The Pharaoh’s Treasure

Early Libraries, Paper, and the Writing Business

As we have seen with the development of papyrus paper and the advent of ink and scribes, the Egyptians built an enormous business and political infrastructure because of paper. James Black tells us in his 2002 thesis on an Egyptian classic, The Instruction of Amenemope, that this effort of building an infrastructure involved the generation of a large body of scribes to “document land allocations and transfers, tax payments, state and temple inventories, administrative decrees, judicial decisions, and so forth. In fact, from present evidence it appears that the use of writing for religious texts and literary compositions was a secondary development; the original motivation for the invention of writing in Egypt—and its primary use in the early centuries—was almost solely for bureaucratic administration and political propaganda.”¹ Any religious texts produced would have been of the most fundamental nature. This is a view reinforced by Kim Ryholt, associate professor of Egyptology at the University of Copenhagen, who noted that among the fragments found in the library of a Tebtunis temple in the Fayum region (Map 2), were copies of the Daily Temple Offering Ritual, the basic ritual performed every day in every temple in Egypt.²

Ryholt suggested that even though it was routine to the point of being old hat, the keepers of temple libraries zealously protected these texts as if they held secret rituals, perhaps a move guaranteed to safeguard the potency of the magic, as well as to protect the priestly tradition of divination. Keeping such things close to their chests also maintained their edge in the area of medical expertise. The Greeks, for example, found it frustratingly difficult to pry loose the wisdom contained in the famous ancient Egyptian medical papyri from the priests. These were later discovered by archaeologists in the nineteenth century.

The general populace had little practice in writing and reading, so it is no surprise that the evolution and history of the early libraries of the Egyptians clearly supported the priest’s need-to-know mentality. Creative thinking was kept to a minimum, the medium continued to be the message and sacred religious scrolls remained as secret as possible.

images — EdfuTemple in the time of Napoleon and the location of the House of Books. (after a sketch by D. Roberts, 1838).

Since the early libraries served the priests, we can expect that they would keep their books nearby in places of worship. A good example would be the House of Books in the Temple of Horus at Edfu. The remarkable thing about this library is the catalog; that object of desire and pride so dear to the hearts of librarians, many of whom will smile upon hearing that this particular catalog is chiseled on the wall and so is still there today. It tells us that the collection contained books that, among other things, enabled the reader to learn about:

The smiting of demons, the repelling of the crocodile, the bringing out of the king in procession, knowing all the secrets of the laboratory, all the writings of combat, spells for repelling the evil eye, instructions for decorating a wall, (and) protecting the body, knowing the periodic returns of the two heavenly bodies, and all the inventories of the secret forms (of the god), and all the aspects of the associated deities, which are copied daily for the temple, every day, each one after the other, so that the “souls” of the deities will remain in (this) place and will not leave (this) temple, ever.³

The building of the temple was begun in 237 B.C. and finished in 57 B.C. by Auletus, the father of Cleopatra. Thus, exactly ten years before Caesar’s arrival in Egypt we find a “house of books” functioning in the same land and at the same time as one of the most famous libraries of history, the Royal Library of Alexandria.⁴

But, what a difference, the Library of Alexandria was fashioned after that of Aristotle and the early Greeks. Aristotle began his library in Athens on his return from Asia in 337 B.C., which coincided with the beginning of his school, the Lyceum. Here he developed a cooperative research program for his students and began collecting books and specimens of interest for the program. Over the years he established a natural history museum and a library of ten thousand scrolls. Aristotle’s museum was supplemented by material and specimens sent back to Athens by Alexander the Great, himself a student of the great man.

Alexandria closely followed Aristotle’s model with its museum and library, both of which were the delights of the scholars, who loved them. The daily tasks of the copyists, scholars, authors, librarians, and scribes associated with the library was to produce books, catalogs, lists, letters, scholarly papers, broadsheets, announcements, and newsletters. As a result, Ptolemy II’s reputation was made. But since the library lay within the palace grounds, the users were limited to those with royal permission. The general public was given access only to a smaller library in the Serapeum, an imposing temple in the western part of the city.

At the end of Ptolemy II’s reign when the library was at its zenith, the 490,000 rolls in the Great Library were supplemented with 42,800 in the Serapeum.⁵ Both of these are conservative. Other estimates refer to millions. At the outside there may have been over a million rolls with twenty sheets per roll. Over the almost three hundred years of Ptolemaic rule, the library’s holdings would have required a production of about 70,000 sheets per year, an amount equivalent only to less than 1 percent of the annual production of paper under Roman rule. Obviously, the amount of paper used for literary purposes would be dwarfed by that used in the business world, but the production of books was an effort of inestimable worth. The historians, screenwriters and filmmakers Justin Pollard and Howard Reid put this in perspective when they made the interesting point that “other libraries since have held more books; indeed, today the Library of Congress in Washington and the British Library in London hold between them nearly every book printed in the last two hundred years and many more besides. But they are not complete, not least because most of the knowledge of the first thousand years of Western civilization is missing. These were the books that formed the library of Alexandria.”

The missing books, the millions of papyrus paper scrolls, along with some codices in later years, vanished, leaving behind only scraps that must now be “painstakingly reconstructed and analyzed by scholars to squeeze out every last drop of information.”⁶

The Writing Trade

In the early days of Egypt, if you were at home, thoughts organized and reed pen at the ready, it was an easy task to enter your bid for immortality. A long letter was all that was needed, say, to a friend in Memphis, perhaps someone who was a scribe. Let’s call him Serenput, perhaps you might compose a discourse on life in Thebes during the Sixth Dynasty when it was a much smaller city than Memphis. On dying, the letter writer would then confidently go to their tomb knowing that thousands of years later, their letter would be found by an eminent archaeologist, then their scroll would be named after a prominent benefactor before it was cut into sections and placed lovingly under glass in a famous Western museum.

If this were in the year 2200 B.C., the letter writer would write in Egyptian, but instead of laboriously drawing out hieroglyphs, would use hieratic script, the shorthand version. As with ancient scribes who sat cross-legged with the papyrus paper scroll across their lap, they would hold the unwritten roll of papyrus paper in their left hand and begin writing with their right. Their script would go across the page from right to left as in modern Arabic and many of the earlier writing systems, including early Greek and Phoenician. Since this would still be in the time of the Old Kingdom (2686–2134 B.C.) their writing would go vertically across the page;⁷ readers would have read their work by holding the scroll up in front of them.

The American painter, Elihu Vedder, a romantic imagist who illustrated the deluxe edition of The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam, portrayed Minerva in a mosaic in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, reading from such a scroll. In fact, the writing is clearly seen laid out in a way that it is vertical to the long edge.

From the Middle Kingdom, 2055 B.C. onward, there was a change in the orientation of writing on most scrolls. The lines were thereafter written horizontally, which meant that a reader could spread out the scroll in front of him rather than holding it up.⁸ This is the form you would use if you were writing in a later time. For example, let’s say you are living in the period around 231 B.C. you now have to work harder to achieve immortality. You’ve decided therefore to send an essay to Aristarchus in Alexandria. You have read his book (in scroll form), On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, and decided he has it all wrong. Your essay will be a rebuttal meant to counter his argument that the earth revolves around the sun. Your hope is that in addition to your work winding up in a museum, your new theory that the sun revolves around the earth will take its place in history. So, this is a substantial document, and you must write it in Greek, even though Alexandria is an Egyptian city. Also you must now write from left to right as in modern Greek, Latin, and English. The text is written on the recto with short lines parallel to the length of the roll and arranged in blocks so that when anyone reads the scroll he can unroll it on a flat surface or across his lap with his left hand revealing from the right, one section at a time.

Your essay is a long one and on page twenty you realize you need more sheets, so you simply paste on a segment cut from a spare roll to finish up. After a while, let’s suppose you receive some good news, your work has found its way into the Royal Library! On a visit to Alexandria, you apply for permission to tour the library. You approach the court of Ptolemy V, who is now king. His fifteen-year-old wife, Cleopatra I, will be the first Ptolemaic queen to be sole ruler of Egypt, like Cleopatra VII of Caesar’s time. She encourages your visit. The king himself informs you that Aristarchus has been dead for some time and your essay is now famous. His wife invites you to dinner and everyone assures you that no one will ever be able refute your idea that the earth is the center of the universe.

Once confronted with the library’s treasures, you are surprised to see scrolls from the early days with writing that ran across the page in a vertical fashion. It was also possible to see in some of the earlier scrolls horizontal writing in long lines that ran the entire length of the roll. This occasioned a great deal of unrolling and rerolling of the scroll.

In time, scribes were forced to adopt the method where the writer used short horizontal lines kept within blocks, so that a section could be read in its entirety without so much rolling and rerolling. Once scribes developed the habit of standardizing the blocks of text, they justified their lines closely to the right and left in order to confine the script inside a block about three inches wide. This was called a pagina in Latin and represented a regular organization of text that is still the fashion. In English it is now called a “page.”

In Roman times, the standard way of reading a scroll was to unroll it on a table or across your lap. When finished, you would leave the scroll wound on the left, just like the old video tapes returned after rental, so the new reader could start fresh with page one and would not have to rewind before using. This method of spreading out a scroll while reading came as a surprise to someone like myself, who remembered watching a scroll being opened by a Roman centurion in the old movies. He would stand majestically in his shiny metal breastplate, short sword and helmet as he unrolled the scroll vertically like a window shade. He then would read the text that had been arranged vertically (that is, across the short axis of the scroll.)

In reality, by Roman times the majority of papyrus scrolls were written with text arranged in a horizontal fashion and organized in blocks, or paginae, as explained above. A realistic portrayal of a reader in those days is seen in the work of the famous Victorian painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. He was a consummate professional, a perfectionist, and it shows in his paintings. In addition to earlier excursions to observe and study places of Roman antiquity, in 1902 he visited Egypt, which gave his work a new impulse. It is said that his meticulous archaeological research, including research into Roman architecture, was so thorough that every building featured in his canvases could have been rebuilt using Roman tools and methods. His historical accuracy was remarkable for his time, and it is not surprising that his paintings were used as source material by Hollywood directors such as D. W. Griffith in Intolerance (1916) or in versions of the ancient world featured in such films as Ben Hur (1926), Cleopatra (1934), Gladiator (2009), and The Chronicles of Narnia (2005). Most notable of all is Cecil B. DeMille’s use of Alma-Tadema in his epic remake of The Ten Commandments (1956), where it is said that De Mille would customarily spread out prints of Alma-Tadema paintings to indicate to his set designers the look he wanted to achieve.⁹

In Alma-Tadema’s painting Favorite Poet, we see a papyrus scroll being read, and it is a correct rendering—the scroll is twenty pages long. The lovely reader has unrolled it and has yet to roll it back up. In another of his paintings, A Reading from Homer, we not only see the correct way of opening and reading a papyrus paper scroll in Roman times, but we also see a dramatic presentation by the laurel-wreathed reader, who is reading the contents of the book. He is making Homer’s characters come to life for the audience who listen in rapt attention. We see here a great example of the tradition of oral performance that we will hear more about later, a tradition that was an important factor in the early circulation of books.

It is difficult to place ourselves in the position of a copyist or scribe of those days, but by the time of the Romans it was clear that the job was not an easy one. Parsons, on the basis of much experience with the papyri of Oxyrhynchus, gives us a picture:

These are the essentials: the copyist sharpens his reed-pen, spreads fresh papyrus over his knees, and proceeds to write—somewhere nearby is his pot of ink (soot mixed with gum), somewhere the exemplar from which he copies—on a stand, perhaps, unless indeed someone else dictates it to him. The posture must be strenuous (only afterwards do desks come into fashion) some later images show the left leg over the right, which may explain why in many rolls the columns of writing slope outward towards their base, following the thigh-line. A minor poet depicts the physical suffering of it all: ‘my eyes are tired, my sinews, my spine, the base of my skull and my shoulders’. The veteran may end with shaky hands and clouded sight. (P. Parsons, 2007)

Inks and Pens

The ink in your inkpot as you write your letter in ancient times is quite similar to the ordinary ink of modern times. It was mixed by the ancient scribe in one of two shallow depressions on his wooden penholder. The same holder had a deep notch that could hold several reed pens. The holder itself was seen as a badge of the profession and was proudly and prominently displayed in drawings and tomb paintings of scribes. Clutched in their hands or tucked under their arms or thrust inside their waistband or sashes (as in the painted vignette of Scribe Nebqed in his Book of the Dead) it declared to the world that you were one of a special breed. It looked like an early form of iPhone and served in a way much like that most influential piece of consumer technology; it was the icon that distinguished the “with it” generation of its day.

The ink used in the wells of the penholder was made by mixing carbon black (soot) with water and acacia gum. The gum was collected from trees growing in arid areas and was the same acacia gum, or gum arabic, that is still in use today as a natural stabilizer and binder for inks, paint, and foods. Ink made from it is very stable and will not fade,¹⁰ but it could still be washed off when a mistake was made or when a sheet or scroll had to be reused. Egg white was occasionally added as a binder, as in some of the Dead Sea Scroll inks.¹¹ In later years, a mixture of soot and gelatin thinned with water or vinegar made up the ink called atramentum by the Romans.

These washable inks could be made more stable and waterproofed by the addition of mordants, such as alumina, or binding components such as burnt resin, dextrin, gum tragacanth, albumen, or wax. David Carvalho, a noted expert on ink and handwriting, tells us that permanent inks could be made using a combination of soot obtained from resins, or resinous woods, mixed with gelatin and oils, egg white, or glue. Some of these mixtures resulted in a close approximation of the indelible ink used in ancient India.¹² “India Ink” of the fourth century B.C. was made of burnt bones, tar, pitch, and other substance, such as shellac. This last added by the Chinese made the ink so tenacious that it was unwashable once dried. We know that some scribes used inks of this nature because of the examples that exist where the writer obviously gave up trying to erase a document and turned to the verso side in desperation.

To apply the ink Egyptian scribes wrote with a thin reed, the stem of the rush Juncus maritimus. Cut on a slant, the point was then chewed to form a small brush tip.¹³ The reed stylus came into use in the time of Alexander. Made from the stem of the reed grass Phragmites aegyptica, it was trimmed and pointed with a split nib, as with a quill pen. This made for faster writing, especially when cursive script was involved. It also signaled a change in papyrus paper because the stylus required thicker paper, which the papermakers were happy to provide.¹⁴

With this change in pens also came a change in ink, which can be seen in documents from 252–198 B.C. onwards. By then papyri inscribed using the Egyptian soft pen and carbon-based ink were being replaced by Greek papyri on which a water-based metallic ink was applied with the reed stylus.¹⁵ The metallic ink used at this time was different from the iron gall ink used in later centuries.¹⁶ Traces of these earlier metallic inks were identified in burnt papyri from Herculaneum dating from 79 A.D. The X-rays used in the study of the charred rolls found that the ink used, though still carbon based like the earlier inks, now contained substantial levels of lead and copper.¹⁷ Since the papyrus documents concerned were about 200–350 years old at the time of the eruption of Vesuvius; this meant that these water-based metallic inks were used in place of the ancient Egyptian ink probably by the third century B.C.¹⁸

The largest change in ink came about much later, at about the time when papyrus paper was being replaced by parchment. It was then that encaustum came into its own. This was an ink made by boiling gallnuts to obtain a dark-brown liquid tannin. Although the exact date of the transition from atramentum (carbon based) to iron gall ink (encaustum) is unknown, it can be safely stated that by the end of the Middle Ages, iron gall ink was the primary ink.¹⁹

In later times vitriol, a metallic sulfate, was added and the ink became so powerful that it would occasionally eat through parchment, leaving a space where the original letter was.

With the advent of printing, Johannes Gutenberg found that neither the earlier soot-gum-water version of the Egyptians, nor the metallic inks of the early Greeks and Romans, nor the later gall ink that became popular for use on parchment, could be used for printing. All of these inks were water-based and thus pooled on the metal typeface, blurring the letters on the pulp-based paper that Gutenberg was using. As a result, in the fifteenth century, a new type of sticky, thick ink had to be developed for printing. Gutenberg designed one for his presses: an oily, varnish-like mixture of soot, turpentine, and walnut oil that is still in use today.

Gum Arabic—A Second Monopoly?

This brings us to a second item exported from Egypt that became an essential and prized commodity, and for which there would be a steady and growing demand in the ancient world. I speak here of the African ink component acacia gum, also known as gum arabic, a crystalized gum that excretes from cuts made in the branches of Acacia senegal trees. These trees grow in many places in Africa and even on the Indian subcontinent, but most of the world’s gum arabic comes from Sudan, where a thick belt of the trees stretches from one end of the country to the other. This gum has been an item of commerce from as early as the twelfth century B.C.

It was collected in Nubia and exported north to Egypt for use in the preparation of inks, watercolors, and dyes. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C., mentions its use in embalming in Egypt. In later days, other trade routes may have taken it through Phoenician, Berber, and Greek hands, but like papyrus paper, the main avenue of transit would be through Egypt.

Scribes all over the world valued it as an emulsifier and stabilizer. When added to soot and water, it brought the two components together so well that the ink flowed easily from the pen. It also helped the ink attach firmly to the paper surface, rather than pooling, as would happen with water alone.

To produce this ink, the crystals of gum arabic would be ground into a powder, which dissolved readily in water; then, once the soot was added, the ink formed and could be used directly or dried into small blocks and sold by weight.

Gum arabic was sold on its own for other uses. It is a natural emulsifier and is still in demand; pharmaceutical companies use it to keep medicines from separating into their component ingredients, and a dab of gum arabic makes newspaper ink more cohesive and permanent. It is also a common emulsifier used in soft drinks, including Coca-Cola. Sixty thousand tons are used annually.

The extraordinary thing is that since it is still shipped primarily out of Sudan, the legend grew that Osama bin Laden owned a significant interest in its production in that country, and therefore one should boycott products using it. Dana Milbank in the Washington Post described a press conference held at the Washington Press Club in 2007, when Sudan’s ambassador to the United States threatened to stop exportation of gum arabic if sanctions were imposed. Brandishing a bottle of Coca-Cola, he said, “I can stop that gum arabic and all of us will have lost this.”

Eventually, the State Department issued a release stating that while Osama bin Laden had once had considerable holdings in Sudanese gum arabic production, he divested himself of these when he was expelled from Sudan in 1996.²⁰

In summary, with the power of these two plant-based products combined, papyrus and gum arabic, paper and ink evolved. This filled the need of people to write, keep written records and record ideas. There was also something about a beautifully inscribed roll of paper that must have captured the fancy of the human mind. Picture, for example, the excitement and joy of the modern high school or college graduate as they raise high that scroll that testifies to their achievement. Generally tied with a colored ribbon, it puts us in the same league as the numerous, wealthy, book-loving Romans, who thought the owner of any well-inscribed papyrus scroll must be a person favored by the gods.