WTF is Papyrus?

What is Papyrus?

Papyrus is a writing surface invented by the Ancient Egyptians. It was made from the plant Cyperus papyrus, which grew along the banks of the Nile River and in the marshy areas of the Delta. Papyrus is often considered “ancient paper” because it provided a nice, smooth surface to write on. It’s not technically paper, however, which the Chinese invented circa 105 CE. Nevertheless, papyrus reigned supreme for millennia as the go-to writing material.

Brief History of Papyrus

Papyrus came on the scene around 2900 BCE in ancient Egypt.¹ Egyptians wrote all sorts of texts on papyrus, including literature, histories, civic records, legal documents, medicinal texts, and funerary guides. The latter, known as the Book of the Dead, or “going forth by day,” are funerary scrolls that the Egyptians buried with their dead. They guided the soul through the afterlife with prayers, incantations, and spells. One of the most famous examples is the Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani, dating to the 19th dynasty of the New Kingdom, circa 1250 BCE. Discovered in the Tomb of Ani in Thebes, the scroll originally measured 78 feet long but was later divided into 37 sheets.

Egyptian scribes wrote with reeds and used ink made of charcoal and water. The image below is a sculpture of a scribe from Egypt’s Old Kingdom, circa 2620-2500 BCE. He’s holding a papyrus roll in his left hand, laying it across his lap. His right hand is empty but would’ve held a reed brush. Similar statues of seated scribes abound in Ancient Egyptian art, each of them holding a scroll of papyrus.

How to Make Papyrus

Papyrus most often took the form of a scroll, which consisted of individual sheets adhered together. Thanks to Roman author Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE), we know how the ancients made papyrus. Pliny wrote Natural History, an encyclopedic scientific work completed in 77 CE.² In chapter 13, he talks all about the famous Egyptian papyrus, giving us detailed instructions on how to make it.

1. Get yourself a papyrus plant. They’re sedges, which are grass-like flowering plants with thick stems, growing about 15 feet tall.
2. Cut the stem and get rid of the rind, which is the hard green exterior.
3. Grab the pulpy substance inside the stem, called the pith. Remove it entirely and flatten that baby out into thin strips.
4. Line your strips next to each other, with the edges overlapping so they stick together. This is the first layer of your sheet.
5. Create your second layer by perpendicularly lining strips on top of the first layer. Basically, make a crisscross pattern. While the second layer makes the sheet more durable, it renders one side completely and utterly useless for writing. Think about it, one of the sides has this crisscross pattern, which is not smooth at all.
6. Now, Pliny tells us to glue the two layers with a starchy substance from the waters of the Nile, but he’s wrong. Sorry, dude, but historians believe the glue was the liquid sap from the reed itself. No additional materials required here.
7. Place the sheet in a press or hammer it with a mallet.
8. Lay the sheet out to dry.
9. Polish it with a piece of ivory or shell.
10. Attach multiple sheets to make a scroll.³

Types & Dimensions

Pliny discusses nine types of papyrus, providing their names, quality, size, and location of production. I’ll spare you the excruciating details but will leave you with this tidbit: the egotistical Romans named the types of papyrus after themselves. Are we surprised? No, we are not.

Anyway, most sheets were no more than 12 inches in height. When glued together, sheets formed scrolls that could be up to 100 feet. Since a long scroll was difficult to read, extensive texts were often divided into several scrolls.

1. Papyrus Plant, Kurt Stüber [1], CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. 2. Hugh R. Hopgood, Men Splitting Papyrus, 1915-1916 after original c.1479-1458 BCE, Ancient Egyptian New Kingdom, tempera on paper, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain.

Papyrus in the Mediterranean

Egyptians exported papyrus extensively throughout the Mediterranean world. Ancient Greeks and Romans used papyrus for their texts, primarily in scroll form. However, papyrus was also used for early codices when they came into use in the 1^st century CE. Unfortunately, only a small number of these manuscripts survive. Papyrus is especially fragile in damp climates, so its shelf life can be quite short. In contrast, Egypt’s desert climate does wonders for papyrus preservation, which is why we have thousands of Egyptian scrolls.

Greek & Roman Papyri

An example of a Greek Ptolemaic manuscript from the early Hellenistic Period, ca. 285-250 BCE, is a papyrus fragment with lines from Homer’s Odyssey. The fragment includes three lines from Book 20 that aren’t in the standard text. This means there were variations of this epic poem.

The biggest hoard of scrolls to survive is the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, Italy. The villa was a private house with an extensive library of about 1,800 papyrus scrolls. Thanks to Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 CE, the scrolls were carbonized, aka burnt to a crisp and turned into charred lumps. While this may seem shitty, it actually preserved the manuscripts. With modern tech, scholars have been able to unroll and read them. Most are works of Greek Epicurean philosophy, particularly by Philodemus.

Not all surviving papyrus manuscripts are epic pieces of literature or Greek philosophy. Some are more mundane, like this letter dating from the Roman period in the early 3^rd century CE. Written in Greek by Heraclides to his brother Petechois, the letter is a shopping list for bread, poultry, lupines, chickpeas, kidney beans, and fenugreek. In addition to letters, Greeks and Romans used papyrus for official records, legal documents, and contracts.

Replaced by Parchment

Papyrus was widely used up until the 4^th century CE, when it lost out to parchment and vellum. According to Pliny the Elder, who cites Roman scholar Marcus Varro, parchment came about due to a rivalry between Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy V (204-180 BCE) and Eumenes II (197-160 BCE), ruler of Pergamon (in modern-day Bergama, Turkey). The Ptolemies in Egypt had built the great library at Alexandria, which was the center of learning in the Mediterranean. They were royally pissed when Eumenes II built a library at Pergamon, turning his city into some serious competition.

As a result, Ptolemy V was like, “Oh yeah…well…you can’t have a library without books! No more papyrus for you!”⁴ Tradition has it he stopped the export of papyrus to Pergamon, forcing them to get creative and invent parchment (pergamena).⁵

Scholars believe, however, that Pergamon already had a long tradition of using parchment but likely improved production and increased use in the 2^nd century BCE to minimize dependency on papyrus. Historians also debate whether the Ptolemy vs. Eumenes rivalry was the real cause of increased use or if the reason was simply a shortage of papyrus growth in Egypt during this period.⁶

Paper Rules All

So, you may be wondering, what about actual paper? Well, it’s commonly cited that the Chinese invented paper in 105 CE. The credit goes to Cai Lun, an official in the Han dynasty. He originally made paper with hemp, but later replaced it with a combo of bark, rag scraps, and bast fiber. Historians believe, however, that the Chinese may have been using paper as early as 140-86 BCE.

Whatever the date, by the 7^th century, papermaking made its way to Korea and then Japan. Paper expanded to the west in the 8^th century, when Arab forces took Chinese papermakers captive in Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan). With the Arab expansion and the Silk Road, Europe finally saw paper in the 12^th century, with the Spanish cities of Toledo and Valencia developing the first paper mills.

Despite the widespread use of parchment and increasing use of paper in the West, scholars believe papyrus was used into the 11^th century CE.

To learn more about the wonderful world of book history, see the following articles:

• WTF is Parchment?
• WTF is Vellum?
• WTF is a Palimpsest?
• WTF is a Codex?
• WTF is a Book of Hours?
• WTF is a Psalter?
• WTF are Illuminated Manuscripts?
• WTF are Incunabula?

Footnotes

1. Some scholars cite 2600 BCE, for example, Howard, The Book, 3. ↩︎
2. Side note, our friend Pliny perished in 79 CE, when Vesuvius erupted and destroyed Pompeii, Herculaneum, and villas in the Bay of Naples. What a way to go… ↩︎
3. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 177-178. ↩︎
4. He didn’t really say that; it’s my imagination. ↩︎
5. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 176. ↩︎
6. Casson, Ancient Libraries, 51; Howard, The Book, 4. ↩︎

Bibliography & Further Reading

*The following links are Amazon affiliate links, which means I earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no cost to you.

Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the Ancient World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Cave, Roderick, and Sara Ayad. The History of The Book in 100 Books. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books U.S., Inc., 2014.

Howard, Nicole. The Book: The Life Story of a Technology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

Ikram, Salima. Ancient Egypt: An Introduction. 3rd Printing. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Lyons, Martyn. Books: A Living History. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Papyrus fragment with lines from Homer’s Odyssey.” The Met. Accessed May 20, 2025.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Papyrus letter in Greek.” The Met. Accessed May 20, 2025.

Pliny the Elder, and John F Healy. Natural History: A Selection. Reprinted with revisions. London: Penguin, 2004.

Wasserman, James. The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day, Being the Papyrus of Ani (Royal Scribe of the Divine Offerings). Translated by Raymond O. Faulkner and Ogden Goelet. Twentieth anniversary edition, [Third revised and expanded edition, 1st print]. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2015.