A plant that became paper-like
Papyrus is a tall sedge that once grew thickly in the marshes of the Nile Delta. The Egyptians used it for boats, mats, rope and sandals as well as writing. The English word paper comes from the Greek word for it, even though true paper is a different material made by a different process.
The evidence for papyrus writing is old. A blank roll found in a tomb associated with the First Dynasty, roughly around 3000 BCE, is commonly cited as among the earliest known examples. That means papyrus was in use well before most of the ancient world’s famous texts were written.
How a sheet was made
Ancient writers left few detailed instructions, and our understanding relies partly on a later Roman description and partly on modern experiments. The general method is well accepted:
- The green outer rind of the stem was cut away, leaving the pale inner pith.
- The pith was sliced into thin, wide strips.
- Strips were laid side by side, with a second layer placed across the first at right angles.
- The layers were pressed or beaten so that the plant’s natural juices and starches helped bind them, then dried and polished smooth.
The result was a flexible, light sheet with a visible grain. The side where fibers ran horizontally was the preferred writing side, since a reed pen moved along the fibers without catching. Individual sheets were then glued edge to edge, with the joins overlapping, to form a long roll. Exact roll lengths varied. Many were short, while some long literary or ritual texts ran to many meters.
Writing and reading a scroll
Scribes wrote with a reed pen, cut and split at the tip, and with ink made from carbon, usually soot mixed with a binder such as gum. Text was written in columns, and a reader held the roll in both hands, unrolling one side while winding the other. For Egyptian texts, a scribe might use a cursive script, hieratic, for daily business and religious texts, while more formal hieroglyphs were common on monuments and some funerary papyri.
Papyri served many purposes: tax records, letters, legal contracts, school exercises, medical and magical texts, literature, and the funerary compositions often called the Book of the Dead, which were placed in tombs. Much of what we know about daily life in ancient Egypt comes from such documents.
Across the Mediterranean
Egypt held a near monopoly over the best supply for a long time, and papyrus was exported widely. Greeks and later Romans used it for books, correspondence and administration. Libraries in the Hellenistic and Roman world were stocked largely with papyrus rolls. A single long work might fill several rolls, and ancient book divisions, such as the “books” of a long history, often reflect what fit on one roll.
Because papyrus came from one region, supply could be affected by politics and trade. Some later accounts connect shortages with experiments in other materials, though the details of such stories are not always reliable.
Why so much survives, and why so much does not
Papyrus is fragile in damp conditions, where it rots or is eaten by organisms, yet it can survive for thousands of years in dry sand. That is why most surviving papyri come from Egypt, especially from dry sites like Oxyrhynchus, where huge numbers of fragments were found in ancient rubbish heaps. In the Roman town of Herculaneum, a library of papyrus rolls was carbonized by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, and scholars have been working for a long time on methods to read them without destroying them.
For most of the Mediterranean outside Egypt, very little papyrus has lasted. This means our view of ancient writing is skewed toward dry places.
Decline
Papyrus did not suddenly vanish. It remained common for centuries, including in the early Christian and Islamic periods in Egypt. But rolls were awkward, the material cracked when folded, and parchment offered a stronger alternative, especially in the bound codex form. As paper spread through the Islamic world from the eighth century onward, papyrus use in Egypt gradually faded. By the early medieval period in Europe, papyrus had mostly been replaced by parchment. The move away from the scroll format is covered further in the article on parchment and codices.