Papyrus
Papiro como soporte de escritura
- Date
- c. 3000 BCE · confidence high
- Place
- Saqqara (tomb of Hemaka) and the Nile Delta, Egypt
- Credited to
- Egyptians of the 1st Dynasty
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
Sheets of Cyperus papyrus pith pressed in two crossed layers, producing a lightweight, rollable, writable support. The papyrus scroll was the format of the book for three thousand years.
The oldest blank roll comes from the tomb of Hemaka (c. 3000 BCE); the oldest surviving written papyri are the diaries of Merer at Wadi al-Jarf (c. 2560 BCE).
What it led to
- Portable documents: letters, contracts and literary texts that travelled along the Nile and the Mediterranean
- Egyptian export monopoly that turned Byblos into a papyrus port and gave the Greek word for 'book' (biblion)
- Fast cursive writing (hieratic), distinct from monumental hieroglyphs
- Lightweight administrative archives that made provincial bureaucracy possible
Built on
- Carbon inkc. 3000 BCE
- Papyrus basketry and matting
- Carbon ink
- Reed pen
Made possible
- Egyptian hieratic scriptc. 2700 BCE
- Written medical and surgical treatisec. 1600 BCE
- Euclidean axiomatic geometryc. 300 BCE
- Library of Alexandria and catalogue (Pinakes)c. 285 BCE
- Parchmentc. 190 BCE
- Medical papyrus
- Library scroll
- Parchment (as a later substitute)