![]() ![]() Yet they offer a glimpse into the thinking of the time. Only some of the blackened texts have been read. Many of the scrolls in the library survived, carbonized by the heat. Pyroclastic flow, a mixture of hot gasses and ash, sealed and preserved the town of Herculaneum, including the Villa dei Papiri and its library. Vesuvius erupted, different types of volcanic material descended on the nearby towns. ![]() The Getty Villa was modeled on the Ancient Villa dei Papiri, so named because of its library filled with scrolls. Step 6: Write your philosophical text, roll it up, and seal it for the library It offers us the opportunity to learn from them and reminds us that our notion of ‘progress’ is subjective.” “Working with papyrus today is exciting because we’re reinventing a technology the ancient Egyptians were experts in. “We have a lot to learn from them,” said Price. Like today, the people who lived long ago were continually developing technologies and tools. Papyrus paper wasn’t cheap, and not everyone could read and write. Scribes wrote horizontally, as we do, in sections the size of our modern pages, rolled the scrolls up, and stored them in libraries. “There’s the account by Pliny the Elder in his Natural Histories, but it’s a rather vague account.” Additionally, he never actually went to Egypt.Īfter the papyrus paper was produced, pieces were attached to create scrolls, up to sixty-five feet long. “I’m hesitant to suggest that no one else ever used this technology throughout the Roman Empire,” said Price. “This would suggest that when Egypt was under Roman control, the Egyptians were supplying the entire Roman empire with these goods.”Įventually, papyrus was replaced by parchment (animal skin), but the ancient process was reinvented in the 1960s for the tourist trade in Egypt. “Most scholars agree the manufacturing of papyrus was a technology belonging to the ancient Egyptians,” said Robyn Price, a PhD candidate in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, who helped facilitate the Getty workshop. Papyrus grew on the banks of the Nile, and the resulting paper was exported across ancient Egypt, all the way into ancient Rome. “This allows you to slow down and think about the evolution from nature to the thing that ancient Romans would write on.” “When you learn how labor-intensive this is, you appreciate it more,” said Hogan. She had chosen several tall stalks from the Getty Villa gardens and was now slicing them into thin flat reeds to be soaked, and ultimately pounded, and pressed into paper. She was preparing the plant for an upcoming workshop on the topic. profiler, typically grows to only 2-3’ tall.Making paper from papyrus today gives us a way of understanding the ancient world, said Chelsea Hogan, a Getty public programs specialist. A dwarf version of this plant, designated as C. Specific epithet is the Greek name used for paper made into rolls from this plant in Ancient Egypt. Genus name comes from the Greek word kypeiros which was the name given to some local sedges. In ancient Egypt, the stems of this plant (considered by some authorities to be the bulrush of the Bible) were used to make a paper-like writing material also called papyrus. Flowers give way to brown, nut-like fruits. Greenish-brown flower clusters appear at the ends of the rays. ![]() Each stem is topped by an umbellate inflorescence of 100+ narrow arching thread-like rays (4-12” long). It features a grass-like clump of triangular green stems that rise up from thick, woody rhizomes. Louis gardens, stems will grow shorter (to 5-8’ tall). It is a tall, clump-forming, tender perennial sedge that, in frost-free areas, will grow up to 15’ tall. Cyperus papyrus, commonly called papyrus, is native to Africa. ![]()
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