Oxyrhynchus

Oxyrhynchus, also known by its modern name Al-Bahnasa, is a city in Middle Egypt about 160 km south-southwest of Cairo in Minya Governorate, and an important archaeological site. Its Greek name means sharp-nosed, after a fish of the Nile. In ancient Egyptian times a city called Per-Medjed stood here and was the capital of the 19th Upper Egyptian nome. After Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC it was refounded as a Hellenistic town, and it became a prosperous regional capital, the third-largest city in Egypt. Since the late 19th century the area has been excavated almost continually, yielding an enormous collection of papyrus texts from the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Roman Egypt, the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 the canal system on which the town depended fell into disrepair and the ancient city was abandoned, and today the town of el Bahnasa occupies part of the ancient site.