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Writing Materials
Egyptian texts in hieroglyphs were inscribed on
stone, wood, and papyrus and in hieratic and demotic, on papyrus,
wood, leather, and ostraca.
Papyrus The material most widely associated with writing in Egypt is papyrus. The word is derived from the Greek papyros, which is believed to come from the Egyptian word papuro meaning “the royal,” as manufacture of papyrus was a state monopoly. This tall plant (Cyperus papyrus L.) grew in abundance in Egypt, particularly in the marshlands of the Delta. Although at first it covered large areas of the river valley as well and formed part of the natural vegetation, it was later managed and harvested in cultivated fields. In addition to producing a writing material from it, the plant was also used to make ropes, mats, boxes, sandals, and small sailing craft. . PROCESSING From predynastic times the fibrous pith of the plant was used to manufacture a writing material. It has been possible to identify the various stages of production. In the first stage, the stalk of the plant was sliced into pieces and the pith was cut out and beaten with a hammer to produce wafers. These were arranged side by side and crosswise in two layers and were then beaten into sheets. Then the individual pages were stuck together in the same way to form a standard roll of twenty pages; sometimes the rolls were stuck together as required to provide an even longer writing surface. After drying in the sun the full strip was rolled up with the horizontal fibers on the inside. This was the “recto” that would be written on first. .
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RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR USES
Papyrus was relatively expensive to produce and
was generally used for religious and more important secular
documents. The most common and cheapest writing materials were
ostraca and pieces of wood. These were often used by schoolboys for
their letters and exercises, and some school texts found on papyrus
also occur on these cheaper writing materials, supplying scholars
with an additional source for knowledge of words or phrases damaged
or destroyed in the papyrus version. As a major source of textual
evidence, papyri preserve a wealth of literature: the “funerary
books” to ensure the owner’s safe journey to the afterlife; school
exercises and copies; model letters; hymns and prayers; wisdom
instructions; folk tales; love poems; educational and scientific
texts; magical and medical prescriptions; and legal and
administrative records. The Egyptians exported papyrus as a writing
material to other areas of the ancient world. The Greeks and Romans
adopted it and used it for their own administrative and literary
texts; classical accounts of Egypt such as those of Plutarch or
Herodotus were written on papyrus. Its use undoubtedly preserved
vast quantities of inscriptions allowing the survival of information
about administrative, legal, religious, medical, and literary
aspects of pharaonic Egypt. The Greek residents of Egypt in later
periods also used papyrus as their main writing material. Egypt’s
ideal climatic conditions have preserved the largest quantity of
Greek papyri of all that have survived from antiquity. In particular
thousands of papyri written in Greek and Egyptian have been
recovered from the Greek settlements in the Fayoum, providing a
detailed account of life in these communities.
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Writing and Incising Tools
Inscriptions were carved (or sometimes painted) on walls or written on the other materials. Fine quality stone was selected for temples and the best tombs; the masons used copper or bronze chisels to carve the stone for the walls and hardened stones to incise the hieroglyphs. Scribes’ writing equipment has also been discovered. This consisted of a case (usually of wood) to hold reed pens, a palette with cakes of paint (usually one black and one red), and a water flask for mixing the paint. Very rare examples of slate ink trays have also been found. The pen (a thin reed with a frayed tip) was eventually replaced by the stylus (a sharpened reed with a fine point) in the third century BC. Texts were usually written in black paint, the red being reserved to mark the beginning of a new paragraph, a total in sets of accounts, certain types of punctuation, or the names of evil beings. .
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Writing Materials
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