![]() ![]() The papyrus plant needed fresh water or water-saturated earth to grow. From these “germs of creation,” the Egyptians extracted the material on which they could create and record for millennia. The papyrus plant was a symbol of rebirth. Papyrus marshes were thus seen as fecund, fertile regions that contained the germs of creation. "In ancient Egyptian cosmology, the world was created when the first god stood on a mound that emerged from limitless and undifferentiated darkness and water, a mythical echo of the moment each year when the land begins to reappear from beneath the annual floodwaters. As Janice Kamrin of the Department of Egyption Art at the Metropolitan Museum of art once wrote, The papyrus plant was very important to the ancient Egyptians. (4) This material, papyrus, would remain in use for longer than any other material in the history of written documents. Around 3000 BC, the Egyptians would revolutionize the literary world by producing a smooth, flexible writing material that could accept and retain ink without a blur or smudge. (4) These clay fragments were also used by many in Egypt and across Europe. The first documented material, clay, was used heavily the river plains of of Mesopotamia, where many believe writing was born. Over the course of thousands of years, different materials and literary forms dominated in distinct regions and eras. The development of writing has been a been a long process based on experimentation and a cycle of new methods gradually replacing the old. This piece serves to highlight the role of papyrus in the development of writing, documentation, and literature as we now know it. Lastly, I will describe my experiences with papyrus in order to provide my insight into its quality as a writing surface. I will first explain the general history of the material, followed by a brief explanation of how we now believe rolls of papyrus were constructed. It had the name of its owner, a man named "Pwkhaef," written on it.In the following post, I will discuss papyrus and its function in the history of writing and documentation. In 2022, a 13-foot-long (4 m) fragmentary papyrus containing texts from the Book of the Dead was found at Saqqara in a burial shaft near the pyramid of the pharaoh Teti (reigned circa 2323 B.C. This appears to be the second papyrus containing texts from the Book of the Dead that has been found at Saqqara in the past year. Scalf, who was not involved in the latest discovery but holds a doctorate in Egyptology, noted that there are Book of the Dead scrolls that measure over 98 feet (30 m) long. "There are many manuscripts that would have been similar in length, but papyrus manuscripts of ancient Egyptian religious texts can vary quite dramatically in length," Foy Scalf, the head of research archives at the University of Chicago, told Live Science in an email. While 52 feet is lengthy, there are other examples of Book of the Dead papyri of that length or longer. They were widely used during the New Kingdom (circa 1550 B.C. The Book of the Dead is a modern-day name given to a series of texts the Egyptians believed would help the dead navigate the underworld, among other purposes.
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