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UK. You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and today I'm

joined by Robert Choffey, who teaches at Bard College in New York State. His book, Egypt, Ethiopia,

and the Greek novel was published earlier this year, and he has a piece in the latest issue of the

LRB on a recent remarkable

paparological find in Egypt. Hello, Roberts and thank you for talking with me today.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. So it's hard to know where or when to

begin, I suppose, and whether to work forwards or backwards when telling the story of this papyrus.

But let's let's start with the physical unearthing of it.

Where was it found and who found it?

So the papyrus was found in the ancient city of Philadelphia.

If you're an American, Philadelphia is a city in Pennsylvania.

But in fact, before that, there was one in Egypt, just two hours south of Cairo.

And there's an extraordinary project going on there to work in the cemetery of Philadelphia,

which really hasn't been excavated.

The city itself has been and continues to be.

And an archaeologist named Heba Adley was excavating two Novembers ago, so November

2022, in what looked like an otherwise sort of normal tomb

...