Papyrus
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in botany, a genus of Cypereæ, having the inflorescence in spikelets, spikelets, with many flowers, surrounded by long bracts; the seeds three cornered. P. antiquorum, sometimes called Cyperus papyrus, is the plant from which the ancients made paper. It has an underground stem, at intervals sending up ordinary stems 8 or 10 feet high. It grows on the banks of the Nile, the Jordan and in the S. of Italy. The paper was made from thin slices of the stem cut vertically. It was made also into boats and its fibers used for cordage. P. corym- PARÁ bosus, or Pangorei, is manufactured into Indian mats; also in literature, rolls of papyrus with writings on them constituting an ancient book. PARÁ, a state of Brazil, in the N. E., bounded by the Guianas, Guianas, Maranhão, Goyaz, Matto Grosso, Amazonas, and the Atlantic. The estuary of the Amazon, also called Para, covers a large part of the state, which rises by series of plateaus to an elevation of 26,000 feet. The thick forests are rich in rubber, and cereals and tobacco are raised in the plains. Cocoa, nuts, leather, and rubber are the principal exports. The area totals 443,- 789 square miles, and is rich in undeveloped minerals. Capital, Pará. Pop. about 660,000. PARÁ (official name Belém), a thriving city and seaport of Brazil, capital of the state of the same name, on the E. bank of the Pará river, 70 miles from its mouth, on a point of land formed by the entrance of the Guandú. The harbor is nearly landlocked by wooded islands, and admits vessels of large size. Tram cars and telephones are in general use, and there is a railway to Braggança (108 miles). The principal buildings are the theater, the government building, custom house, and cathedral (1720). The city contains a small fort and botanic gardens. The place is not unhealthy, though the wet season extends over nearly two-thirds of the year. Pará is the emporium of the Amazon river trade, supplying the towns of the interior with foreign goods, and exporting india-rubber, cacao, Brazil nuts, the piraucú fish, etc. The annual value of the exports exceeds. Pop. about 285,000. PARÁ, the name which the Tocantins river receives in its lower course, from Cameta downward (138 miles). It is 20 miles broad opposite the city of Pará, and 40 miles broad at its mouth. The Paranan, an arm of the Amazon, which cuts off Marajó Island from the mainland, pours into it part of the waters of the great river.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 papyrus was mainly a plant with an antiquarian footnote — "rolls of papyrus with writings on them constituting an ancient book." Those rolls have since become a whole discipline: the Oxyrhynchus rubbish-mound finds published from 1898 onward were followed by the Nag Hammadi codices (1945) and the Dead Sea material (from 1947), and in 2013 archaeologists at Wadi al-Jarf recovered the world's oldest inscribed papyri, including the logbook of an official named Merer who hauled stone for the Great Pyramid. Most spectacularly, the carbonised scrolls from Herculaneum, unopenable for two centuries, began to be read in 2023–24 without unrolling them, using X-ray tomography and machine learning. The plant itself, which Collier's says "grows on the banks of the Nile," had largely vanished from wild Egypt by then and was reintroduced in the 1960s to supply a tourist craft industry; botanists now use the name Cyperus papyrus rather than P. antiquorum.
Written for this edition, 2026.