Oxyrhynchus hymn
The Oxyrhynchus Papyrus XV 1786 is the oldest known manuscript of a Christian hymn, in which both the text and musical notes are included.
Origin and publication
This papyrus was excavated in 1918 in the Egyptian Oxyrhynchus on an ancient garbage dump and first published by Arthur Surridge Hunt and Henry Stuart Jones in 1922. It is a fragment of a scroll, and is kept in the papyrology Rooms Sackler Library in Oxford.
Content
The papyrus is 29.6 × 5 cm in size. On the front of a bill for grain from the first half of the 3rd century The back contains 5 lines of a hymn from the end of the 3rd century, of which the end is obtained. It can not figure out how long the hymn was originally and whether further verses followed up. The first line contains a big gap. Above the text the appropriate notes are written.