Sometime in the late first or early second century CE, a man named Nearchos wrote a letter on papyrus to his friend Heliodoros, describing a trip up the Nile to visit some of the most famous sacred sites in Roman Egypt.  The papyrus was catalogued by Kenyon and Bell in 1907 and is now in the British Museum (P. Lond. III 854). Scholars are divided as to how to read this epistolary text: as a genuine letter reporting news to a good friend? or as literary pastiche with no claim to truth, meant only to entertain its well-educated addressee? 

This talk sets out the terms of the debate, including proposed textual emendations and literary allusions to Herodotus' own Egyptian travels, and argues for a compelling compromise between the papyrus letter's documentary and fictional status.