'If this date is confirmed, the tablet could be the oldest written record of Homer's
work ever discovered'
in Greece, a ministry statement said.
This was misreported as "Archaeologists may have discovered the oldest known extract of
Homer's epic poem."
FAKE NEWS indeed! Although the find itself is marvelous.
Here's an older fragmentary piece of the Odyssey on papyrus dating to 250 BC, half a millennium earlier!
It's hardly obscure, held as it is in the
collection at The
Met!
https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/09.182.50/This is the first early Ptolemaic fragment of the Odyssey ever discovered. It contains three lines from Book 20 that do not occur in the standard text preserved today and is a physical testimony to the fact that local variations of this famous work existed in the third century B.C.