Papyros

The famous “Papyros Ebers,” which was written during the reign of the Egyptian king Bicheres, 3,500 years ago, was discovered by the celebrated archeologist, Georg Ebers in 1872, when an Arab brought him a metallic case containing a papyros roll enveloped in mummy cloths, which he claimed had been discovered between the bones of a mummy in a tomb of the Theban Necropolis.

Another example from the same mould has the mask of a slave of comedy in one hand and a papyros roll in the other, so that it was presumably a present to a victorious comic poet.

We have in this book [Egyptian Magic by E. A. Wallis Budge] dozens of excerpts from magical papyroi, tomb inscriptions and other sources.

[…] as may be seen with several representations in Egyptian papyros. The large swamps of the Nile delta with their thickets of lotus, papyros and reed, were favourite hunting grounds in Ancient Egypt. The papyros plants themselves were important for the fibre they supplied, used in the making of indispensable writing material and the construction of light papyros boats for hunting and fishing. […] Wild geese and ducks in flight from the papyros thickets are among the most impressive pictures of fauna in Egyptian art.

Finally, finds, such as the clay stamp of a papyros and the silver sheet, are related to the use of the building for the worship of the Mother Goddess.

“Why would anyone loot a papyros shop?” / “As valuable as papyros is, it does not have street value like jewels or olive oil or wine. If the shop were attacked, it would be as an act of vengeance against Greeks.”

As we know, in Egypt, the country of origin for this instrument (cf. Watrous 1995, 397), idiophones like sistra “were particularly associated with religious worship” (Shaw and Nicholson 2008, 214). Their origin might have been a bundle of papyroi with a rushing sound (Larkes 1980, 75).

In a world where it was very difficult to look up a particular passage in a papyros roll, citations from other authors were usually from memory; errors of memory were easy to make.