Papyrus

A Papyrus is a tall, reedy plant that grows in water specifically around Africa and the Mediterranean. It is also a kind of paper made from the pith of papyrus plant, used for writing on before paper. It is considered the first paper-like writing material.

This painting is a copy of a detail from a scene of Egyptian people harvesting and working papyrus. The original painting was made in ca. 1479–1458 B.C. and the copy was produced around 1914–1916 by Hugh R. Hopgood as part of a larger project to copy and preserve Egyptian artifacts, pieces of which were being hacked off and taken away to be held in Western museums or private collections. The copy is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Creation and Usage

Papyrus is created from the inner stalks of the Cyperus papyrus plant. These stalks were cut and used to create light-weight, flexible sheets for writing on using ink. Papyrus was the most common writing material in a post-tablet world being used to record religious works, legal documents, literature, etc. It was the material used for scrolls in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome. Papyrus was also used in the early versions of the codex. These early versions of the codex were still written in a column style like was standardized in scrolls. This made thicker sheets of papyrus (compared to the thin paper popularized today) valuable for a time while codices were first being copied.

Location

Papyrus is primarily found in the Nile River Valley, hence its significance in Egyptian history. It can also be found in the Mediterranean Sea which explains why it was regularly available to be used in scrolls in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome. The plant can be harvested from the riverbeds, and the inner piths are turned into the writing surface popularized before modern paper and books came about.

Significance

Because of its flexibility and light-weight form, as opposed to clay or stone tablets, papyrus allowed for the writing of longer scrolls and religious texts. In the centuries prior to codices being invented, specifically in Egypt and Rome, papyrus was the paper on which everything was written. Without papyrus, scrolls would not have been able to be as long or detailed as they were. The flexible, lightweight structure and the easily accessible plant both made it possible to have a regular method of recording events. The most common examples of scrolls are made out of papyrus, therefore without papyrus scrolls would not have been as easy to create or normalize. Papyrus scrolls were used to record the religious and historical texts of the world as well, so they offer the foundations of our oldest books like the Bible and Torah.