ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1231

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 1231 is a very old piece of paper that has some writing on it. It was found in a place called Oxyrhynchus in Egypt a very long time ago. It's special because it has some important information written on it that teaches us about things people did a long time ago.

The paper is really, really old and fragile. Imagine if you had a really old piece of paper that your great-great-great-grandparents wrote on, and you had to be super careful with it so it wouldn't rip or tear. That's how the people who take care of this paper feel. They have to handle it very gently.

The writing on the paper is in a language that people don't speak anymore, and in a different way of writing that people don't use anymore. It's like if you found a note your great-great-great-grandparents wrote to each other, but they wrote it in a secret code you don't know how to read. Someone has to be very smart and know a lot of things about languages to try to read this paper.

But luckily, some really smart people were able to translate some of the writing on the paper, and they found out that it tells us about some important things that people did a long time ago, like how they wrote letters to each other and how they used an important tool called a calendar.

Even though this paper is old and hard to read, it helped us learn more about what life was like a really long time ago. That's why it's important to take care of old things and try to figure out what they mean, because they can teach us a lot about history.