This volume contains the first editions of 55 Greek literary and documentary papyri. The theological texts include fragments of Genesis and Luke, both assignable to the third century. Pride of place among the new literary texts is given to a retelling of Egyptian mythology, in which Isis writes to Arianis, appealing for his help in locating the body of Osiris. Two others are philosophical (Peripatetic and Stoic). Among the extant classical texts, large fragments of Plato's Laches offer readings of particular interest. A paraphrase of Justinian's Digest shows a professor explaining the relationship between written law and custom in a mixture of Greek and Graeco-Latin. The documents include a group of ten private letters and an elaborate first-person account of a failed attempt to buy camels for the state.

The core of this volume is the biggest concentration of magical papyri published in some 25 years, giving a fascinating insight into approaches to averting and treating illnesses, and attracting a partner. Further material contains theological texts (Philo), extant classical texts (Menander, Theocritus, Euclid, Polybius, Plutarch), and a new classical text (Sophokles).

The publication of the Greek papyri from the excavations of Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt at ancient Oxyrhynchus in 1896/7 and from 1903 to 1906/7. Numbers 4968-5019 are included in this volume.

This volume adds to previously published early Christian texts four new papyri of the Gospel of John and also includes fragments of a lost play by Sophocles (Epigonoi), two prose works on Hellenistic historians and Hellenistic kings, a rhetorical exercise on speeches in Thucydides, and a lost novel with an Ionian setting. A further group of papyri of Iliad and related Homeric texts, including a paraphrase of Iliad I (its texts transmitted verbatim by at least two other papyri), scholia minora to Iliad I, and commentaries on Odyssey III and XV with scholarly credentials. Documentary texts include declarations of livestock, loans, leases, and other contracts. Finally it records publication of a group of drawings that appeared outside the series but assigns Oxyrhynchus publication numbers to them for the first time. Images of the drawings were prepared for and will be published in the volume Oxyrhynchus A City and its Texts (GRM 93) and Egyptian Archaeology 22.

The latest volume of papyri from Oxyrhynchus includes new texts of Greek drama (a tragic rhesis probably by Euripides, plot-summaries of two tragedies which may have some connection with the lost Hippolytos Kalyptomenos, an addition to Act II of Menander's Epitrepontes, a rhetorical exercise Enkomion of the Horse, a treatise on star-signs in Greek poets, etc.) and versions of known literary texts (all the remaining EES papyri with extracts of Hesiod's Theogony, Works and Days and Shield, whose interest lies in their omission or inclusion of verses suspected by ancient scholars and modern editors; also included are a fragment with Homeric Hymns and the first known papyrus of Batrachomyomachia). The third section of the volume contains three writing exercises and three pieces of erotic magic; and the fourth section documentary texts mainly of the fifth century AD chosen for their chronological and prosopographical interest, many providing the earliest or latest known dates for the use in Egypt of certain consulates for dating purposes. These texts illustrate the continuing flow of essential business: loans, supplies of wine, leases of land and houses and rooms, maintenance of irrigation machines and the transport of grain.