The Pharaoh’s Treasure

Our mentor, Cassiodorus, lived most of his life in an Italy that, by the sixth century, had become a backwater. The Roman Empire of his time was a shell. The Goths, Huns, and Vandals had emptied the coffers, burned the libraries, trashed the archives, and taken control. A superb and diligent bureaucrat even at a young age, Cassiodorus went to work for the Goths when he was thirty-eight and rose rapidly in their political system. He had great connections under the old regime, where his father had been the governor of Sicily and Calabria, and his grandfather a tribune. Cassiodorus knew his way around and how to get ahead. Professor James O’Donnell, librarian at Arizona State University, historian, author, and authority on Cassiodorus, referred to him as a man who had an “aptitude for compromise with power,” and also “a great seizer of opportunities,” he was someone on the side of change and innovation.¹

In Ravenna under Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogoths greatly appreciated his literary and legal skills. As Christians, they had taken over the reins of government, and with that came a nightmare, an enormous legacy of documentation, everything connected with the business of church as well as state. It all seemed to require written responses of a lengthy and careful nature. Snowed under by this avalanche of papyrus paper, it helped that they had a man who embraced the task. His appointment as praetorian prefect for Italy effectively made him prime minister of their civil government and he was often entrusted with drafting significant public documents. He kept copious records and letter books concerning public affairs, all on papyrus paper, which he, like Saint Augustine, felt was one of the world’s greatest inventions.

images — Cassiodorus and a papyrus codex (after Gesta Theodorici 1176).

His boss Theodoric was so swayed by him that in due course he removed the tax on paper, which Cassiodorus thought to be a fine moment in the history of government. By 534 A.D. the people had a great supply of papyrus paper in Italy and it was tax free, thus, “a large store of paper . . . laid in by our offices that litigants might receive the decision of the Judge clearly written, without delay, and without avaricious and impudent charges for the paper which bore it.”²

What a man! And remarkably cool-headed as the Goths continued their wars, beheadings, tortures, and all manner of blood-spattering incidents. If one were to read only Cassiodorus one would never suspect they were anything but a docile church-going flock.

Following the death of Theodoric’s young successor, Athalaric, in 534 A.D., and Justinian I’s conquering of Italy in 540 A.D., Cassiodorus left Ravenna to settle in the new seat of power, Constantinople.

In Cassiodorus’s day, Constantinople was a walled city surrounded on three sides by water. It reflected wealth, power, and protection and, like Rome, it was built on the rising ground of seven hills that provided then, and now in present-day Istanbul, spectacular views of the Bosporus. A chain could be placed across the Golden Horn estuary so as to cut off further boat traffic in order to protect the flanks of the city.

It was the largest city of the Roman Empire and of the world, and so its emperors no longer had to travel between various court capitals and palaces. They could remain in this Great City and send generals to command their armies as the wealth of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia flowed to them.³

In the eighth century A.D. the Theodosian Walls (double walls with a moat) kept it impregnable from land, while a newly discovered incendiary substance, known as “Greek Fire,” squirted under pressure allowed the Byzantine navy to destroy Arab fleets and keep the city safe.

Grain arrived regularly from Egypt, spices and exotic foods came from India, grapes and wine from local vineyards, while produce from extensive gardens and abundant local fisheries was brought into the city daily. This supplemented vast quantities of stored provisions, while the Lycus River that ran through the city provided abundant fresh water to many underground cisterns and reservoirs. Constantinople was thus famed for its massive defenses, and though besieged on numerous occasions, it was not taken until 1204 when it was sacked by the army of the Fourth Crusade.

As for paper, Nicolas Oikonomides, the illustrious Byzantine scholar, noted that papyrus from Egypt was still being imported into Constantinople by the shipload in the tenth century. It was regarded as the choicest of materials.⁴ He pointed out that although parchment was being used to make new books, and to transcribe older papyrus codices, it was still quite expensive. It made up almost a third of the cost of a book. Also, the supply of parchment was seasonal, since slaughter of the animal mostly involved the sheep, and happened at a particular time of the year, and it was not always of the desired quality. There were frequent shortages in Constantinople, especially in the winter months. Papyrus paper could be ordered in large enough quantity so it could be stored as well as used to satisfy daily needs. Michael McCormick, in his concise economic history of the era, The Origins of the European Economy, points out that the papal chancelleries of the 840s A.D. had so much papyrus paper in reserve that one piece was at least thirty-eight years old from the day it was made in Egypt until the day it was used.⁵ To the east of Constantinople, stored papyrus paper served the Muslim governments equally well. According to historian Matt Malczycki, the caliphs in Baghdad around this time kept tabs on papyrus paper in their storehouses.⁶

So, throughout the world, from Anglo-Saxon England to Baghdad, and until the tenth century, papyrus served everyone’s everyday needs and more; this situation did not change even after 794 A.D. when an Arab paper mill was started up in Baghdad.⁷ The mill used the new Arab improvisation on the Chinese method, a process that involved the pulverization of linen rags in order to make a slurry of pulp, and the pouring of this slurry onto frames for drying. The laid rag paper produced this way was cheap but, according to Oikonomides, it was not very strong. Chinese paper was made out of wood fiber, such as mulberry bark, but the earliest paper made in the Muslim world was made of linen rags, which turned out to be a useful idea, as the flax plant was grown and linen cloth made in quantity in Egypt especially under Fatimid rule (969–1171). The new rag-paper industry would thus be a natural adjunct to the large linen-weaving industry. The most interesting part of this story is how the Arabs, after latching onto the Chinese process and changing it, now had a use for their recycled linen waste left over from their cloth industry. For hundreds of years, they manufactured all three in Egypt: papyrus paper for the Christian world, rag paper for the Eastern Muslim markets, and linen cloth in quantity for everyone.

Constantinople found itself directly in the path of development of rag paper on the one hand and parchment on the other; yet papyrus continued to be used for ordinary everyday business. It is no wonder that Oikonomides tells us that up to the ninth century, the imperial secretariat preferred papyrus for important documents, such as the famous “Saint Denis Papyrus.” In this letter, Emperor Theophilus sought help from the Franks in turning the tide of Muslim forces in the Mediterranean, perhaps a prelude to the Crusades.⁸

With the end of the first millennium came a change in Europe. It was no longer economical to transport papyrus northward across the Alps. Though Italy was awash in papyrus paper (see insert, Map C), the new kingdoms north of the Alps throughout Frankland and as far as Northumbria had to look elsewhere, and they did so. These kingdoms did not have the historic trade ties with Egypt that Rome did. And perhaps also they were following the example of the village priests and curates who, even if it was an expensive process, stocked their local church libraries with codices made of vellum and parchment. Thus the new rulers of western Europe turned to a locally produced medium for their everyday needs and said goodbye to papyrus.

Further north in Europe and England, the supply of papyrus diminished until it reached the vanishing point, and here we see what happens when Pharaoh’s treasure was at the end of its rope. As in modern times when we live far from the grocery store, we just have to make do. In the outer fringes of the Roman Empire in northern England, just south of Hadrian’s Wall, we find ourselves in a Roman fort called Vindolanda living in a military colony of Belgic Gauls in 100 A.D. surrounded by people they referred to as those “wretched little Britons.”⁹

Although papyrus paper still arrives with the monthly dispatches, and scrolls of the Acta Diurna reach us periodically so that we are still informed as to what is happening in the world, there is less and less paper included in the supplies that are sent to the fort. Now that the major source of paper is far away, we must learn to use what is available locally. In the other parts of Europe, the trend would be to start up a parchment industry; here the military establishment is a small enclave, a fort surrounded by forests not like the monasterial infrastructure of elsewhere. Anything needed for our daily existence that can be made of wood is a blessing. The commanding officer assigns a noncommissioned officer with woodworking skills to provide writing materials. That person decides not to turn to the inner bark of trees, as did earlier Romans; this is where liber of ancient days, the word for bark, comes from. The Latin word for book comes from liber (and the later English word for “library”). He looks instead to the light-colored wood of local trees: the so-called sapwood of birch, alder, and oak.

After cutting down a suitable tree, he saws out a block of wood approximately the size of the final half sheet (about 8 by 3 ½ inches); then, along the surface of the grain of the wet wood, he passes a nine-inch wide, very sharp, iron blade—perhaps contained in the frame of a large block plane. Very soon he has a pile of wide shavings about one millimeter in depth that will serve in place of paper. He treats them further by drying them under a weight so they won’t warp. Then, after a light sanding, he has a supply of small sheets that can be used for everyday correspondence as well as the needs of the army.

Daily and weekly accounts must be kept, work rosters, interim reports, lists of day-to-day needs, and daily checks on men and material have to be recorded. All this is done on what is referred to today as a “tablet,” though perhaps it is more rightly named “wood paper,” since it was used in place of paper, served the same purpose, and probably when first made was as flexible as stiff bond or postcard stock.¹⁰

The value of these postcard-size sheets lay in their use as interim material. Larger official reports, which became part of the official archive at regional level, were still drawn up on papyrus paper scrolls; but for all else the sheets of wood were more than adequate.

Discoveries since Vindolanda, especially in the fort and town at Carlisle at the western end of Hadrian’s Wall, show that these tablets were in wide use, and there is evidence that they were well-known in the Roman world. The third century historian Herodian, describing the death of the Emperor Commodus (180–192 A.D.) noted that the assassination was caused by the discovery that the emperor had made a list of proscribed persons, “on a writing-tablet of the kind that were made from lime-wood, cut into thin sheets and folded face-to-face by being bent.”

This is part of the picture of what a well-oiled and bureaucratic machine the Roman army was, and it is also further demonstration of how such a small number of ingenious, resourceful men could be used to police and control a wide frontier.

South of the Alps, as McCormick explains, the Roman church offices and the papal registry followed Saint Augustine and Cassiodorus in their preference for papyrus, which was “part of the conservative symbolic culture of papal power.” In other words, the demand for papyrus paper in Italy was based on the same kind of sacred church liturgical and bibliographic traditions that called for lead seals for documents (bulla in Latin, hence any important church manuscript became a “bull”), special handwriting, prose rhythms, sacred ties, and foldings, all to the glory of God, the church and the pope. One of these traditions demanded that documents of the early popes had to be written on papyrus, and so, in the papal chancery, papyrus was used to the exclusion of other materials, even though alternatives were available in parchment and vellum.

Another factor influencing the decision of the church’s preference for papyrus over parchment may have been security. The fact is that writing normally will adhere firmly to parchment or vellum and ordinarily cannot be erased by rubbing or washing; but even a tenacious ink like that made of iron gall can be removed. Because parchment is very durable, a thin layer can be scraped off the writing surface. This practice was put to use in teaching where the term “scratch pad” in the Middle Ages meant a palimpsest. This was a parchment used in the fashion of a schoolboy slate; any practice writing was simply scratching off to begin again. In the early Middle Ages parchment was even recycled by washing away the original text using milk and oat bran.¹¹ With the passing of time, the faint remains of the former writing would reappear enough so that scholars could discern the text (called the scriptio inferior, the “underwriting”). In the later Middle Ages the surface of the parchment was usually scraped away with powdered pumice to prevent this reappearance of the ghost of the original text, yet irretrievably losing the writing. Hence the most valuable palimpsests today are those that were overwritten in the early Middle Ages.

None of this applies in the case of papyrus, if a permanent ink was used, scraping would leave a hole or scar, making it difficult to falsify a document. This was also a factor in the preference of some caliphs for papyrus over parchment. How could they be certain that their subjects or the person addressed in a letter or decree would receive the real thing? In this they were not alone: the popes also had the same problem. In both cases they were reluctant to give up the use of papyrus paper. Parchment was okay for books, but not for their letters or official documents.

At that time, the term “papal bull” included many things: encyclicals, decrees, notices, and pronouncements of all types. The earliest were written on very large sheets of papyrus, though smaller copies were often made on parchment. A French writer of the tenth century, speaking of a privilege obtained from Pope Benedict VII (975–984 A.D.), says that the petitioner who went to Rome obtained a decree duly expedited and ratified by apostolic authority; two copies of which, one on parchment, the other on papyrus, he deposited in the archives on his return.¹²

It boggles the mind to think that papyrus, the sacred reed of the pagan Egyptians, was now equally blessed and revered by the Catholic Church. And it remained special until the ink dried on the last bull known to have been written on papyrus in 1083 A.D., the Typikon of Gregory Pakourianos, the noted Byzantine politician, military commander and patron of the Chuch. By then, Europe had turned to parchment for its needs and the church followed suit. Thus, in the late twelfth century, Eustathius of Thessalonica complained of the “recent” disappearance of papyrus.¹³

In the Muslim East, improved forms of rag-pulp paper eventually became the preferred medium, thanks to fact that it had a more uniform surface, could be written on both sides, and more easily made into a book, so that the last Arabic document on papyrus in 1087 A.D. existed side by side with Arabic manuscripts on laid paper that survived into the eleventh century.¹⁴

The Spread of Ancient Books

Library fires occurred in Constantinople in 726 and 1204 A.D., and finally in 1453 when the city fell to the Ottomans. These, along with the numerous blazes in Rome and Alexandria took a terrible toll on world literature, but still, as Knut Kleve, the Norwegian classical philologist reminds us, the efforts of people like Themistios, the Ptolemies, the book-loving emperors, both Roman and Byzantine, and thousands of early librarians, administrators, scribes, and philosophers, were not in vain. During their time, visitors from the provinces came to these great libraries to consult the works that had been put in place, and they took away copies that were recopied and treasured, and the thread of history was thus kept intact.

Many of these recopied scrolls, codices, and indices would wind up in the smaller but impressive libraries on the periphery of the ancient world, in Hippo, Caesarea, Cirta, Arethas, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Nisibis, Aelia, Cappadocia, Mount Athos, Squillace, Evegetis, Patmos, Sicily, and on and on. In Egypt, thousands of small and large monasteries developed in the Eastern and Western Deserts. These “Desert Fathers” were the models for later monastic orders in western Europe. In these remote, arid region, as we will see in the next chapter, texts were copied, and recopied. This is summarized in the diagram showing book trade in the Christian era (see page five of color insert). Compared to the earlier diagram of the Roman era it is obvious that enormous changes had been wrought.

The Christian era culminated in a simultaneous demand in Europe and the Arab world for the same works. These works were being translated into Syriac, Hebrew, and Arabic for the East, as well as Latin for the West. The work done in the older monasteries of Egypt and the newer ones in Europe demonstrated the effects of Cassiodorus’s philosophy, which was outlined in his classic guide for monasteries and universities, a popular book called Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum or Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning. It became one of the important schoolbooks of the early Middle Ages. In it he made a winning argument for a well-rounded education, and for the copying and production of books not simply as the duty of a subordinate, but as a life experience. He loved books and scriptoria, but outside his own libraries he must often have felt that he had landed in a world of gnomes. It would be many years before it became clear that it was his example, along with the direct involvement of Pope Gregory and Saint Benedictine, which caused the production and preservation of books to become an integral part of western monasticism.¹⁷

Today we are indebted to the labors of the monastic copyists for practically all that survives of the secular and sacred literature of antiquity. In the next chapter, we will delve into the way papyrus paper helped them serve this purpose, particularly in the first monasteries which, by chance, were located in Egypt and luckily close to the major source of paper.

Elsewhere in the world, literacy, book production, and the Roman economy declined as new waves of barbarians descended on the civilized world in the sixth century. Booksellers in Rome must have begun clearing their old stock and taking on used books, which were now becoming a rare commodity. To supply this need, Professor Avrin tells us that books—now mostly codices—were being forged and then buried, to make them look old. Plundered manuscripts from Italian monasteries, and whatever remained of great private and public collections, were showing up in the markets.¹⁸ Ecclesiastical and royal shoppers from the monasteries of England and the Carolingian court spread out in a buying spree; the needs for texts were beginning to grow as at about this time the teaching function that medieval monks performed was being transferred to the first universities. But by then the medium that allowed it all to happen, papyrus paper, was only a memory.

Old is Gold, and When is Forgery a Sin?

One of the consequences of the decline and final disappearance of papyrus paper was the fact that old papyrus paper became quite valuable, almost a treasured commodity, because new paper was no longer being made. Then in the Middle Ages, the unthinkable happened. According to Father Herbert Thurston, an English Jesuit priest and prolific contributor to the 1908 Catholic Encyclopedia, papal and other documents were being fabricated in a very unscrupulous fashion. As a result, he felt that a number of early documents in church libraries were not only open to grave suspicion, but were plainly spurious. He also emphasized that the motive for the forgeries was often not criminal. Many of the perpetrators were prompted by the desire to protect monastic property. Title deeds were often lost, misplaced, or illegible, a circumstance that left the peace-loving fathers open to persecution and extortion. They might have to pay overlarge sums in order to get their charters reconfirmed, or worse: ambitious clerics, anxious to exalt the importance of their own house, might blackmail the fathers into providing credentials less than impeccable in origin.

Take the Abbey of Saint Benignus at Dijon. The abbey church was built in 511 A.D. and rebuilt in 1325, and became no less than the famous Cathedral of Dijon, a French national monument and final resting place of the Burgundian duke, Phillip the Good. Hardly a place to harbor malpractice. But Father Herbert pointed out two papyrus papal bulls in the abbey library, professed to have been addressed to the abbey by Popes John V and Sergius I and accepted as genuine, that have since been proved to be fabrications. They were made out of a later bull from John XV addressed to the abbot in 995 A.D., one half of which was blank. Someone literally cut the bull, divided the resultant sheet in half, and used the venerable paper in a most unchristian manner. Father Herbert was at a loss, however, as to why a papal bull would be forged either in this case or at any other time.¹⁹

The monastery of Saint Denis is another case. Situated in a small town about four miles north of Paris, it is the burial site of Saint Denis, the first bishop of Paris. In 630 A.D. King Dagobert founded the abbey for Benedictine monks, and his successors further supported it until it became one of the richest and most important abbeys in France. So important was it that Christ himself was supposed to have assisted in person at the consecration of a new church at the abbey, which was commenced in 750 A.D. by Charlemagne. The abbey thus figured prominently in the history of France and, for several centuries, its abbots were amongst the chief seigneurs of the kingdom. During the Crusades, the abbot of Saint Denis acted as regent of France whilst King Louis VII was absent. Joan of Arc hung up her arms in the church in 1429.²⁰ Again, who would think anything but good of such a place?

According to Patrick Geary, historian at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, nineteen historically important papyrus paper documents exist today in the archives of Saint Denis, but at least three others were known to have existed in the seventeenth century, including a forged donation of King Dagobert, a forged bull of Pope Stephen II, and a forged Confessio Genechiseli. Also, he notes that a bull of Pope Nicholas I is either a ninth-century forgery or at least a copy that the papal chancery agreed to authenticate with a lead seal, or bulla! This indicates that higher ups also played the game!

What drove them to it? One thing, of course, was the Vatican’s insistence on the use of papyrus paper for its important documents. This meant that those libraries with numerous scrolls were the most desirable places to look for old paper. In fact, Geary tells us that during the eleventh century, forgery became such a venerable tradition at Saint Denis that the forged works served as models and “without exception, the other documents survive only because, at a time when supplies of fresh papyrus were unobtainable, they became the raw material on which the diplomas and bulls needed . . . were written.”²¹

And so it went until the present day when a 1½ by 3 inch piece of papyrus paper surfaced in 2012 and Karen King, professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced that the fragment contained the words, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . . ’” The subsequent claim that it was a forgery put the fat in the fire. But it was not the first time that the idea has come to us that Jesus was married with children; about fifteen years ago readers of The Da Vinci Code knew about Jesus’s wife as a revelation, not from the Fathers of the Church, but from Dan Brown. Two hundred million readers of Dan Brown have already said, “I knew it!” They would have no problem believing in this scrap of papyrus. To them it was the real thing.

What made the document unusually appealing was the authenticity of the news release, from Harvard no less, and from a King. It was even blessed with a sacred name that made it hard to dismiss.

But for me the moment of truth came with the mention of papyrus. In which I saw that once again McLuhan was proved right: the medium really is the message. Why? Because all the experts examining the scrap of paper declared it authentic—the paper that is. Anyone carbon dating the scrap or physically scrutinizing the material would have to say, “Yes, it is an eighth century document.” Even the ink looked old according to AnneMarie Luijendijk, professor of religion at Princeton University, who said, “We can see that by the way the ink is preserved on the papyrus.”

Since then, the ink and paper have been both proven to be real;²² that is, really ancient, it was only when other experts looked at the Coptic script that they spotted a fake. A lengthy analysis by Alberto Camplani of Rome’s La Sapienza University (cited by the Vatican), and studies by Craig Evans of the Acadia Divinity College, Professors Francis Watson of Durham University and Leo Depuydt of Brown all suggested that it is a modern text reassembled from phrases taken from well-known Coptic texts and inked onto a scrap of ancient papyrus paper.

The Vatican jumped on it with both feet in order to squash the idea, because Catholic Christian tradition has it that Jesus was not married, and, since his Apostles were men, women cannot be priests. The idea that he was married to Mary Magdalene and had children could spell a great deal of trouble. But years ago, it was in fact members of the church who did just what the writer of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife did—forge papyrus documents for a purpose, not for money!

Probably from before the time the fragment was made, members of the Church of Rome have been creating forgeries. Does this excuse the fact? Not at all, said Father Herbert, who stated that, “No doubt, less creditable motives—e.g., an ambitious desire to exalt consideration of their own house—were also operative, and . . . lax principles in this matter prevailed almost universally . . . !”

So where are we who were taught not to cast the first stone unless we can show a spotless record, a past free of blemish? According to some, the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife is as valid as any of the documents in the New Testament, even if was written yesterday. They would say that the mysterious author of the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife has done us a favor unconsciously, and in the process, he or she used a method not unknown to the church in the distant past.

For believers, this new gospel provides, “a glimpse into an otherwise occluded moment in the evolution of Christianity . . .” And, according to Tom Holland of the Guardian, “a reminder of how effectively religions have been able to manufacture for themselves, in defiance of messy reality, a streamlined and authorized past.”²³

Oh, papyrus.

The Great Library and the Book Trade

The Role of Fire

The Spread of Ancient Books

Old is Gold, and When is Forgery a Sin?