Taking on the World—and Leaving a Legacy
A wonderful product in truth is this wherewith ingenious Memphis has supplied all the offices in the world.
—Cassiodorus
What was the Roman statesman, Cassiodorus thinking about when he wrote that? The first thing that comes to mind was that he was just stating the obvious that in those ancient days all offices of the world were supplied with paper from Memphis, the once-capital of Egypt. In modern times this is the equivalent of saying that the city of St. Louis, a city on the banks of a mighty river, and surrounding farms had won the monopoly of supplying paper to the world for the next four thousand years! An eye-opener of a statement, if it were true, and a reason for those looking for a financial jackpot to head to that city and make as much inroad as they could into the local paper factories, as well as nearby farms, shipping and businesses.
In Cassiodorus’s time, instead of the millions of sheets of letter- and legal-sized bond paper found in the commercial Western world, ancient nations were awash in sheets, rolls, and books of papyrus paper. And it could not have escaped the notice of businessmen of his day that this commodity was made exclusively from a plant that grew only in Egypt using a process that was strictly controlled by the producers. This didn’t bother Cassiodorus one bit because in his time, his fellow Romans were the rulers of Egypt and, thus, the owners of the monopoly. However, within one hundred years of his lifetime all that would change, bringing the First Papyrus Era to an end. During those four thousand years, development and paper production went hand in hand as we will see in a brief overview of Egyptian history as follows.
In the Protodynastic Period in Egypt, while papyrus paper was being born, or maybe even because of it, development of the earliest known hieroglyphic writing was in progress. This was Egypt’s Bronze Age (ca. 3200 B.C.) when early settlers along the Nile were bent on leaving behind a record along the terraces of the Nile and in the oases. Here they were still busy carving into rock faces in order to record simple stories including the one that the Nile meant life and the desert death. They perhaps had little faith in the new medium even though temple priests and the more advanced settlers swore by it.
With the rise of the First and Second Dynasties in the Old Kingdom (2755–2255 B.C.) funeral practices for the elite centered around the construction of mastabas, which later became models for subsequent step pyramids. Papyrus paper by then had become an essential component of life among the royals who set up shop in the new capital of Egypt that rose in Memphis, where Djoser established his court and ordered the construction of the first pyramid in the nearby necropolis of Saqqara. The Great Pyramids followed as papyrus paper was used by the priests and other officials to record all aspects of state and temple functions as well as the delivery of materials to these massive projects that went forward during this Age of Pyramids.
Egyptians worshiped Pharaoh as a god and, believing that he ensured the annual flooding of the Nile that was necessary for their crops, fell in line with his wishes when he decided to create a centralized government. From this came the extensive powers that he needed to organize and feed the pyramid builders, as well as to provide for the support of a very large crew of specialists, including engineers, painters, mathematicians and priests.
The rising domestic market for ebony, ivory, myrrh, frankincense, copper, and cedar compelled the ancient Egyptians to navigate the open seas. Papyrus paper was a useful tool in keeping track of this expansion, it also provided income as a trade item; it joined gold, grain, papyrus rope and linen in Egypt’s expanding list of trade goods.
In its last years the Old Kingdom ended in chaos perhaps brought down by droughts, low river levels, and starvation, once again proving that life could be mean even in a paradise on earth.
After the fall of the Old Kingdom came the rise of the Middle Kingdom and mummies found decorated with magical spells that were once exclusive to the pyramids of the kings. From this point through to the beginning of the Thirteenth Dynasty (2030–1650 B.C.) the delta evolved into the major center of papermaking.
The Seventeenth Dynasty was to prove the salvation of Egypt and would eventually lead to the war of liberation that drove invaders of that period (the Hyksos) back into Asia. In addition to being the commercial and bureaucratic medium of this period, papyrus now became the preeminent literary and historical medium and helped usher in the Egyptian Age of Classical Literature.
Thereafter, from a civilization that was already the product of almost two millennia, the New Kingdom arose like a lotus from the mud. During this period Egypt attained its greatest territorial extent. It expanded far south into Nubia and held wide territories in the Near East. Egyptian armies fought Hittite armies for control of modern-day Syria. This was a time of great wealth and power for Egypt. Some of the most important and best-known pharaohs ruled it and provided proof that Western Civilization was possible. By then Egyptian culture, customs, art expression, architecture and social structure, all closely tied to religion, blossomed into a way of life that remained remarkably stable, changing little over thousands of years.
It was also an age of ascendancy of the written word. Oral tradition using the medium of speech had allowed communication and interpretation of the general meaning of thoughts and ideas, which were passed forward as the essence of history, but paper recorded the exact words and true meaning. Proof of this lay in the fact that by popular demand the Book of the Dead on papyrus paper became a commercial success. A great trust in papyrus paper had developed among wealthy people who needed a recorded testimony and a passport in order to attain everlasting life. And their trust was not misplaced, since, as Professor Shaw noted, the ease and convenience of paper to convey information was an overpowering argument for its use. It alone allowed a balance between the horizontal social media and the power of vertical, institutional society, represented by the magnificent temple complexes at Abydos, Karnak, Abu Simbel, and Luxor. This was, after all, the Age of Magnificent Pharaohs, which featured such great figures as Queen Hatshepsut, Thutmose III (“the Napoleon of Egypt”), Amenhotep III, Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV), his wife Nefertiti, Ramesses I, his son Seti I, and Ramesses II (“the Great”).
With the rise of Thebes and the New Kingdom (1550–1069 B.C.) came the first real, large increase in production of paper for export. In this respect, the Phoenician city of Byblos was important as it served as a center for the export of paper from Egypt to Greece. In fact, the Greek word for papyrus paper, byblos, may have come from the city’s name. During the Old Kingdom, Byblos was virtually an Egyptian colony, a relationship reflected in the oldest Egyptian word for an oceangoing boat, which was “Byblos ship.”
From there, papyrus paper imports fed the developing needs of the early Greek, Arab, Syrian, Hebrew, and Roman empires. Egyptian contact with Byblos peaked during the Nineteenth Dynasty, only to decline during the Twentieth and Twenty-first Dynasties when Byblos ceased being a colony. This coincided with the end of the New Kingdom by which time Egypt was exhausted and its treasury depleted.
A gradual decline of the Egyptian Empire followed Ramesses III’s death. Now came endless bickering, a series of droughts, low levels of the Nile, famine, civil unrest, and official corruption. The power of the last pharaoh of this period, Ramesses XI, grew so weak that in the south Theban High Priests of Amun became the effective de facto rulers of Upper Egypt. The country was once again split into two parts making it an easier task for the takeover by the Libyan kings of the Twenty-second Dynasty.
Libyan. Assyrian, and Nubian rule (945–525 B.C.) was followed by the Persians who had already taken Babylon. Egypt was no match for the Persian king Cambyses who now assumed the formal title of pharaoh. Persians continued to dominate Egypt until 332 B.C. when Alexander the Great was welcomed by the Egyptians as a deliverer.
Following Alexander’s death in Babylon, Ptolemy took the title of pharaoh and founded the dynasty that was to rule Egypt for nearly 300 years until the Roman conquest of 30 B.C. During the Ptolemy’s reign, a Hellenistic culture was introduced that thrived in Egypt well after the Muslim conquest in later years. Influenced by the great thinkers of ancient Greece the Ptolemies set about making Alexandria the intellectual capital of the world, accomplishing their goal with the aid of the Great Library stocked with hundreds of thousands of papyrus paper scrolls.
Roman rule continued from 30 B.C. until about 325 A.D. when Christian Romans emerged and a Byzantine period flourished until 640 A.D. After which the Saracens invaded Egypt and established Arab rule.
During all that time paper exports continued as the overseas markets grew and paper became essential for growth and development throughout the Western world. Trade in papyrus paper reached another peak during the advent and development of Chinese pulp paper, since papyrus paper was still a valuable export during this period.
Arab control of Egypt as well as the Middle East and southern Europe made it easier for the Arabs to develop and promote rag pulp paper throughout their empire and beyond, eventually leading to a large market for cheaper paper. The decline of papyrus plantations and swamps followed, and a drop off in papyrus-paper production resulted as the use of pulp paper rose during the Byzantine Empire (324–1453 A.D.)
Through all that time, papyrus paper was especially useful in the Western world of business where it was put to good use on the large estates during the Ptolemaic and Roman eras. We see this in the documents discovered from a site near the ancient Egyptian town of Philadelphia. The discovery happened during the winter of 1914 when villagers in Kom el-Kharaba in the Fayum region found a cache of about 2,000 ancient documents, now known as the papyri that make up the Zenon Archives, named after Zenon, the overseer of a large estate belonging to Apollonios, an important financial advisor to Ptolemy II.1 Sometime around 258 B.C. Zenon, as private secretary, received individuals, managed the household and estates, and looked after the archives of his patron.
The large number of documents found in this cache provided a picture of life both in and out of government in the early Ptolemaic period. Within the archives were letters, appeals for help, reports, accounts, and a few works of art including two epigrams commemorating a hunting dog who died from wounds while saving Zenon from an attack by a wild boar. Zenon retired in 249 B.C. and the farms and holdings of the estate continued operation under other overseers.
The size of the operation can be judged by the amount of papyrus paper used. One report tells us that 454 rolls of papyrus were used by his office in the course of just thirty-three days. At that rate of use, fourteen rolls daily, business must have been clipping along. Papyrus paper was therefore ordered in quantity to meet the need, which created the usual problems of supply and demand.2
Zenon,
Greetings. I suffered anxiety when I heard of your long protracted illness, but now I am delighted to hear that you are convalescent and already on the point of recovery. I myself am well . . . 400 drachmae in silver have been paid . . . for the papyrus rolls which are being manufactured in Tanis for Apollonios. Take note then that these affairs have been settled thus. And please write yourself if ever you need anything here.
Promethion.3
And, what happens when things go wrong?
Zenon,
Greetings. We hear that the boat has sailed past with the papyrus rolls on board! Will you kindly send us the ten rolls which Apollonios ordered to be given us? Give them to the bearer of this letter, in order that we may not be unduly behindhand. Farewell,
Dionysodoros.4
By now even those using clay tablets and the cuneiform script of the Fertile Crescent had adapted to papyrus paper, which they imported from Egypt. It is said that this need to change to pen and ink and papyrus was undoubtedly a factor in the Phoenicians’ development of their alphabet, one of the forerunners of Greek and Latin characters. As to the plant used to make the paper, Cyperus papyrus, the swamps along the Nile were a valuable commodity protected by royal mandate, fed and nurtured by the seasonal inundation of the Nile with its nutrient-rich waters.
Even Shirley Hazzard, the best-selling novelist and writer, found this key role played by papyrus in ancient times extraordinary. In May of 1983, in Naples, Italy, she covered the Seventeenth International Congress of Papyrology as a “Far-Flung Correspondent” for the New Yorker. Here she tells us that, “failure of the Egyptian papyrus crop could mean to the Roman world a paralysis of commerce and affairs of state, and suspension of work for innumerable scribes who carried on the enormous labor of transcription.”
Papyrus paper would eventually be replaced and the swamplands on the Nile would later be drained, plowed up, and cultivated so that in the time of Napoleon papyrus had disappeared from Egypt. But the plant would continue to grow on in remote places in Africa, just as papyrus paper would live on in the minds and ways of human beings. Why? Because it was the first paper put to such wide use, and it made people in the West accustomed to being able to write things down easily, whether it was household accounts, a shopping list, or government records, as well as books and poetry, etc. Once people got used to being able to record and transmit information so easily, the medium might change, parchment or pulp paper might come or go, but this habit and expectation of writing things down had become a hallmark of civilized life. Thanks to papyrus, humans were never going to revert to stone or clay tablets again for the transcription of the written word.
Many of the early papyrus scrolls were memorials to the skills, patience, and dedication of artisans who knew the value of good papyrus paper when they saw it. The fact that many papyri survived means that papyrus paper, whether freshly made or old, is quite durable if kept under the right conditions.5 One roll in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin is over 3,000 years old and could still be rolled and unrolled by Wilhelm Schubart who was curator from 1912 to 1937, without the slightest danger to the material.6 If kept under reasonably dry conditions, it lasts for a very long time, but, once exposed to humid air, papyrus paper becomes perishable and a great deal of effort must then be made to preserve it from destruction by insects, fungi, bacteria, light, and air.7
Although most ancient Egyptians were illiterate, many benefited from the manufacture of papyrus paper during the time when Egypt was papermaker to the world. Not only did it provide jobs, it also served a higher purpose as pointed out in the first century A.D. by Pliny the Elder, who said papyrus was also the guardian of our immortality. The thread of history, so often threatened by catastrophic events, was kept whole and intact by saving the literature, thoughts and business transactions transcribed from earlier ages.
With the rise of the Greek state and later Roman Empire, the spread of papyrus paper reached its pinnacle. In retrospect, without realizing it, Cassiodorus’s earlier statement about all the offices of the world described a benchmark that was about to be passed in the history of the world. At the time he was writing, papyrus paper was being replaced by parchment in Europe, which, made from local animal skins, did not have to be imported from quite so far. Five hundred years after him both parchment and papyrus would gradually be replaced by laid or rag paper, the forerunner of modern paper.
Laid paper, or linen or rag paper as it is called, was introduced to the world by Arab traders, who knew a good thing when they saw it. They were quick to realize that unlike papyrus paper, pulp paper did not depend on any special plant material. It could be made out of any fibrous material at hand. At first they used mulberry tree bark, flax, or rags, but it was evident that paper could be made out of a large assortment of plant or cloth materials.
What would have happened if rag paper had been introduced in the early days of history? Marvin Meyers, professor of Bible and Christian studies at Chapman University in California and an expert on early Gnostic bibles, made the interesting point that because papyrus is a durable writing surface, if the famous codices found at Nag Hammadi had been written in the third and fourth centuries on pulp paper instead of papyrus, the texts would have disintegrated into dust long ago. On the other hand, the arrival of pulp paper in later days was fortuitous because it was available during the period when the printing press was developed. Its porous nature allowed it to readily take up the special ink designed for printing presses while papyrus did not. Parchment, though still in use, was phased out as it was now too expensive, and so the choice was made and the four-thousand-year papyrus monopoly was broken. But laid and rag paper was able to supplant papyrus paper thanks, in large part, to the paper trade and industry framework that papyrus paper had initially created.
The paper trade in ancient times grew over many centuries. The scale of production gradually rose from nothing to thousands of rolls annually prior to the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt (1400 B.C.). Then at the time of Roman conquest (48 B.C.) production grew to millions of rolls.
Leila Avrin suggests that papyrus paper could have been introduced first to the Greek islands as early as the eleventh or ninth century B.C. when the Phoenicians first introduced the alphabet. We know from The Story of Wenamun, a text written in 1200 B.C., that Egypt exported papyrus through Byblos, but it was not until after 750 B.C. that Greek expansion, trade, and colonization flourished. Thus, Avrin felt that the late eighth century B.C. would be a more realistic date for the first large-scale, practical use of papyrus in the Greek world.
From then on papyrus was known to be one of the more important Mediterranean trade items, and it would have been quite common in Greece by the early seventh century B.C., as by then the Greeks had established their own colony in Egypt at Naucratis on the Canopic branch of the Nile river, forty-fives miles from the open sea. It was the first and, for much of its early history, the only permanent Greek colony in Egypt. Later, during the Ptolemaic period the Fayum region (Maps 1 and 2) became a popular place for Greeks who made up as much as 30 percent of the population there.
Throughout all of this, the papyrus cartel stood to make a great deal of money, especially as they kept the process secret, which they did until Pliny spilled the beans. Though they continued to do well after that, the market shifted slightly after the time of Constantine (330 A.D.) but continued strong until the tenth century.
For production on such a mammoth scale—amounting, beyond doubt, to millions of rolls per annum—the papyrus industry must have been one of the biggest employers of manpower in Egypt, perhaps second only to food production. Thousands of workers would be needed, some of them highly specialized, for the different branches of the industry: cultivating and harvesting the plant, transporting the raw material to the factory, fabrication, sale, and shipment of the finished product. (Naphtali Lewis, 1974)
Under the Ptolemies as well as the Romans, information gathering was the norm; the intention was to better manage food production and industries such as papyrus papermaking. It would be important for the managers to know how much raw material was available from day to day in order to keep industries supplied. Though it is something that the Ptolemies probably knew, we are still in the dark about the total amount of papyrus paper and papyrus rope produced or exported. On our part we can only guess. As Naphtali Lewis tells us, “information on the organization of the papyrus industry in Egypt in Greek and Roman times is sparse, consisting of no more than a handful of relevant Greek documents complemented by isolated bits of supporting evidence. The sum total presents us with a chiaroscuro, a few highlights emerging from a dark background of silence.”
Using an earlier estimate of the extent of the ancient Egyptian swamps,8 we can make a rough estimate of the maximum amount of papyrus paper that could have been made at any one time. This is referred to as the “standing crop” and represents a one-time harvest, as when a field of wheat is mown or a forest is clear-cut. From calculations, we can guess that about twenty-five trillion sheets of paper could have been made from this theoretical one-time harvest in ancient Egypt, and it would be worth about $22.5 trillion at current paper prices.
In practice, papermakers were constrained by the owners of the swamps. They were only allowed to cut stems within reason, according to terms that were set out in contracts made at the time the swamps were leased. Since the swamps were money spinners, the lessee had to ensure that he did not overcut or else the swamp would take too long to recover, or might be permanently damaged. From the restrictions and constraints written into the contracts and modern growth estimates of papyrus stems,9 we can estimate the maximum yield on a sustainable basis during Roman times, which turns out to be only about 7.5 percent of the maximum standing crop, or 1,875 million possible sheets per year. This maximum sustainable production was probably never reached, simply because the number of papermakers and reed cutters required was be enormous. My estimate of fifty million sheets per year in Roman times, when paper use and production was at a peak (with a total of 21,250 million over 425 years as shown in the graph (and in Table 2 in the Appendix), is still only a very small percentage of the maximum possible sustainable yield. This would leave enormous numbers of stems for use as fuel for the baths and for the crafts and rope industries.
Estimated Production of Papyrus paper in Ancient Egypt.
Unlike food, the market for paper is not directly correlated with the growth of populations, since common people had little use for it. The recurring and ever-increasing demand for paper lay in the world business market. Conversely, papyrus paper was a nonagricultural product that could be exported year-in and year-out without regard to famine conditions. Political disturbances did take their toll, and there were times of disruption in paper exports because of riots in Egypt.
How then does my rough estimate of about 157,807 tons during the four-thousand-year period from 3100 B.C. to 900 A.D. compare to paper produced in modern times? In order to appreciate what it represents, we can compare it to paper production in, for example, nineteenth century Britain. Rag paper was being made by hand in Britain beginning in 1588, using the process invented by the Chinese. This process consisted of pouring a slurry of paper pulp (a mixture of pulverized wood fibers or liquidized cloth rags) onto a fine screen so that the pulp “laid down” on the screen through which the water was drained. Once dry, the sheet of rag paper could be peeled from the screen.
By 1800 there were 430 paper mills in England and Wales, and less than fifty in Scotland, mostly operating a single vat of pulp slurry that was dipped into the paper molds to produce paper by hand.10 Total annual output on the average was about twenty-three tons per paper mill, or about 11,000 tons in total. The first successful papermaking machine was installed at Frogmore, Hertfordshire, in 1803; it used an endless wire cloth, which transferred the wet paper to a continuous felt blanket to assist in water extraction. Improvements after this centered on water removal and drying, and by 1850 paper production in Great Britain reached 100,000 tons per annum. The pattern for the mechanized production of paper had been set. By the end of the century, there were 300 paper mills in the United Kingdom, and they employed 35,000 people to produce 650,000 tons of paper a year.11 Thus, by the 1800s, after a period of development of only three hundred years, Great Britain would have reached and far exceed the total production of ancient Egypt (3100 B.C.–900 A.D.), well before the point where handmade methods changed over to mechanized processes.
Today in Egypt papyrus paper is made for the tourist trade. At the height of the tourist market, when tourism surged to 14.7 million visitors in 2010, the papermakers in el-Qaramous in the delta were making about 1,000 sheets a week per family.12 Given that there were about 200 families engaged over the course of a year, one million sheets were possible from their 500 acres of papyrus plantations, a rate of production that is equivalent to one-tenth of that obtained from 400–900 A.D. under Arab rule.
World footprints for paper use, lbs per person per year. (after Statista, 2016).13
The footprint of paper usage today compared to that of ancient times makes an interesting comparison. In today’s electronic age it often comes as a surprise to find out that an enormous amount of paper is still in use,14 especially in the United States, which topped the world average in 2010 with a whopping 500 pounds per person per year. This makes the concept of a “paperless world” look like self-deception. It is also interesting to note that the footprint of ancient papyrus paper would not even register unless it was taken in its entirety, thus it is shown as the total poundage used over 4,000 years per person in Roman times.
To the average Egyptian all this would be of little interest, since the most useful thing about the plant was not the making of paper—although the windfall of the paper trade on the local economies was appreciated—but in the multitude of things that could be made from it at no cost. It helped to have the plant close by during a famine or during a cold spell, and it could always be useful around the house for making baskets, mats, and rope. For people living on or near the water it served as a larder and fish nursery; for marsh dwellers it must have been a comfort to have papyrus seemingly everywhere, as papyrus could be made into a mat, boat, or small house. Best of all it was ready, willing, and able to help make the transition to the next life, no matter whether the deceased was rich or poor. Wrapped in a simple, low-cost papyrus mat, or clutching a tiny amulet containing a small piece of papyrus paper, or sealed into a multimillion dollar tomb with a hundred-foot long roll of papyrus paper, the dead were secure and ready to make the voyage thanks to the sacred sedge. To the businessman of the age or the temple caretaker, the paper was a boon; and to the more socially conscious dweller of this ancient world it provided the means to keep up with what was happening. As Tom Standage tells us, papyrus paper enabled people to physically send a message rather than relying on a messenger to deliver it in spoken form. The informal system that had developed now enabled information to penetrate to the farthest provinces within a few weeks at most. He pointed out that news from Rome only took about five weeks to reach Britain in the west and seven weeks to reach Syria in the east.
In ancient times papyrus paper had allowed humans to literally rip the regal prerogative of immortality off the wall. The voices that appeared on paper were those of the gods and the sacred residents of the netherworld. Now in Roman times came a new evolution, not among the dead, but the living, as merchants, soldiers, officials in distant parts and the general populace raised their own voices. The result was a surge in letter writing on papyrus paper.
Some of these letters circulated information from the heart of the republic within select social circles, others revealed two-way conversations in which information passed horizontally from one person to another. All of which indicated that social networks were developing and civilization was responding.
Best of all was the fact that all of this would be recorded on scrolls and the scrolls in turn would be stored for all time in facilities created just for this purpose. Thus began recorded history and the organization of knowledge.