Papyrus

. . . A wonderful product in truth is this wherewith ingenious Memphis has supplied all the offices in the world . . .

If one serious misapprehension has colored our thinking about Egypt for thousands of years, it is this: Most modern Egyptians, tourists, and students of Egyptian history as far back as the end of the First Millennium have no idea what the ancient Egyptians meant when they talked, wrote, or dreamed about papyrus or papyrus swamps, or pointed to their Paradise, their Heaven, the great papyrus swamp of the afterlife called Sekhet-Aanru—the Field of Reeds. This comes about because the Egypt of our times was—and still is—a land without papyrus.

To correct that image will require a walk on the wild side. Literally, we’d have to go and take a stroll inside a modern papyrus swamp, and therein lies part of the problem. Most of the papyrus swamps of significance today are located in areas that are under fire, or remote and difficult or costly to get to. And when you finally arrive at the side of a papyrus swamp in Africa, it presents itself as a 15–20ft solid wall of green that may be floating on 6ft of water, guarded by a crocodile or two, with a hippo or elephant thrashing around and possibly a python lurking close by.

If you hesitated before going any further, you wouldn’t be alone. But there were some—the early Victorian explorers—who were forced to enter. They were driven by greed, ambition, or curiosity to go into such places and beyond, often cutting their way through miles of such swamps in order to reach their goal, the source of Africa’s great rivers. Of these men there were quite a few who never returned.

How do we know the papyrus swamps of ancient Egypt were like these rather formidable and dangerous ecosystems of today? How do we know they were even as tall?

As Helene Kantor, late Professor of Archeology at the University of Chicago, pointed out in her thesis, the paintings of papyrus in Old Kingdom tombs formed a centerpiece for fishing and fowling scenes that towered high above the human figures. In later times the tendency was to diminish the size and rigidity of the swamp landscape until it became nothing more than a graceful clump, despite the fact that the papyrus plants of ancient Egypt remained tall and robust during all that time. This is evident from the writings of Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist and polymath, who in 23–29 A.D. wrote that he had seen papyrus plants, growing in marshes and sluggish waters along the Nile, that were 15ft in height.

We can also infer the robustness of the plants in ancient days from the width of the dried slices of pith used for making paper in the early days in Egypt. Surviving samples indicate that at least some of the plants were of hefty size.

The best example of this comes from Sir Wallis Budge, the Egyptologist who acquired one of the most extraordinary copies of the Book of the Dead by Scribe Ani yet discovered. Budge was the first to analyze it. He found that some of the plants used in the manufacture of this 78ft papyrus scroll had to be at least 4½ inches in diameter.¹ Though unusually large compared to the papyrus plants cultivated in Cairo today, it is a size easily reached by plants found in equatorial Africa.

It is difficult now for tourists and students of Egyptology to conjure up that vision, but for the ancient citizen it was daily association with this unusual plant that made the intimate connection so easy. This vigorous picture of the plant they knew probably explains why it was so much a part of everyday life in Egypt in ancient times. And also why it pops up as one of the most common symbols associated with lush places and abundant growth, such as the hieroglyph for Lower Egypt, the name for the wife of the Nile god Hapi (Wadjet, the mother of papyrus), and as the hieroglyph for the word “green” and thus “to flourish” or be “eternally renewed.”

The Egyptians used papyrus for thousands of years to build millions of boats, houses, and craft items, and millions of miles of rope that allowed them to keep pace with other river cultures. And, luckily, they were also blessed with a resource that was unique to them, a resource that allowed them to forge ahead of other civilizations and to make the West dependent on Egypt for the next four thousand years—papyrus paper. From 3000 B.C. until 900 A.D., Egyptians made papyrus paper and went on to supply the whole of the Roman Empire with millions of scrolls and sheets.

The early Christian scholar, statesman, and writer Cassiodorus did not know how the civilized Western world had gotten along without it, since by then it was used for books, records of business, correspondence, orders of the day for the Roman army, even the first newspaper: the Acta Diurna, carved originally on metal or stone, was later recorded on papyrus which was, after all, a lot easier to carry around.

Pliny tells us that in 44 B.C., “(Papyrus) paper tends to be in short supply, and as early as in the time of Tiberius a shortage led to the appointment of commissioners from the Senate to oversee its distribution; otherwise daily life would have been in chaos.” Here was the one plant in the history of the world powerful enough to stop the Roman Senate in its tracks. In this way it ruled the world in the same fashion that King Cotton ruled the South, the demand being met exclusively by the papyrus swamps of Egypt. Whoever controlled Egypt controlled the medium of choice. And it was big business, employing thousands of people, some 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.

Even Shirley Hazzard, the bestselling novelist and writer, found this key role played by papyrus in ancient times extraordinary. In Naples in May 1983, she covered the 17th 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.”

Where would the world be without papyrus paper? Like an early Egyptian without a papyrus boat—up the creek without a paddle.

In ancient days, parchment was associated with Pergamum, a city in Anatolia that was fast becoming a center of Greek learning and stood in direct competition with Alexandria in Egypt. On one occasion Ptolemy II is said to have stopped the export of papyrus paper in an attempt to stifle book acquisition at Pergamum; thereafter they used parchment for all their books. This story is an oft-quoted example of cutting off your nose to spite your face; according to Pliny, who had it from Varro, as a result of the papyrus paper embargo, parchment—which was made from animal skin (particularly goat, sheep, or cow) that has been scraped or dried under tension, or vellum made of calfskin—was invented in Pergamum in about 250 B.C. This seems to be another one of those stories that were designed to keep historians busy for years, as we learned that parchment was already known to exist well before that time.

The reality is that parchment-making is definitely an art rather than a science. Although it was invented, according to Herodotus, in the 5th century B.C., it would have required great skill to come up with a consistently high-grade product. The classical scholars Colin Roberts and T. C. Skeat thought a parchment industry on a scale adequate to serve the needs of the ancient world would have required many years, perhaps even centuries, to work out the details by trial and error. To build up and train a sufficient labor force spread over the length and breadth of the world, and eventually the Roman Empire, would have cost much time and money.

Also, parchment may not have arrived in time to record the early works of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Sappho’s poetry, the Song of Songs and early books of the Old Testament, Hesiod’s Work and Days, with its early discussion of the work ethic and justice, and his Theogony, from which we get the descent of the gods and the genesis of Greek mythology.

Missing also, perhaps, would be the works of Pythagoras, and philosopher-poets such as Xenophanes, and Aesop, and many others such as the New Testament and the Koran, which were all written originally on papyrus and then passed on by others to be copied or paraphrased, while the originals vanished.

Meanwhile, desperate humans over the years would and did try virtually anything that came to hand—pieces of stone, bone, cloth, tablets of clay, wax, or wood, palm leaves, pottery shards, sheets of lead, and even tree bark as media of record—but papyrus paper was still the primary choice. And it could be made simply, and quickly, by laying strips of papyrus pith in sequence and then pressing and drying, as shown below. It requires no skill, only a sharp knife, some water, and the stems of papyrus plants. Simple, efficient, and cheap to produce, until Chinese “laid” paper appeared on the market at the end of the First Millennium, it was indispensable.

So a world without papyrus would have been inconceivable, until laid (also called “rag” or “linen”) paper appeared and made its way to Egypt, where it was even manufactured alongside papyrus paper. By 1035 A.D. in the markets of Cairo, vegetables, spices, and hardware were being wrapped in laid paper, which was cheaper and more pliable. This pretty much spelled the end for papyrus. Shortly after this, papyrus plants went missing from Egypt while the swampland where it grew was converted to agriculture. Papyrus plants did show up again in 1969 when cuttings were brought back and it was cultivated as a novelty. Today it grows on the Egyptian Nile in Cairo, where it is used to make papyrus paper for tourists.

Although it is simple enough to make, papyrus paper requires some attention to basics. For example, the stems have to be peeled. It is not possible to just smash them flat and by chance produce a sheet of paper, let alone a roll of a dozen or more sheets joined together in such a way that the joins are as smooth as the made paper. Thus the question arises: How was papyrus paper made?

In my reading, I came across a term often used in error; it was used by the unwary in describing papyrus paper as a “weave.” Even when looking at finished papyrus paper lit from behind, it does look like a “weave,” but clearly the strips of papyrus pith that are used to make paper are laid overlapping (as explained below) and are not woven.

Naphtali Lewis, the ultimate expert on papyrus, once pointed out that the term “weave” (used even by Pliny) in descriptions of how to make papyrus paper is clearly figurative. It is faster and more efficient to simply lay the strips rather than weave them, but I think that the first paper produced was just that—a woven product. Which brings up the next question: Knowing that the tough skin of a papyrus stem has to be peeled away before anything else can be done, how did the first papermaker acquire strips of the inner pulp of the papyrus stem to try weaving it into paper in the first place?

The story probably starts in Memphis, a city that in pre-dynastic days and during the first dynasties was everything that an ancient Egyptian could want. Located in a strategic position between Upper and Lower Egypt, close to the great burial grounds of Saqqara, it is a likely candidate because it was close to the swamps of the surrounding floodplain, and it later became a papermaking center in its own right. It is also likely that in early Memphis, in pre-dynastic times, weavers were a common sight, peeling stems for baskets, sails, or mats. It was and still is common practice in Africa to use the long tough strips of fresh papyrus skin for weaving mats; they have to be used fresh because that’s the moment when they are still supple, pliable, and useful in weaving.

The soft pith of the stem is left over from this process and it would certainly attract the attention of any children sitting there as their mothers weave away. The children could easily have been playing with the inner pith that had been left in long strips. Possibly, as kids do, they began copying their elders and wove some primitive mats of their own out of the pith. Even more fun would be squashing them, and after that, if they were left to dry, humankind would have an early form of paper.

Further refined, the pith sliced into thin slices and laid rather than woven, then pressed rather than squashed, becomes a process that might have produced the first pieces of papyrus paper.

Born around 3000 B.C. during pre-dynastic times, it would catch on quickly. Perhaps this evolution was helped when the child’s father came home. He is a potter and decorates his work in dark red with pictures of animals, people, and boats. Not much of a job, but he is a curious young man and interested in life about him and in things like this dry, white, featherlight mat that his child has left behind on the floor of their simple mud-brick house or papyrus-reed hut. This is the day after his wife finished weaving some window mats made from papyrus skins, just in time for the rainy season. He turns this product of his child’s work over in his hands. His child wakes from her nap, comes to him, and he shows her how to decorate the mat using the tools of his trade, a reed brush and colored inks. He is also a recorder for the village chief and must tally the grain that is stored in the village granary, and he comes to realize that using this simple mat of papyrus pith is much easier than spending his time scouring the neighborhood for flat bones and rocks, or collecting pieces of pottery from his workplace.

Now the idea catches on. Well aware of what he has, and given the inks and pens at his disposal, and the obsession of priests for temple documents and records, and the village chiefs for accounts, he improves on it. His career goes forward. He is soon known as a scribe in the region, things begin to look up markedly, and he gives thanks to the gods for his family, his kids, and this new medium.

No matter when or how all this happened, paper so invented would require years to evolve into the mass commodity it was for 4,000 years. It was perhaps improved on with every generation until after some years the refined method became the standard that is still in use today in producing papyrus-paper souvenirs.

Interestingly, as shown below, it doesn’t require much skill to make papyrus paper. The better forms and higher grades employ sizing and polishing, and joining the sheets into rolls. Perhaps at that stage some expertise is needed, but basically the making of the paper itself is a simple process, and fortunately Pliny preserved the description for the historical record. Using Pliny’s account, and after a great deal of research, Hassan Ragab, the late founder of the Papyrus Institute in Cairo, was able to re-create the process. In 1979 he earned a Ph.D. from Grenoble in the art and science of making papyrus paper. During this time he brought cuttings of plants from Sudan to Egypt and started cultivating papyrus in shallow, protected areas of the Nile River not far from the old Sheraton Hotel.

His method of making paper was as close as possible to the original method, and has given rise to many papermaking centers in Cairo and Luxor where scenes are daily repeated of what might have taken place in ancient times. Standing in such a site near Memphis or in the delta or Faiyum (Map 2, p. 21) we would have seen workers hauling in armfuls of green stems freshly cut from a nearby marsh exactly as they do in Cairo today.

One famous tomb drawing showed papyrus collectors assembling bundles destined for the boat, rope, mat, or paper makers. In the drawing, one stem is being peeled; perhaps, as suggested by Prof. Quirke at the Petrie Museum in London, the skin would provide ties for the bundles. The pith so revealed could be sliced lengthwise and used for paper.

In this tomb drawing, the ancient artist also used the scene to show us the Ages of Man, from a lad on the left pulling papyrus stems into a papyrus skiff, to a gray-haired, paunchy fellow carrying a bundle of stems.

1. Green stems are trimmed into pieces about 12 inches long. These are soaked in river water until they are peeled.

2. The tough skin peels easily, exposing the white pith of the inner stem. This pith is then sliced thin with a razor blade.

4. The strips are laid parallel, slightly overlapping, to form a sheet. More strips are laid on top, at right angles to the first layer.

5. The two layers are then squeezed between blotters and held under pressure until the papyrus is dry and the strips have fused into a sheet.

6. The sheet is burnished with a fine clay powder until the surface is smooth and ready to write on.

Making papyrus paper: slicing the pith; rolling pith slices; laying out the slices; and pressing the sheets made from the slices.

At this point it is useful to note that if you are making papyrus paper at home in small quantities, it is no longer necessary to have access to fresh stems or a papyrus swamp. Thin dry strips of papyrus pith are readily available on the Internet from suppliers in Egypt. In the case where you are using dry strips bought from such a supplier, simply skip the first few steps and soak the thin dry slices overnight, then use them as if they were the fresh-cut slices called for in the process.

The thin slices, after being squeezed and pressed to remove excess water, are laid out parallel, slightly overlapping, to form a sheet. More strips are then laid on top of that sheet at right angles, and the two layers are rolled with a rolling pin or hammered with wooden mallets to flatten the sheets. This squeezing or hammering forces water out of the sheets and allows them to dry faster.

The wet sheets are then laid out on linen and compressed between boards. Bound tightly and set aside to dry, preferably stacked against some sunny wall, they are opened later and the dry sheets taken out. These are now sheets that are tough enough to be burnished with fine clay powder until the surface is smooth. At this point also the paper can be tested. According to Dr. Ragab, “Good papyrus paper is quite flexible.” In addition to feeling smooth to the touch, high quality papyrus paper should be easy to bend and must remain flexible. This is an indication that the natural juices that bind the sheet and help keep it intact have been properly distributed throughout, a condition that comes only if pressure is used while the sheet is fresh and still wet.²

If there is any secret in the manufacture of this paper, it is that sufficient hammering with a wooden mallet or rolling or pressing during the early stage is essential if the strips are to adhere to one another. This allows the sheet to stand up to everyday wear and tear. Smoothing of the surface with a pumice or polishing stone makes for a better surface, but is not an absolute necessity, as you can write perfectly well on a freshly made sheet as soon as it has dried.

After the sheets are removed from the presses, they can be joined together to form scrolls of twenty sheets (later referred to by the Romans as a scapus), a process done using starch paste rather than glue in order to preserve the flexibility of the roll. In the final stages of the assembly line in an Egyptian paper factory, large rolls 60–100ft long were sometimes made up on special order.

The very first production of papyrus paper in Egypt must have been before 3100 B.C., since by then a tied roll of papyrus—the hieroglyphic sign signifying the process of writing—was already in use. The oldest papyrus paper ever found was a pair of blank rolls found in 1936 by a young Egyptologist, Walter Emery. The rolls were in an inlaid box in the burial place of Hemaka (ca. 2850 B.C.), chancellor and royal seal-bearer of Pharaoh Den in the First Dynasty. More recently, the Cambridge Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson concluded that the two rolls, though uninscribed, not only were proof that papyrus paper existed 5,000 years ago, but also that Egyptian writing already existed in the First Dynasty (a span of eight kings from Narmer to Qa’a over the period 2950–2750 B.C.). He based his conclusion on the fact that a cursive form of writing called hieratic was tied to papyrus, which lent itself to this speedier form of writing. Thus if the paper existed, then writing must already have been in use, which is a double first for papyrus: not only was it the first paper but it was proof of the first cursive writing by man.

The earliest literary use of papyrus is the Prisse Papyrus, known from the name of its former owner, a French Egyptologist who called the text “The Maxims of Ptah-Hotep.” It is a copy of a work written earlier by the Grand Vizier Ptahhotep, an administrator and first minister during the reign of King Djedkare Isesi (2475–2455 B.C.).

The earliest Greek papyrus is believed to be a papyrus excavated near Saqqara on which was written the poem “The Persians” by Timotheus, poet and musician of Miletus, 450–357 B.C.

The most famous of all papyrus scrolls is the Papyrus of Scribe Ani found at Thebes, and purchased by the Trustees of the British Museum in 1888. It is an extensive account of The Book of the Dead as recorded by Ani, who was more than a scribe, being “. . . accountant of all the gods . . . governor of the granary of the lords of Abydos . . . and . . . scribe of the sacred property of the lords of Thebes.” It measures 78ft and is the longest known papyrus of the Theban period. Other long papyri are: the Papyrus of Nebseni (18th Dyn) 76ft; the Papyrus of Hunefer (19th Dyn) 18ft; the Leyden Papyrus of Qenna (18th Dyn) 50ft; and the Dublin Papyrus (18th Dyn) 24ft. Many of these early rolls were cut into smaller sections for ease of handling. One of the longest papyri still virtually intact and on display is the 63ft Book of the Dead of the Priest of Horus, Imouthes (Imhotep) at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

All of these are memorials to the skills, patience, and dedication of artisans who knew the value of good papyrus paper when they saw it. The fact that the papyri survived means that papyrus paper, whether freshly made or centuries old, is quite durable if kept under the right conditions.³ One roll over 3,000 years old in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin could still be rolled and unrolled by the curator without the slightest danger to the material.⁴

If kept under reasonably dry conditions, it lasts for a very long time; but once exposed to humidity, 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.⁵

In making Egypt a province of their Empire, the Romans were simply formalizing a longstanding arrangement with a major trading partner. In ancient Egypt, in exchange for luxury imports and raw materials such as gold coins, glassware, olive oil, wool, purple fabric, and metal weapons and tools, Egypt exported grain, gold, linen, glass, painted pottery, and papyrus paper and rope.⁶ For years Egyptian grain exports had fed the ports, cities, and populace of Italy. Grain imports would rise to more than 100,000 metric tons per year under Augustus.⁷ But this was a two-way street; Egyptian exporters saw it as an opportunity in their race to export value-added items, a challenge that has still not abated (even after thousands of years, it is still with us in the modern day).

The first instance I saw of the value-added principle in action was in Ghana when I was consulting on the environmental impact of a new and very expensive dam. Aluminum ore was locally available in quantity, and the new hydroelectric facility near Accra was destined to be used to provide the power to smelt the ore. But to make exports competitive and profitable, economists on the project suggested it would be better to export improved or finished products. They suggested that instead of exporting ingots, Ghana would be better off exporting aluminum pots and pans.

When Egypt came under Roman administration, Egyptian papermakers were under pressure, since they were now subjected to strict quality controls in terms of grading and standardizing sheets. But they rose to the occasion by producing finished high-quality paper and were also still able to keep the consumer price for papyrus paper high. Prof. Lewis tells us that the paper factories were able to operate twelve months a year, since papyrus was harvested year round. It also helped that a cartel existed among the plantation owners.⁸ As a result, when the rolls left Egypt bound for the Roman markets, they represented a marvelous example of the value-added principle, unlike grain which was sent raw to be ground into flour by the Roman mills, or glass and linen that required much work, and gold that needed to be refined. In the case of glass, pottery, and refined gold, fuel was needed in a country where wood was scarce. The kilns and furnaces in Egypt often used chaff (waste from grain milling), dried papyrus stems, and, reluctantly, “chaparral wood”—local bushes and stunted trees from the arid regions.

So the Roman Empire stood to make a great deal of money because Egyptian papyrus paper was a model in the world of value-added. Back in Egypt, the papermakers furthered their cause by keeping the process of making the paper secret, until Pliny spilled the beans. Until then, the papyrus cartel was able to keep the price of paper high for hundreds of years. And over many centuries the paper trade also provided steady, reliable work for thousands.

Although most ancient Egyptians were illiterate, many benefited from the manufacture of papyrus paper during the time when Egypt was papermaker to the world.