Papyrus

Egyptian Bookshelf

by R.B. Parkinson, Stephen Quirke

One of the most outstanding inventions of ancient Egypt was the making of "paper" from the papyrus plant. As early as 3000 B.C., sheets and rolls of papyrus provided an ideal surface for writing with reed pen and cakes of carbon black and red ochre pigment. Egyptian scribes were able to record on papyri everyday details such as administrative records, legal documents, and letters of business and personal life. Equally important for our understanding of ancient Egypt, pen and papyrus were used to record literary texts, tales, and moral instructions, as well as compendia of Egyptian knowledge exemplified by the famous Rhind Mathematical Papyrus and the books of treatment, prescriptions, and recitations for healing. Religious hymns and litanies are recorded, as are the great formulae to secure life after death--the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead. In this book, Richard Parkinson and Stephen Quirke freshly examine the methods of papyrus-making and its different uses, not only under the Pharaohs, but also other Egyptian civilizations such as the Hellenistic kingdom of the Ptolemies and the colonial rule of the Roman Empire. Papyrus remained the writing material of the Mediterranean world until it was eclipsed by the cloth paper of the Orient in the ninth century A.D., bringing four thousand years of writing tradition to an end.

Genres: Egyptology

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Patricia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Because the museum I work in has a number of papyrus manuscripts, I felt the need to learn more about papyrus and the plant-to-writing-medium transformation. In answering my questions about what Cyperus papyrus is, and how it becomes a writing medium, this book earns five stars. In six hours (the time it took to read this slim book), you'll know everything you need to know about what papyrus is (a fresh-water marsh reed), how papyrus turns from reed to a glueless writing medium, plus many interesting facts about scribes, ink, linen, origin of the word, etc. Do you know how to 'erase' papyri documents? Or that probably only 0.3 to 5% of ancient Egyptians could read?

Read this book and you'll be able to decode when the colours black and red are used on Egyptian papyri (red was used for "highlighting phrases and marking distinctions" but was otherwise regarded as a very inauspicious colour--villains' names are written in red). And you'll meet Thoth, the ibis-headed god of knowledge, associated with the moon as lunar movements was the key to calculating time in ancient Egypt.

Is it a book for the layman? No. Is it a book for all lovers of Egyptian and ancient history? Absolutely. As well as anyone curious about the world's earliest writing medium (paper, invented by the Chinese, only replaced papyrus after the 8th century). I would recommend it for any adult interested in mummies, Egyptology, manuscripts, pens, ostraca, ancient gods, etc....

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is dry and fascinating at the same time, dense with details about how papyrus came to be used, how it fell out of use, and the various different kinds of writings that were used on it.

In the New Kingdom, from the reign of Thutmes III, the forms of hieratic signs were systematically revised. This revision was marked by a return toward the hieroglyphs which underlay hieratic signs. The handwriting also appears swifter and more floridly calligraphic, although ‘calligraphy’ does not seem to have existed as an art form distinct from fine handwriting.

Much of what we know about papyrus and what went on it comes from tombs, because Egypt put their tombs in locations that were nearly perfect for the preservation of papyrus. Less stylized and formal documents would have been in use where humans can better live, which means more moisture and less isolation, resulting in decomposition and destruction of papyrus documents such as inventories, accounts, invoices, stories, and letters.

It is difficult to assess how much has been lost. The majority of administrative papyri will have been kept in the exposed environment of towns in the Nile valley and have decayed… There was presumably a vast mass of administrative paperwork, from which only a few examples have survived.

Perhaps unsurprisingly in a culture where writing was a very specialized profession, being a scribe was, at least according to the scribes who created all written documents, a very noble profession!

Spend the day writing with your fingers
and read in the night!
Be close to the roll and the palette—
they are sweeter than pomegranate wine.
Writing, for him who knows it,
is more excellent than any office.
It is sweeter than provisions and beer,
than clothing, than ointment.
It is more precious than a heritage in Egypt,
than a chapel in the West.

Most of the photos are in black and white, losing a bit of the interesting use of color for semi-typographical purposes. But some are in color, and are wonderful.

There’s even a final chapter on how papyrus has been preserved and even restored after exhumation, sometimes usefully, sometimes counterproductively: what works and what doesn’t. But the authors go even further to discuss the tradeoffs of restoration. Many of the papyri we know about were re-used not as further writing materials but in the creation of other things, such as masks and coffins, using a vaguely papier maché-like material known as “cartonnage”. Helpfully, the process of creating cartonnage preserves the papyri intact.

But accessing those texts by removing them creates “the dilemma of whether to preserve the painted mask or to destroy it in the hope of finding papyri.”

New techniques are being developed to peel the layers of papyrus away from the inside of a mask, without damaging the painted outer surface, but it is still a difficult task.

And it still destroys some of the original object, of course, preserving mainly the literally superficial display of it.

These problems were present in antiquity, as is shown by… the theological inscription on the ‘Shabaka Stone’. This claims… that

this writing was copied out anew by his Majesty in the Temple of his father Ptah-south-of-his-wall, for his Majesty had found it to be a work of the ancestors which was worm eaten and could not be understood from beginning to end.

King Shabaka copied it onto a basalt slab ‘so that it became better than it had been before’. Ironically, the slab was reused as a grindstone and is itself now illegible in many places.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a good introduction to the topic. The illustrations were great, although the references to the images in the margins (especially to the color plates) were somewhat cumbersome to me. I appreciated the Chronological Table at the back.