Papyrus
I was in our garden last week checking some tall papyrus plants we have growing in a sunken bath there. We had planted it there after clearing it from our dam. Although I had planted only a few roots of papyrus ten years earlier, it had grown so high and so thick that none of our ducks could push their way through the strong stalks. After we cleared out tons of papyrus, we replanted some of it in the sunken bath where it could not spread.
The English word “paper” is derived from the word “papyrus”, an Egyptian word. About 4000 BC Egyptian scholars realized they needed a more flexible and transportable medium on which to record information, other than the stone monuments and clay tablets then in use. However, there were not many options. But in the delta area of the Nile, there were vast forests of papyrus that could be easily harvested and transported. Once its utility was discovered it was used for recording information for 5000 years.
It was prepared by the pith of the stalks being sliced into long even slices, which were pounded on a flat stone until the sugars and starches created a bonding agent. Eventually these sheets were placed between heavy flat stones and dried for a week. They were then scraped and rubbed to smooth and polish the surface. A number of sheets would be sewn together lengthwise, attached to a round stick, and rolled to form a scroll. Smaller sheets were stitched and glued along one side to make a bound book called a codex while single sheets were used for accounts, bills of lading, correspondence, laws, religious rites, magic spells, and regulations of all kinds.
I have seen thousands of pages of papyrus, and many of these I have still been able to read despite their age. Because the sere Egyptian climate did not allow papyrus to rot, an enormous amount of documents were still in one piece when the 19th century archaeologists shipped them off to their museums and universities. In the college libraries at Oxford University there are still large wooden boxes of papyrii that have never been opened. Egyptian tombs, crocodile skins, cats and dogs and the like, were often stuffed with papyrii, creating a goldmine of information for the archaeologists and historians of our time who have found them.
One other use of papyrii was to paste papyrii all over the mummified body of a corpse. This process, called cartonnage, actually preserved pre-used papyrus including accounts, music, religious texts, and literature pasted one on top of the other, and then the outside of the last layer was painted with bright colours.
It is estimated that some 400,000 papyrii are preserved in museums worldwide, as well as hundreds of thousands of fragments. And what a wonderful insight into Egyptian culture and history they have given us!