Papyrus
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
pa-pi'rus, the Egyptian paper plant. It is a straight, stout, tall, reed-like, aquatic plant of Egypt and Palestine. Botanically papyrus is a cypress and is a member of the sedge family. The leafless stem rises from four to fifteen feet above the water, and has an umbrella-like top of delicate green rays. The bark was used by the ancients for paper. A section cut from the lower part of the stem yields a number of delicate layers which are separated and laid out on a flat surface with over-lapping edges. A second layer is spread crosswise, and the sheet thus formed is subjected to pressure. The material contains enough natural mucilage to cause the pieces to adhere. These sheets, pasted together end to end, form the papyrus roll on which the books of the ancients were written. The papyrus reed was formerly abundant in the Euphrates. Papyrus was used by the Chaldeans prior to the printing of cuneiform characters on clay tablets. The oldest books known are written on rolls of papyrus. Papyrus manuscripts found in the tombs of the Egyptian kings and preserved in the Museum of Berlin are now considered the oldest specimens of this material, as well as the oldest books in existence. The papyrus plant formerly bloomed abundantly in the lower Nile, but it is now extinct there. It fringes the margins, however, of the sluggish regions of the upper Nile. It is reared as a curiosity in many botanical gardens. A plantation of papyrus in a small river near Syracuse, Sicily, is regarded as a botanical curiosity. It is visited by many thousand tourists annually. The United States Department of Agriculture is investigating the question of introducing papyrus as an ornamental reed for the waters of Florida and other Gulf States. See Parchment
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 note that papyrus "is a cypress" is a garble of its genus name, Cyperus; Cyperus papyrus is a sedge, and no relation to cypress trees. The plant is indeed effectively gone from wild Egypt, but it was brought back deliberately: from the 1960s Hassan Ragab grew papyrus near Cairo and revived the ancient sheet-making craft, now a staple of the Egyptian tourist trade, while wild stands still choke the Sudd marshes of South Sudan. The claim about "the oldest books in existence" has moved on twice over: the Oxyrhynchus dumps in Egypt, dug just before this entry was written, yielded hundreds of thousands of fragments that scholars are still publishing more than a century later, and in 2013 the Wadi al-Jarf caves gave up the logbooks of the official Merer, dating to roughly 2500 BC. Most striking of all, the carbonised scrolls from Herculaneum, unreadable in 1910, began to be deciphered without unrolling them in 2023, when the Vesuvius Challenge used CT scanning and machine learning to lift words off the burnt layers.
Written for this edition, 2026.