Since the late 19th century, the area around Oxyrhynchus has been excavated almost continually, yielding an enormous collection of papyrus texts dating from the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Roman Egypt.

Oxyrhynchus lies west of the main course of the Nile on the Bahr Yussef, a branch that terminates in Lake Moeris and the Faiyum oasis.

In ancient Egyptian times, there was a city on the site called Per-Medjed,[4] named after the medjed, a species of elephantfish of the Nile worshipped there as the fish that ate the penis of Osiris.

[7] This uprising ultimately led to the near-total expulsion and annihilation of Jews from Egypt, with papyrological evidence of a festival commemorating this victory still observed in Oxyrhynchus eighty years later.

[12] The large number of fallen Muslim soldiers buried in this city was due to major battles against the Roman army and their fortifications in this area.

Al-Qa`qa` bin Amr, Hashem, Abu Ayyub al-Ansari and Uqba ibn Nafi Al-Fihri, the future conqueror of Maghreb, and went with two thousand of Persians convert who now fight under the caliphate, and raided the border of Barqa.

[22] There was also a particular mosque called Dome of Seven Maidens, which allegedly was built to honor seven Oxyrhynchus Coptic girls who defected and helped the Muslim armies under 'Amr ibn al-As and now venerated for their effort in the conquest of the city.

"[24] The classical author who has most benefited from the finds at Oxyrhynchus is the Athenian playwright Menander (342–291 BC), whose comedies were very popular in Hellenistic times and whose works are frequently found in papyrus fragments.

Menander's plays found in fragments at Oxyrhynchus include Misoumenos, Dis Exapaton, Epitrepontes, Karchedonios, Dyskolos and Kolax.

This shift in emphasis had made Oxyrhynchus, if anything, even more important, for the very ordinariness of most of its preserved documents makes them most valuable for modern scholars of social history.

[citation needed] A joint project with Brigham Young University using multi-spectral imaging technology has been extremely successful in recovering previously illegible writing.

Thus, researchers can find the optimum spectral portion for distinguishing ink from paper in order to display otherwise completely illegible papyri.

[29] On June 21, 2005, the Times Literary Supplement published the text and translation of a newly reconstructed poem by Sappho,[30] together with discussion by Martin L.

[33] In May 2020, an Egyptian-Catalan archaeological mission headed by Esther Pons and Maite Mascort revealed a unique cemetery consisting of one room built with glazed limestone dating back to the 26th Dynasty (so-called the El-Sawi era).

[34][35][36] In February 2023, 16 individual tombs and 6 funerary complex from the Persian, Roman and Coptic periods and 2 deposited frogs were discovered by the Egyptian-Spanish archaeological mission.

[20] In March 2020, archeological researchers from the Antiquities Inspection of Al-Bahnasa District located archaeological evidence of the encampment of Khalid ibn al-Walid and 10,000 soldiers under him, including 70 veterans of the Battle of Badr.