Papyrus

One of the most remarkable inventions of ancient Egypt was the making of paper from the papyrus plant. As early as 3000 BC 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 used papyrus for administrative records, legal documents and letters of business and personal life. Equally important for our understanding of ancient Egypt, papyrus was used to record literary texts as well as compendia of knowledge such as the famous Rhind mathematical papyrus. Religious hymns and litanies are recorded, as are the great collections of formulae to secure life after death, the Book of the Dead. Richard Parkinson and Stephen Quirke examine the methods of papyrus-making and its different uses under the Pharoahs and their successors, the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors. To the elite of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt we owe the survival of much classical Greek literature. Papyrus remained the writing material of the Mediterranean world until it was eclipsed by the cloth paper of the Orient in the ninth century AD, bringing to an end a tradition spanning 4000 years.