22 Lost Cities Underwater, On Land, and in Legend

Beneath Egypt’s sand, scholars found what amounts to a paper time machine. In the late nineteenth century, excavators at Oxyrhynchus uncovered thousands of papyri. They found letters, plays, contracts, and some of the oldest Christian texts known.

The city itself eroded, but its words survived, offering glimpses of how ordinary people lived, argued, and dreamed. Each scrap reads like a whisper from someone who never thought history would care.