• Title : Papyrus
•  Subtitle: Writing in Ancient Egypt 
•  Author(s): Richard Parkinson and Stephen Quirke 
•  Publisher(s): Perrousseaux Atelier 
•  Collection: Kitab Tabulae 
• Product type: book 

One of the most remarkable inventions of ancient Egypt was the making of "paper" from the papyrus plant.

By 3000 BC, papyrus sheets and rolls provided an ideal writing surface for copying texts using reeds dipped in carbon and red ochre pigments. Egyptian scribes used papyrus for legal and administrative documents, business letters and private correspondence, but also for literary texts, encyclopedic works, religious hymns, etc.

This book presents the methods of making and preserving papyrus, the different techniques and scripts used by scribes, and the many uses of papyrus during the Pharaonic era, and then during the following periods, under Ptolemy and the Roman emperors.

Egypt transmitted to us much Greek literature and a great number of administrative writings, making papyrus the great medium of culture in the Mediterranean world until it was eclipsed, around the ninth century, by rag paper from the East, putting an end to a tradition that lasted four thousand years.