1,700-year-old fragment of Homer's Odyssey found in Utrecht University library

An ancient piece of the Odyssey from 1700 years ago has been found at Utrecht University. The piece of parchment had been sitting completely undetected in the university’s library for decades, RTV Utrecht reported.

It had been originally cataloged as an unremarkable, damaged 7th-century text. But Dr. Luc de Kreij, a lecturer in Ancient Greek, was combing through a collection of Egyptian manuscripts two years ago when he noticed very small, precise Greek letters on a tiny piece of parchment.

The parchment is extremely small, measuring 6.6 cm by 7.7 cm, roughly the size of a standard playing card. It is discolored and full of severe water stains.

It dates back to the 3rd or 4th century AD. Experts believe it was torn from an ancient "codex,” a pocketbook-sized edition produced in Egypt. The university purchased it in the mid-20th century from the heirs of German scholar Carl Schmidt as part of a batch of early Christian manuscripts. Because it was nestled among Egyptian texts written in the Greek alphabet, it went unnoticed for decades.

The tiny fragment contains a handful of verses from Book 12 of Homer's book. It describes Odysseus’s men disobeying his warnings by killing and eating the sacred cattle of Helios, the sun god. This then forces the god Zeus to send a catastrophic storm that destroys Odysseus's fleet and wipes out his entire army.

While the fragment was identified years ago, Utrecht University purposefully publicized the discovery to tie into pop culture. Christopher Nolan’s feature film adaptation, The Odyssey, has been a box-office hit. The university used the resurgence of global interest in Homer's journey to highlight their own rare piece of literary history.