The plants of Nile arise, a wood without leaves or branches, a harvest of the waters, the fair tresses of the marshes, plants full of emptiness, spongy, thirsty, having all their strength in their outer rind, tall and light, the fairest fruit of a foul inundation.
—Cassiodorus
When we think of modern paper manufacturing today, our thoughts turn to pine. Other plants such as eucalyptus or bamboo, or material such as linen or rag in the case of fine paper, are used in the paper manufacturing process. But the bulk of paper pulp produced in the world today is still derived from softwood pulp made from pine. A walk in a pine forest slated for paper production is a pleasant experience, providing a needle-carpeted, open, resin-scented environment, an environment in which it is even possible to camp or just sit and contemplate.
Not so with papyrus. A good example of how ugly an experience it can be was seen during the 1862 Baker expedition that went right through the enormous papyrus swamp of southern Sudan. Florence and Samuel Baker eventually carved a path through the swamp and achieved their goal: locating the exact course of the White Nile as it emerged from Lake Albert. Later known as Sir Samuel and Lady Florence, they never forgot their first encounter with papyrus. The swamp region they traversed, the Sudd, has remained virtually untouched since the day they left it; it is still a very difficult place to get around in.
A papyrus swamp in Africa.
In such a swamp, papyrus begins its growth on wet mud at the waters’ edge where young rhizomes tend to grow over older ones; the whole mass of papyrus, along with a layer of peat, then spreads out over water with the plants rooted in a floating mat. This is possible because the plant is equipped with many air spaces in the stems that provide the necessary buoyancy. On large African lakes or along deep rivers, it will form substantial floating mats, with stems so tall (fifteen feet or more) that it is impossible to look over them unless on the deck of a steamer. Without a map, channel, or guide, it would be a difficult job to fight your way through a papyrus swamp; consequently very few people in the Western world really know what a normal papyrus plant looks like.
The morphology of papyrus is straightforward and typical for a sedge; each upright stem, or “culm,” appears and grows upward from the tip of a horizontal stem, or rhizome. The upright stem expands at its top and spreads out into a large tuft of slim, flowering branches or umbels. The base of the stem is closely sheathed in scale leaves, and the umbel at the top of the stem is enclosed in scale-like bracts prior to opening. The stem, which is the part most often used in making boats, baskets, roof thatch, rope, paper, and other crafts, is triangular in cross-section, a distinctive feature that sets the sedges apart from grasses. Collectively, swamp grasses, grass-like plants, sedges, and rushes are all called reeds, and they are among the fastest growing vascular plant species. For example, a modern study of papyrus by a team of researchers on Lake Naivasha in Kenya showed that papyrus stems take only about six months to reach maturity and nine to twelve months to complete their life cycle.1 The same study showed that papyrus swamps selectively harvested on a twelve-month cycle regenerate completely within the year.2 In the process, the plant produces on average twenty-two tons of dry matter per acre annually, which ranks it among the highest and fastest producing ecosystems on earth. Reed marshes, for example, those made up of the grass Phragmites, or tropical seagrass beds, produce only twelve to sixteen tons per acre in comparison.
During the time when ancient Egyptian papyrus swamps were common in the delta and in the backwater or swampy regions along the Nile River, the management of swamp plantations in Egypt was a serious business. And that seems appropriate because Egypt during the reign of the Ptolemies was well-managed and economically strong; so much so that Rome was dying to get its hands on it. It is said that the famously rich kingdom was so high a prize that senators and emperors vied with one another to be the first to conquer it. Ptolemy II (known as Philadelphus 283–246 B.C.), even though he had two of his half-brothers murdered and married his own sister, was a superb manager, organizer, and leader. It is assumed that he would have taken an active interest in existing papyrus plantations and there is ample proof that he was mindful of the needs of the paper industry, especially any trade in book scrolls in Alexandria. Under his reign, the plantations, though perhaps not directly owned and operated by the state, would be carefully supervised by government agents.
Collecting papyrus stems for papermaking in a modern tourist plantation. City of Cairo in the background.
The Romans later improved on what he had begun, and in their time carried forward the Greek distinction between wild, or natural, swamps called drymoi (singular drymos), as opposed to the helos papyrikon, or papyrus plantation.
Among the drymoi a large one in Fayum particularly stands out, the Great Swamp mentioned by Lewis. Such a swamp would be used to supply village craftsmen, as well as commercial vendors and manufacturers with rope, thatch, canoes, skiffs, and mats. In addition, once Alexandria had developed into a thriving capital city, it, along with other Greek-influenced cities upriver and in Fayum, had baths that were modified to use straw and reeds,3 an arrangement used elsewhere by the Romans in North Africa, where wood fuel was not easy to come by. The baths were in constant need of fuel, a need that grew even larger with time, so that large quantities of dry reeds were consumed daily.
Although other reeds from other marshes and swamps were available in the Egyptian wetlands, more than likely the easiest and most reliable source of reed would be dried papyrus stems from the drymoi where papyrus stems could be harvested and dried in sufficient quantities.
Some historians found it difficult to believe that a single plant species could deliver the quantities needed. In the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, an item appeared written by E. M. T.—Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, the first director of the British Museum. He was also the friend and mentor of Wallis Budge. He wrote, “it seems hardly credible that the Cyperus papyrus could have sufficed for the many uses to which it is said to have been applied and we may conclude that several plants of the genus Cyperus were comprehended . . .” He was writing at a time (after 1000 A.D.) when papyrus had disappeared from Egypt and well before the modern studies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that show the enormous rate of production that the plant is capable of. We now know that no other species was needed, papyrus was more than capable of providing for the needs of the people, as well as the bath-fire stokers and the papermakers on its own.
As time went on, there would be more and more pressure placed on these swamps even though they were being cultivated as cash crops. Later, with an increase in population and more demand for food crops, farmers were allowed to encroach on the wetlands and the papyrus swamps. At that point, papermakers were probably told to use the harvested stems more efficiently in order to meet production levels. This extended the life of the plant, but did not prevent its eventual demise, which happened in the last part of the first millennium A.D., when the rag paper of Arab manufacture came into its own and papyrus swamps were converted to agricultural land.