Most of the papyri found seem to consist mainly of public and private documents: codes, edicts, registers, official correspondence, census-returns, tax-assessments, petitions, court-records, sales, leases, wills, bills, accounts, inventories, horoscopes, and private letters.
Only an estimated 10% are literary in nature. The manuscripts date from the time of the Ptolemaic (3rd century BC) and Roman periods of Egyptian history (from 32 BC to the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 640 AD). The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a group of manuscripts discovered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by papyrologists Bernard Pyne Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt at an ancient rubbish dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt ( 28☃2′N 30☄0′E / 28.533°N 30.667☎ / 28.533 30.667, modern el-Bahnasa).
Class=notpageimage| Site where the Oxyrhynchus Papyri were discovered Excavations at Oxyrhynchus 1, c.
