Ancient Egyptian Papyrus

Ancient Egyptian Papyrus

Papyrus began as the world's first type of paper, derived from the Cyperus
papyrus plant. Even though it was developed in Egypt, it spread across the
ancient world and was used throughout West Asia. Before papyrus became
common, many cultures wrote on clay tablets. It was eventually replaced by the
Chinese method of making paper from rags.

What is Papyrus?
Papyrus is both the shortened name of the plant and the paper product made
from it, but is most often referred to as the latter.

The plant grows in the Nile River and can reach heights of about 16 feet. The
long stalks of the plant were typically soaked in water until they reached a
slight state of rot. They were then laid next to and on top of each other, and
pounded flat until the stalks essentially merged. The final step was drying.

Egyptians used papyrus for much more than just making paper however.
Papyrus was also used in woven material such as baskets, mats, rope and
sandals. The stalks could be bundled together to make boats and when dried,
it could be used for fuel. For a long time, the art of turning papyrus into paper
was lost. Although the Egyptians did not leave much evidence on how it was
done, in 1965, Dr. Hassan Ragab rediscovered the process through intense
research.
Papyrus was a weed that grew wildly along the banks of the Nile
River. It grew about 10 feet high. It was used to make
everything!
The ancient Egyptians used papyrus to make paper, baskets,
sandals, mats, rope, blankets, tables, chairs, mattresses,
medicine, perfume, food, and clothes. Truly, papyrus was an
important "gift of the Nile".
 They even tried to make boats out of papyrus, but that did not
work very well. Papyrus absorbs water. Boats made of papyrus
would become waterlogged and sink.
Using papyrus to make boats might not have worked, but
making paper out of papyrus worked very well. The ancient
Egyptians soaked papyrus to soften it, and then mashed it. They
pushed the mashed papyrus together into sheets, and let the
sheets dry. Then they cut the dried papyrus sheets into strips.
They piled several strips on top of each other to make a thick
paper. They beat the stack with a hammer to mash the strips
together. Then, they placed a weight on top of each stack. That
made the paper thin and sturdy. The final step was to dry to
stack. That's how they made paper.  
The ancient Egyptians used papyrus to make books. But they
were not books like our. Ancient Egyptian books were made
from long strips of papyrus paper. The end of a strip was pasted
to another strip, to form a long and thin continuous writing
surface. Someone one end, and sometimes both ends were
fastened to a stick of wood, or if you were very rich, a thin stick
of ivory. Most papyrus books were only a few feet long. But
some were very long, over 150 feet long!
But still, it was paper made of papyrus. That meant that even
thought it had been beaten to a pulp, twice, and dried, twice, it
would still absorb water. To make sure what they wrote down
was protected, the ancient Egyptians only wrote on one side of a
sheet (thin strip) of paper. When the paper was full of writing,
they rolled the paper into a cylinder with the writing inside, and
left a hole down the middle. That way, if the paper picked up
any moisture, it could dry more easily.

Egyptian Papyrus
Definition

by Joshua J. Mark 
published on 08 November 2016
Papyrus is a plant (cyperus papyrus) which once grew in abundance, primarily in the
wilds of the Egyptian Delta but also elsewhere in the Nile River Valley, but is now
quite rare. Papyrus buds opened from a horizontal root growing in shallow fresh water
and the deeply saturated Delta mud. Stalks reached up to 16 feet tall (5 m) ending in
small brown flowers which often bore fruit. These plants once were simply part of the
natural vegetation of the region, but once people found a utilitarian purpose for them,
they were cultivated and managed in farms, harvested heavily, and their supply
depleted. Papyrus still exists in Egypt today but in greatly reduced number.  

The papyrus of Egypt is most closely associated with writing - in fact, the English word
'paper' comes from the word 'papyrus' - but the Egyptians found many uses for
the plant other than a writing surface for documents and texts. Papyrus was used as a
food source, to make rope, for sandals, for boxes and baskets and mats, as window
shades, material for toys such as dolls, as amulets to ward off throat diseases, and even
to make small fishing boats. It also played a part in religious devotion as it was often
bound together to form the symbol of the ankh and offered to the gods as a gift.
Papyrus also served as a political symbol through its use in the Sma-Tawy, the insignia
of the unity of Upper and Lower Egypt. This symbol is a bouquet of papyrus
(associated with the Delta of Lower Egypt) bound with a lotus (the symbol of Upper
Egypt).

BESIDES WRITING, PAPYRUS WAS USED AS A

FOOD SOURCE, TO MAKE ROPE, FOR SANDALS,
AS WINDOW SHADES, MATERIAL FOR TOYS
SUCH AS DOLLS, AS AMULETS TO WARD OFF
THROAT DISEASES, & EVEN TO MAKE SMALL
FISHING BOATS.
The plant may also be seen etched in stone on temples and monuments, symbolizing
life and eternity as the Egyptian afterlife, known as the Field of Reeds, was thought to
mirror the fertile Nile River Valley right down to the abundance of papyrus. The name
'Field of Reeds' actually refers to the reeds of the papyrus plant. At the same time,
however, the papyrus thicket represented the unknown and the forces of chaos. Kings
are regularly depicted hunting in the papyrus fields of the Delta to symbolize the
imposition of order over chaos.

The dark and mysterious nature of the papyrus fields were frequently employed as a
motif in mythology. Papyrus fields feature in a number of important myths; most
notably that of Osiris and Isis after Osiris is murdered by his brother Set and Isis hides
their child Horus in the marshes of the Delta. The papyrus reeds, in this case, hid the
mother and child from Set's intentions to kill Horus and so again symbolize order
prevailing over disorder and light over darkness. 

NAME & PROCESSING

Papyrus is the Greek name for the plant and may come from the Egyptian
word papuro(also given as pa-per-aa) meaning 'the royal' or 'that of the pharaoh' because
the central government had control of papyrus processing as they owned the land and,
later, oversaw the farms the plant grew on. The ancient Egyptians called the
plant djet or tjufi or wadj, forms of the concept of freshness. Wadj further denotes
lushness, flourishing, greenness. Once papyrus was cut, harvested, and processed into
rolls, it was called djema which may mean 'clean' or 'open' in reference to the fresh
writing surface.

Nebamun
Hunting in the Marshes

Papyrus was harvested from the beginning of the Predynastic Period in Egypt (c. 6000-
c.3150 BCE) and continued to be throughout Egypt's history down to the Ptolemaic
Dynasty (323-30 BCE) and into Roman Egypt (30 BCE - c. 640 CE). Field workers would
harvest the plants from the marsh by cutting them at the bottom with sharp blades,
bundling the stalks together, and carrying them to some conveyance which brought
them to a processing center. Historian Margaret Bunson describes the process whereby
the plants were made into workable sheets:
The stem of the papyrus plant was cut into thin strips which were laid side by side in
perpendicular fashion. A solution of resin from the plant was laid down and a second
layer of papyrus was put into place, horizontally. The two layers were then pressed and
allowed to dry. Immense rolls of papyrus could be made by joining the single
sheets...The sides of a papyrus where the fibers run horizontally are the recto and,
where the fibers run vertically, the verso. The recto was preferred but the verso was
used for documents as well, allowing two separate texts to be included on a single
papyrus. (201)

Egyptologist Rosalie David adds to the description, detailing the stages of this process
of forming the plants into sheets:

In the first stage, the stalk of the plant was sliced into pieces and the pith was cut out
and beaten with a hammer to produce wafers. These were arranged side by side and
crosswise in two layers and were then beaten into sheets. Then the individual pages
were stuck together in the same way to form a standard roll of twenty pages; sometimes
the rolls were stuck together as required to provide an even longer writing surface. After
drying in the sun the full strip was rolled up with the horizontal fibers on the inside. This
was the "recto" that would be written on first. (200)

The sheets, now joined into rolls, were then transported to temples, government
buildings, the market or exported in trade. Although papyrus is closely associated with
writing in general, it was actually mostly used only for religious and government texts
because manufacturing costs were fairly expensive. Not only was the manual labor in
the fields and marshes costly, it took skilled workers to methodically beat and process
the plant without destroying it. All of the extant papyri are from temples, government
offices, or personal collections of wealthy or at least well-off individuals. Written works
often appear on pieces of wood, stone, or ostraca (shards from clay pots). The image of
the Egyptian scribe hunched over his papyrus scroll is accurate, but long before he got
his hands on that scroll, he would have spent literally years practicing writing on
potsherds, chunks of stone, and pieces of wood. 
USES & EXAMPLES
The scribes of ancient Egypt spent years learning their craft and, even if they were from
wealthy families, they still were not allowed to waste precious material on their lessons.
David notes that "the most common and cheapest writing materials were ostraca and
pieces of wood. These were often used by schoolboys for their letters and exercises"
(200). Only once one had mastered the basics of writing was one allowed to practice on
a papyrus scroll. David notes how exercises found practiced on ostraca are sometimes
duplicated on papyrus, which often supplies missing words or phrases to works which
are incomplete in either form.

As a writing material, papyrus was used for hymns, religious texts, spiritual
admonitions, letters, official documents, proclamations, love poems, medical texts,
scientific or technical manuals, record-keeping, magical treatises, and literature. Extant
scrolls range from fragments to one page to the famous Ebers Papyrus which is 110
pages long on a scroll sixty-five feet (20 metres) long. The Ebers Papyrus is a medical
text which is routinely cited as evidence of how medicine and magic were interrelated
in ancient Egypt. Along with other papyrus scrolls like the Kahun Gynaecological
Papyrus, the London Medical Papyrus, and the Edwin Smith Papyrus, to name only a
few, these works attest to the vast medical knowledge and skill of the ancient Egyptians
and how they went about addressing major and minor injuries, various ailments, and
serious conditions such as cancer and heart disease. Cases of anxiety, depression, and
trauma are also dealt with in the medical texts of Egypt as are subjects like abortion,
birth control, menstrual cramps, and infertility.
 Edwin Smith
Papyrus

Papyrus was also, of course, used for literary texts. The term 'literature' is commonly
applied to an array of ancient Egyptian works from medical texts, royal decrees and
proclamations, letters, autobiographies and biographies, religious texts, and others
besides works of the imagination. A number of these works were inscribed in tombs,
on templewalls, or on stele and obelisks while those which fit the common definition of
'literature' were written on papyrus. Some of the best known are The Tale of the
Shipwrecked Sailor, The Report of Wenamun, and The Tale of Sinuhe, but there are many
others.

Ancient Egyptian scribes wrote in black and red ink. Red was used for the names of
demons or evil spirits, to mark the beginning of a new paragraph, for emphasis of a
word or passage, and for punctuation in some cases. Scribes carried a wooden case
which held cakes of black and red paint and a water flask to mix and dilute the paint
into ink. The pen was initially a thin reed with a soft tip but was replaced in the third
century BCE by the stylus, a more robust reed sharpened to a very fine point. A scribe
would begin a work on the recto of the papyrus roll, write until it was filled, and then
flip it over to continue the text on the verso. In some instances, a papyrus roll on which
only the recto had been used would be taken by another scribe and used for another
work, either complementary or completely unrelated.

Egpytian Scribe's
Palette

As noted, however, papyrus was not used exclusively for writing. The plant could be
baked and eaten, and Herodotus reports that the papyrus root was a staple of the
Egyptian diet. It was cut and prepared in a variety of dishes much as the later potato
came to be in other cultures. Papyrus was not only a food source but leaned itself to an
incredibly diverse range of uses. The earliest Egyptian skiffs were made by tightly
weaving stalks of papyrus and binding them with rope, also made of papyrus. This
technique created a light-weight water-tight boat which could easily be carried by
hunters or fishermen. The papyrus skiff is featured in numerous tomb and temple
paintings and has a markedly different, more linear, shape than later wooden boats
built on the same design. Papyrus continued to be a significant aspect of the Egyptian
boat even after wood replaced it as the primary material. When small wooden vessels
were developed into large sailing ships, the plant was woven into ropes for the sails.
Papyrus rope, however, was used for a number of purposes besides sailing and
papyrus fiber, which was quite strong, proved useful in other products.

Mats and window shades were woven through a technique similar to that used to make
writing material. The shafts of the plant were set down vertically and then woven with
others horizontally and pulled tightly; they were then bound with a thinner fiber from
the plant. Sandals were made by coiling the papyrus and were so sturdy that many
examples of them have been found thousands of years after they were made still in
good condition. Papyrus sandals required a great deal of skill to make and were too
expensive for most people. Herodotus reports that the priests of Amun only wore
papyrus sandals which, along with other evidence, scholars interpret as further proof of
the priests' great wealth. Dolls or other toy figures were made by bunching up the stalks
and then shaping them through tightly tied fibers to create a head, arms, and legs.
 Papyrus Sandals

This "bunching" of the plant was employed in the creation of a popular offering to the
gods: the shape of the ankh. The ankh, symbol of life and promise of life everlasting,
was one of the most important icons of ancient Egypt and frequently placed with
offering to the gods at temples or obelisks. Egyptologist Richard H. Wilkinson notes
how "the ankh could be symbolized by floral bouquets and the 'papyrus swathe'
(bundles of flowers and plant foliage tied around a central bunch of papyrus stalks)
which was commonly offered to the gods" (161). This same technique was used in
creating the Sma-Tawy symbol representing the unity of the country. The association of
papyrus with unity and the gods is fitting in that the plant, like the gods and the gifts of
the land, was an integral part of the people's lives.

EDITORIAL REVIEW