Richard Parkinson and Stephen Quirke

One of the most remarkable inventions of ancient Egypt was the fabrication of a "paper" from the papyrus plant. Since 3000 BC, sheets and rolls of papyrus furnished an ideal writing surface for copying texts using reeds dipped in pigments based on carbon and red ocher. Egyptian scribes used papyrus for legal and administrative documents, business letters and private correspondences, but also for literary texts, encyclopedic works, religious hymns, etc.

This book presents the methods of fabrication and conservation of papyrus, the various techniques and scripts used by the scribes, and the multiple uses of papyrus during the time of the pharaohs, and then during the following periods, under the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors.

Egypt has left us a great deal of Greek literature and a large number of administrative records, making papyrus an important vehicle for the culture of the Mediterranean world up until it was eclipsed, around the ninth century, by cloth paper originating from the East, ending a tradition that lasted for four thousand years.