The ancient Egyptians believed that their writing was a divine revelation to the world, created by the god of wisdom who ruled over knowledge and magic, Thoth.
Documents written in ancient Egyptian script are carved on stone, wood, leather, pottery and other materials, but the most important is the sedge, a gift from the Nile. The word "sedge" is derived from the Greek word "papyrus", which is thought to come from the Egyptian word "papuro", meaning "royal", because sedge cultivation and processing is a state monopoly. This perennial aquatic plant was once widely distributed in the Nile Valley, especially in large swamps in the lower delta. It was widely used and occupied an important position in social life at that time. The white stem under the surface of the water, similar to cocoon, is edible; Green stems can be used to build grass huts, shipbuilding, weaving straw mats, straw shoes, ropes, baskets and other daily necessities; Dried roots can be made into spices for sacrifice and fly repellent. According to the Bible, the legendary figure Moses was placed in a papyrus basket and floated on the Nile by the Egyptian princess. However, its greatest use is also as a writing material. Since the former dynasty, the fibrous pulp of the plant sedge has been used to make the writing material, grass paper.
One can identify the different periods of straw paper production. At the first stage, the stem of the plant is broken into thin slices, and the pith inside is gouged out and beaten into pancakes with a hammer. Then arrange them side by side, place two layers crossed, and beat them into sheets. Then, such papers are put together in the same way to form rolls, a roll of 20 sheets; Sometimes, paper rolls are glued together as required to form longer writing pages. After drying, the transverse fibers of the entire sedge strip are rolled inwards horizontally. This is the "sedge front" on which to write first.
It is impossible to investigate when this method of "papermaking" began and who invented it. In the tomb of a minister of the First Dynasty of Saqqara, a southwestern suburb of Cairo, the oldest wordless paper dating back more than 5,000 years has been found. The oldest papyrus with text was discovered by Egyptian and French scientists on the Red Sea in 2013 and was written more than 4,500 years ago during the Palestine Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty of Egypt's Old Kingdom.
Among the writing materials owned by the ancient Egyptians, this papyrus paper appeared to be the most practical, so it gradually replaced materials such as stone, wood and pottery. However, pottery and wood chips were the cheapest writing materials, and schoolchildren often used these materials to write letters and practice, and some school documents often written on straw paper also used these cheap writing materials, so as to provide future generations of scholars with content on the missing parts of the cursive paper.
When copying longer articles, the ancient Egyptians often pasted a single sheet of papyrus, wrote it and rolled it into a tube. At the same time, papyrus is a very valuable writing material, always try to make the most of it, and write on both sides. In addition to official documents, general bills, transactional documents, and letters can be used later. The paper on which the writing was written was also pasted and cut, remade into paper rolls, and new content was written in the blanks, and papyrus even became an important export material for ancient Egypt, exported to all parts of the Mediterranean coast.
According to the "Voyage of Wen Amun" papyrus in 1100 BC, he carried 500 scrolls of refined papyrus from Egypt to the area around Phoenicia (present-day Lebanon coast), and in the 6th century BC, papyrus was already commonly used in Greece. So far, about 100,000 papyrus documents have been found in ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Hebrew and Arabic scripts, most of which come from Upper Egypt (referring to the upper Nile area), probably because it is dry and rain-poor and not easy to rot. These papyrus are very rich.
However, with the introduction of Chinese papermaking to Egypt, papyrus was eclipsed in the face of real paper and gradually disappeared, and even the production process was lost.
