A Papyrus Long Overlooked

Sitting unrecognised in the archives of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology (IFAO) in Cairo, a fragment of papyrus roughly two thousand years old had been waiting for the right reader. That reader turned out to be Nathan Carlig, a papyrologist at the University of Liège, who identified the document — catalogued as P.Fouad inv. 218 — as containing thirty previously unknown verses from the Physica, the great philosophical poem of the pre-Socratic thinker Empedocles of Agrigentum (5th century BCE).

The discovery is significant on its own terms. Until now, everything we knew about Empedocles came through indirect channels: quotations embedded in Plato, paraphrases in Aristotle, allusions in Plutarch. These sources are invaluable, but they inevitably filter and reshape what they transmit. P.Fouad inv. 218 offers something different — direct access to Empedocles’ own words, without the mediation of later interpreters.

But the fragment’s significance deepens considerably once you understand its relationship to another papyrus, one already well known to scholars: the so-called Strasbourg Empedocles.

The Strasbourg Papyrus: A Landmark of 1999

The Strasbourg papyrus (P.Strasb. Gr. inv. 1665–1666) made headlines in the world of classical studies when it was published in 1999. Dating to the end of the 1st century CE, it was the first direct textual testimony ever found for the Physica — Empedocles’ account of the natural world, composed in hexameter verse. Before that publication, no one had ever read a line of Empedocles in manuscript form. The Strasbourg fragments offered new verses and fresh insight into the philosopher’s conception of the cosmic cycle.

For over two decades, those fragments stood alone as the sole surviving manuscript witness to the poem.

One Scroll, Two Cities

This is where Carlig’s identification of P.Fouad inv. 218 becomes especially compelling. The Cairo and Strasbourg papyri are not two independent manuscript traditions. They are, according to Carlig, fragments of the same ancient scroll.

At some point in antiquity, a single papyrus roll containing a copy of the Physica was damaged, dispersed, or divided. Parts of it eventually made their way to Strasbourg; another section ended up in the IFAO archive in Cairo. For more than a century, neither fragment was recognised for what it was in relation to the other.

The material and palaeographic evidence — the physical characteristics of the papyrus, the scribal hand, and crucially the poetic content — all converge to support the conclusion that both fragments derive from the same original manuscript. Together, they constitute the only known copy of Empedocles’ Physica.

What the Cairo Fragment Contains

The thirty verses in P.Fouad inv. 218 cover ground not found in the Strasbourg material. Where the Strasbourg fragments shed light on Empedocles’ cosmology and the cosmic cycle, the Cairo papyrus deals with his theory of effluences (aporrhoai) and its application to sensory perception, particularly vision.

Empedocles held that objects continuously emit streams of fine particles, and that perception occurs when these particles pass through corresponding pores in the sense organs — a strikingly materialist account of how we come to know the world. The newly recovered verses give us Empedocles articulating this theory in his own words for the first time.

The implications for the history of philosophy are considerable. Analysis of the text has revealed:

  • A probable direct source for a passage in Plutarch (2nd century CE)
  • Conceptual parallels with a dialogue by Plato and a text by Theophrastus, disciple of Aristotle (both 4th century BCE)
  • Previously unnoticed echoes in the comic poet Aristophanes and the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius
  • Evidence that Empedocles may be considered a forerunner of the atomists, in particular Democritus of Abdera

The Edition

The editio princeps — the first critical edition, translation, and commentary — has been published as:

Carlig, N., Martin, A., & Primavesi, O. (2025). L’Empédocle du Caire (P.Fouad inv. 218). Introduction, texte, commentaire. Papyrologica Bruxellensia, 44. Brussels: Association Égyptologique Reine Élisabeth.

The volume is available via the University of Liège open repository at hdl.handle.net/2268/329390.

A Second Renaissance

Carlig has invoked a phrase coined by the papyrologist Peter Parsons to describe what finds like this one represent: a second Renaissance. Just as humanist scholars of the 15th and 16th centuries scoured European monasteries and libraries to recover lost classical texts, modern papyrologists comb archives in Cairo, Oxford, and elsewhere, recovering voices long thought silent.

P.Fouad inv. 218 and the Strasbourg papyrus, read together as the two surviving fragments of a single ancient scroll, are a vivid demonstration of what that recovery can look like — two pieces of one puzzle, separated for two millennia, finally reunited on the page.