyrhynchus, a town on the banks of a Nile River branch called Bahr Yussef. By 400 CE, the vital urban locale was heavily influenced by Greco-Roman culture—a fact documented in over two centuries of archaeological excavations. “Since the late 19th century, a huge number of papyri have been discovered at Oxyrhynchus, including Greek literary texts of great importance,” Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, a University of Barcelona philologist and Oxyrhynchus project director, said in a statement. This isn’t the first time researchers noted Greek papyri …