Derveni Papyrus

Anonymous / tradition · c. 5th century BC (papyrus itself buried c. 320s BC) · Derveni (Greece) · philosophy

One of the oldest surviving Greek papyri, though not certainly the single oldest, preserves an anonymous allegorical commentary - composed elsewhere and only later carried to the funeral pyre near Thessaloniki where it was recovered in 1962 - that reads an Orphic theogony poem through Presocratic natural philosophy.