One of the most outstanding inventions of ancient Egypt was the making of "paper" from the papyrus plant. As early as 3000 B.C., sheets and rolls of papyrus provided an ideal surface for writing with reed pen and cakes of carbon black and red ochre pigment. Egyptian scribes were able to record on papyri everyday details such as administrative records, legal documents, and letters of business and personal life. Equally important for our understanding of ancient Egypt, pen and papyrus were used to record literary texts, tales, and moral instructions, as well as compendia of Egyptian knowledge exemplified by the famous Rhind Mathematical Papyrus and the books of treatment, prescriptions, and recitations for healing. Religious hymns and litanies are recorded, as are the great formulae to secure life after death--the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead. In this book, Richard Parkinson and Stephen Quirke freshly examine the methods of papyrus-making and its different uses, not only under the Pharaohs, but also other Egyptian civilizations such as the Hellenistic kingdom of the Ptolemies and the colonial rule of the Roman Empire. Papyrus remained the writing material of the Mediterranean world until it was eclipsed by the cloth paper of the Orient in the ninth century A.D., bringing four thousand years of writing tradition to an end.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent book for the price but....,
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This review is from: Papyrus (Egyptian Bookshelf) (Paperback)
It's an excellent book on the history of papyrus but I would like to see the author expand more on the actual making of the product in detail, both in ancient times and today. Excellent book for the price and very well written. There are a few websites showing how to make the product that are well illustrated but please...where can I purchase a book that I can lay down beside me as I work? Will someone publish one?
5.0 out of 5 stars
The mainsprings of early civilisation,
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This review is from: Papyrus (Egyptian Bookshelf) (Paperback)
Papyrus: 3100BC-AD750; paper: AD750-present; World Wide Web: 1990-future. You are online and reading it now, but only time will tell if Tim Berners-Lee has given us the new papyrus. It has a long way to go before it matches the history of that most important of inventions. Ancient Egypt, famed for all time for its pyramids, had a far more important achievement. Papyrus was used to record taxes, payrolls, sales receipts, laws and legal documents, war records, official administration, personal letters, funerary works, literary works, medical and veterinary works, mathematical works, and blueprints for pyramids. The kings of Egypt controlled its production and they supplied the Greeks, the Romans, and most of the civilised ancient world.This excellent short book, published in 1995 under the auspices of the British Museum, covers the manufacture, uses, and the handling and storage of papyrus. Aimed at the non-expert, it is clearly written, packed with information, and is well illustrated with photographs and diagrams. Many aspects of history are naturally discussed in the analysis of the substrate of the communication medium, in particular the development of writing and hieroglyphics. There is a highly enlightening two-page section on 'Errors, erasures, and re-use' in the documents, and numerous scattered observations on the same. There is a useful bibliography and index. These writers are very good, but it must be said that there there is one statement that I would question. For example, the authors (clearly quoting other sources), state that the rate of 'full literacy' was only about 0.3-5%, and a prestigious aristocratic and high priestly activity. This ignores the obvious usage of reading and writing at lower levels. Both hieroglyphs and the other forms of writing took several years to fully master, but a basic 'get by' ability was all that most needed. The Egyptian army was a large organisation where literacy was required for orders and reports, and army correspondence has been found. (A payroll of a New Kingdom Egyptian temple records that the lower levels of temple scribe earned no more than a temple guard, see Gillings, R.L., 'Mathematics in the time of the Pharaohs'.) A modern parallel would be mastering the various levels of accountancy, from basic double-entry to actuarial work for the government. Business requirements meant that even copper miners/smelters had basic literacy. But all in all, a very valuable work.
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