There's something about papyri

If you are anything like me, you love used books because not only buying used normally equates to saving money, but also those books come with their very own personal history -- a name in the front cover, notes in the margins, and (if you are lucky) a small correspondance used as a bookmark.  There is something romantic about piecing together these types of clues to mentally reconstruct the book's previous owner.

I often think how a future mind might try to reconstruct my life based on the clues I leave in my books. In a way, owning used books and passing books along after you use them allows us, as mortals, to participate in the never ending pursuit of knowledge and truth.  Everybody, no matter how mundane or non-famous our lives are, has a chance to glimpse immortality in the reconstructed memory of a future generation.

I may be over romanticizing my point, but when you consider the Egyptian papyri, my feelings have a ring of truth.

Papyrus was the ancient equivalent of paper made from the husk of a Nile reed.  It was a major Egyptian export, in its day, and depending on the time period, not a cheap commodity.

After the Greek (Macedonian) conquest of Egypt, the country ran by means of a well organized, large scale bureaucracy that produced mountains of written record on papyrus.  So much papyrus, in fact, that they needed some creative ways to deal with the refuse.  There were garbage dumps of course, but as Captain Planet taught my generation, you shouldn't thrown something out it can be reused.

(Note, the existence of an ancient Egyptian manifestation of Captain Planet has yet to be discovered)

A lot of the old, used papyrus was reused.  The backside of tax receipts and country census documents were used for personal correspondance and for copying out literary works.  More inventive, however, was the use of old papyrus for cartonnage -- a sort of paper mache used in the mummification process and for post mortum stuffing of people and animals in preparation for burial.

Because of these extra uses for papyrus and Egypt's dry climate, a huge amount of documentation has survived well over 2,000 years.  Unlike intentionally preserved history, these papyri tell stories that no one intended to pass along.  These are the stories of everyday people.  People that were meant to be forgotten to time, but through a combination of coincidence and fate, come back to life for us in the 21st Century.

They tell timeless and familiar tales of the homesickness of young men in the midst of military service, of students getting bored and doodling during class, of disputes with noisy neighbours, and of religious faith being tested during hard life circumstances.

There's something about the papyri...



If you are interested in reading some of people in the Egyptian papyri, I recommend the book "Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt" by Lewis.