The Pharaoh’s Treasure

Behold, the Lord rideth upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt . . . and shall set the Egyptians against the Egyptians, city against city and kingdom against kingdom . . . and the rivers shall be wasted and dried up . . . the paper reeds . . . shall wither, be driven away, and be no more.

—Isaiah 19: 4–7

I was amazed to read this prophecy in the Bible. Although the timeframe referred to by Isaiah dealt with that part of the Old Testament that took place in the eighth century B.C., during the takeover by the Kushites, he seemed also to be predicting what would happen in a relatively modern age. He could have no inkling of the final disappearance of the “paper reed” that happened just prior to the time of the Crusades, also he could not be aware that the final blow leading to extermination would be delivered by man, rather than God. Also, if his prophecy were fulfilled in later times, as it was, there would never be any doubt that he was referring to a plant so important that before its demise, it had influenced the economic and aesthetic well-being of the Western world.

Its disappearance happened after the Arab occupation of Egypt, but not immediately. As we saw above, papyrus paper was still in production in Egypt until the tenth or eleventh century.

During the period from the start of the Arab occupation in the 600s A.D. until the arrival of Napoleon in 1798, a period of over a thousand years, Egypt had changed. For one thing, the population had grown to ten million. Agriculture remained the mainstay of the economy, yet during the intervening years, papyrus had gone missing, and the worst part was that its absence was not remarked upon until French scientists began asking around in the late 1700s. They asked in vain, though papyrus was well known in many languages. In Arabic it was called bardi; in Greek, papyrus; in Latin, papyrum; and in Hebrew, suf. In Kiswahili it is still known most appropriately as ndago mwitu (“the people’s sedge”).

Before taking up the reasons for its disappearance, it might be of interest to know what the ancient papyrus plant of Egypt must have looked like. According to botanists familiar with Egyptian flora, the original plants of the Nile valley must have been similar in size to those found today in the equatorial region of central and eastern Africa, and specifically in southern Sudan; in other words, the papyrus plants of ancient days were from a robust and vigorously growing stock as befits one of the fastest growing vascular plants known to man. When the slender stems each topped by a fluffy flowering umbel reached maximum growth potential, they were tall, fifteen feet or more.

We can also infer that they were robust from indirect evidence; the width of the dried slices of pith used for making paper in those early days in Egypt indicate that at least some of the plants were of a hefty size. For example, in two scrolls of papyrus paper found in Fayum (ca. 300–500 A.D.) the slices of papyrus incorporated in some of the sheets were 8–9.7 centimeters (three to four inches) wide.¹

When first reported in modern literature, these findings were met with disbelief, since ordinary strips used in modern papyrus paper made for the tourist trade normally average one to two inches. But, if we assume the plants growing in ancient days were as robust and similar in growth as African plants that reach fifteen to eighteen feet in height, often with a base diameter of six inches, slices could easily be obtained that would measure in that range, even accounting for shrinkage during drying when the paper was made.

Sir Wallis Budge also reported that the paper used in the manufacture of the Scribe Ani’s Book of the Dead was made of plants that were at least 4.5 inches in diameter.² Likewise, some of the strips used in making the paper for the Greenfield Papyrus were taken from a plant that was at least four inches wide.³ This indicates that along the Nile River in Egypt, in the heyday of papyrus, the size and weight of stems would be similar in range to what is found in equatorial Africa today.

Although papyrus is a robust plant, it is also a swamp species and amphibious, therefore it is very susceptible to any drying out or drainage of the local landscape. It would also suffer if the Nile River water became more saline. Unfortunately for papyrus, during the first millennium A.D. in Egypt the most obvious changes to occur in the Nile valley were increases in drainage and salinity. As a result, the wetlands of the delta were affected early, and the papyrus swamps that grew there in profusion began dying back, leaving behind small isolated clumps of papyrus that existed well into the 1800s, when conditions changed even more drastically and the last vestiges of the plant vanished.

We can see this reflected in reports from 900 A.D. onward by visitors to Egypt who commented on the state of the papyrus growing in the Nile marshes. The merchant Ibn Hawqal in 969, and the travel writer Ibn Gulgul in 982, both reported that papyrus, though present, was no longer in abundance.⁴ Later, the French naturalist, Pierre Belon noted in the 1540s that papyrus was still growing in Egypt, as did the Italian doctor and botanist, Prosper Alpinus, in 1580, but the impression one gets is that it was no longer easy to find.

The famous Swedish explorer and botanist, Fredrik Hasselquist, did not see the plant in his travels of 1749–50. In 1790 James Bruce wrote that papyrus was still hanging on in Egypt, and in 1820–1821 Baron Heinrich de Minutoli, a Prussian army general, found it growing but only in a few places in the Nile delta and northeast of Cairo. Finally, the distinguished French botanist Gustave Delchevalerie referred to its complete extinction in Egypt in 1897, with the exception of a dozen plants brought to Egypt from the botanical garden in Paris in 1872.⁵

In prehistoric times and later, when the early residents went about their first efforts at basin control, the river banks were too steep and the rush of water too strong for any plant growth in the main stream of the river. Papyrus was relegated to patches of waterlogged soil, shallow swampy areas left in depressions and ravines after the floodwater receded. It was tolerated, perhaps even encouraged, in the backwaters of the floodplain because it was useful to have it nearby to provide raw material for things around the Stone Age house. Later distinctions were drawn between wild and plantation swamps, but both became just another component in the course of floodplain agriculture where the chief occupation remained food production. During the period of Roman conquest and occupation, enormous levels of agricultural production were achieved in the delta and the Fayum region. Production levels were so great that large grain boats were employed to carry the surpluses to Rome.

Modern Egypt is still an agrarian-based economy. If you fly along the Egyptian Nile today you’ll see the flat green aspect that is typical of irrigated schemes, with dusty brown riverbanks and a floodplain blanketed by a man-made haze, a haze that comes from water evaporating from flooded fields, a weary vista broken only by the sight of corrugated roofs of houses or storage buildings, isolated palm trees, and the occasional urban landscape of a modern town or city.

If you had made the same flight in ancient times, as the plane passed over the floodplain on its way to the delta, the land would still appear clothed in green, but the farms and croplands would be interspersed with willow thickets and verdant patches of natural marshes and swamps. And as the plane dipped lower, you’d also see what is missing today, the large areas covered by the fluffy umbels of the sacred sedge, a sight that would certainly be dear to the heart of the ancient Egyptian.

Some ecosystems are more resilient to change than others; some are so sensitive that they seemingly change overnight. Aquatic ecosystems are among the latter, of which papyrus’s natural ecosystem is an outstanding example. In the Nile valley, the flora of seasonally flooded basins began to change as soon as the first irrigation ditch was dug. We know that such projects got underway early. In fact, one of the first historical “documents” is a stone macehead found by Frederick Green and James Quibell in 1898. It was found along with the Narmer Palette in the main deposit in the temple of Horus at Hierakonpolis, an ancient city between Luxor and Aswan. The macehead is referred to as a “document” because there is a story written on it, which shows an early Egyptian king, Scorpion II, ceremoniously opening a new irrigation ditch in circa 3000 B.C. He is depicted with pickaxe raised while an attendant stands by with a basket to catch the diggings. Above them, rows of papyrus plants are positioned almost as if they were looking on, perhaps in apprehension.

This is also one of the earliest representations of papyrus, and, as the late Helene Kantor of the Oriental Institute in Chicago pointed out, the papyrus plants shown are stylized.⁶ They appear springing from two superimposed ground lines more as representations rather than as hieroglyphs. This could perhaps be taken as a suggestion that in the early days, these plants were being singled out for special treatment; that is, they were being kept apart as hunting preserves or places to live in as part of the Floating World.⁷ Community development and public works in the days of Scorpion or during the Dynasty of Narmer (or Menes, the first pharaoh, 3100 B.C.) involved the elevation of village areas by mounding and the digging of canals. This would put the residents of places, such as Memphis, above the flood level while they built up the main banks of the river into levees. Presumably this heaping up of the soil went on whenever they were not busy building pyramids and temples.

In those early days, groves of acacia, tamarisk, Egyptian sycamore, and Egyptian willow were encouraged in regions close to settlements and on floodplain farms in order to assist in stabilizing the soil that had been heaped onto levees and the banks of early irrigation canals. These trees are aggressive water users, so they helped in drying out the land: all actions detrimental to wetlands and especially swamps. Dikes and canals were a well-established part of the landscape by the time of the Ptolemies and the Romans. Covered with grass and small trees to strengthen them and most likely with a chariot road or footpath running along the top, the embankments served as roadways during inundation. At that time of the year, the river was guided into channels and flow was contained, while breaches made in the bank, intentionally or unintentionally, allowed the water to rush out into the floodplain creating immense shallow lakes six feet deep on all sides.

The Loss of the Plant and the Swamps

Often in the modern world, when rivers lose their native fauna and flora, especially when plants disappear along the waters’ edge, the usual culprits are salinity and changes in river water quality and, beginning with the twentieth century, pollution. In the case of the Nile valley, during ancient times the water did not radically change in quality until the changeover from basin to perennial irrigation, something that didn’t begin until the first barrages were built in the delta from 1843 through to 1930. In the main river, water quality stayed within reason until the Aswan Dam was built in stages from 1899 through to the last high dam phase in 1970.

Prior to the 1800s, changes in salinity and sediment probably didn’t happen to any large measure because of the enormous quantity of water passing through the system. For example, until 1904 two-thirds of the Nile water that entered Egypt from the Sudan was poured into the sea, along with a major share of the sediment load. So much water came through that it flushed the system and kept the water fresh and potable along the length of the river. Proof of its freshness? All Alexandria drank water directly from the Nile at its mouth from 323 B.C. until 646 A.D., a period of one thousand years.

During that time there must have been small or temporary changes in water quality due to geological effects, erosion of upriver substrates, and cataclysmic events or storms. Low-water years must also have brought a concentration of salts and silt in the water due to evaporation. But until the 1800s, Nile water changed so little that it could not be a major factor in the disappearance of papyrus from the delta and from other floodplain swamps during the period prior to 1000 A.D. If there were any chief culprits, they must have been physical and economic factors, especially those that led to clearance of the swamps for food crops during that period.

Once the Arabs conquered Egypt, papyrus was still plentiful and papyrus paper was still in production, and they made a great deal of money off the sale of papyrus paper until they developed rag paper, at which point they walked away from papyrus leaving it to its fate. From then on, during a period of 800 years lasting from circa 1000 A.D. until the arrival of Napoleon in 1798, the population of Egypt exploded while agriculture expanded exponentially to meet the increased expectations of the Arab overlords, who now controlled Egypt.

For the Arabs, clearing papyrus swamps would not be a difficult job. The process is repeated daily in many places in Africa where papyrus swamps are still being reclaimed. Unlike clearing a forest or an acre of brush, there are no stumps or deep-rooted masses of vegetation to pull up. In their attempts to force a path through the swamps, the early European Nile explorers, with their river steamers, resorted to cutting and chopping their way if all else failed. They made the job difficult because they approached floating papyrus swamps head on. From the water’s edge it is very difficult to cut through a tough, fibrous mat that sinks under your feet, making it a horrendous job in the typically hot, humid, insect-infested atmosphere. No wonder they often came to a standstill, frustrated by this tall, green barricade.

The African farmer comes at a papyrus swamp in a different way. He approaches from the land side during the dry season. By then the older stems have died back. He simply walks into the solid mat and starts slashing the soft green shoots, which are left to dry. After a while the whole is burnt, and the ashes are left on the newly exposed swamp soil to enrich it further. Then the shallow-rooted papyrus rhizomes are rooted up from the light organic peat, soil is dug up from the edges or under the shallow parts of the plot and mixed with the peat. The old rhizomes are heaped along with other debris to form berms along the edges of the plot. These berms will later act as dams to allow for the controlled flooding of the plot during the flood season. Within a short while, the farmer is growing a crop of cabbages or other plants that he knows will survive on the new land he has reclaimed where a swamp used to be.

In ancient Egypt, clearing the swamps on the Nile obviously took place first along the riverbanks at boat landings. Later, more extensive clearings would be needed whenever wharves were built. These riverbank areas were widened and raised over the years, which involved clearing of the local vegetation. Later, as villages became towns, then small cities, or major building sites for pharaonic monuments, papyrus along the waterfront and surrounding floodplains would be further cleared, relegating it more and more to areas away from settlements. This initial clearance was not done hastily because some demand for papyrus for use as a fuel was still there, and the need for papyrus for household crafts did not diminish until the time of the Ptolemies. By then other natural products, such as cloth, leather, palm trees, and wood, had replaced the use of swamp products. Its use as fuel was taken over by the byproducts of grain milling. Chaff, often mentioned in ancient farming accounts as the source of energy, was used in pottery kilns and bakery ovens. Once it was clear that papyrus was of use only for paper and rope making, more and more of the swamps were probably allowed to go under. Still, that left large areas in the delta and Fayum where the bulk of paper manufacturing was concentrated.

Economically, the paper industry was not affected by the diminution of swampland, since the papermakers became more adept and more efficient at their trade. During this period more and more control was exerted over the plantations by the papyrus papermaking cartel. Over time the interest of the cartel became the only reason for the survival of papyrus. When Egypt was conquered by the Arabs in 639 A.D., papyrus paper was still being produced and exported, but during the next 300 years, the protection offered by the cartel would vanish, and more and more of the rich swamp soil would be converted to cropland.

Also it did not help that ancient landowners had grown accustomed to the idea that cutting back on production might make papyrus more valuable. As suggested by Strabo in 718 A.D. “they do not let it grow in many places, and because of the scarcity (so created) they set a higher price on it and thus increase the revenues, though they injure the common use of the plant.”⁸ So, in the early days of Arab occupation, swamps that were quite capable of being brought into paper production may have been allowed to stay fallow, or been cleared and converted to other crops.

In the case of papyrus, unlike other crops, clearance is often a one-way street. The habitat and structure of papyrus swamps depend on the organic peat substrate, a natural substance that is in delicate balance. Once cleared or drained, peat is more difficult to re-create, and without it, plant growth is more difficult. So, the clearance of swamps as a market ploy by the papyrus paper cartel may have played a large role in its eventual demise.⁹

Clearly the Romans preferred and encouraged privatized industry, but privatization meant less control over the natural resource base. Swamps taken out of service may never have recovered. Under the Arabs between 600 and 800 A.D., Egypt was again rich. And, while it was also closed off to the West during that period, population numbers rose and the need for land rose as well. Population estimates vary widely for ancient Egypt; it has been set at only one million at the beginning of the pharaonic period (3500 B.C.) Later, in the time of the Romans (30 B.C.) it was five million.¹⁰ Despite the rise in population, or perhaps because of it—after all, population is a main driving force behind agricultural production—Egypt once again became an attractive target for conquest.

In the old days, the most notable conquerors of Egypt were the Libyans. Then Assyrians and Nubians, were 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. After this came the Romans, then the Arabs. Later it was the turn of the Crusaders representing Christianity. They tried conquering Egypt early in 1096 A.D. to no avail. They returned in 1219 and landed in Damietta in order to fulfill the purpose of the Fifth Crusade, which was to capture the Egyptian stronghold at Damietta, and then take Cairo as well. They took Damietta by the end of 1219, but spent all of 1220 waiting for the arrival of reinforcements. In the end, they advanced but were driven back to Damietta where they evacuated in 1221 and ended their effort. From that time on, papyrus was no longer a factor in the development of the Nile valley.¹¹

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that by the year 1000 A.D., in the Egypt created by the Arabs, no one would have mourned the passing of papyrus. After all, like the Greeks, Persians, and Romans, the Arabs were never intimately involved in the history of the plant. They knew it only as something used to make rolls of writing paper. They did not grow up with it in their backyards as the early Egyptians did. They certainly had no plans to walk beyond this world into a swampy paradise known as the Field of Reeds, even if they were to be invited there by the likes of Hathor and Isis. Their visions of the afterlife were, and still are, of a different sort: visions in which a papyrus swamp would not figure.

In ancient times papyrus was well established in Africa, but the extent and height to which it grew was not appreciated until the Victorian explorers arrived. As they trudged forward into the swamps of eastern and central Africa, often fighting their way through papyrus in order to survive, they came to understand the full effect and implications of what a high rate of growth can achieve for a plant, especially one that had little competition until the arrival of modern man.

Today all other countries of the Nile basin—Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo—have substantial natural growths of papyrus. Egypt, in a historic twist of irony, is the only exception.

Small relict wild stands have been found in Wadi Natrun and Damietta,¹² and in 1969 Hassan Ragab brought papyrus plants to Cairo from Sudan and cultivated them there in shallow areas of the Nile River in small patches. This isolated cultivation is what serves as a source of material for the paper used in the tourist trade today.