So that the fish do not lack wrapping paper and the olives do not fear bags / or the dirty cockroach fear poor hunger, / take away, you muses, what I lost: the papyri from the Nile. ”So begins an epigram by the Roman poet Martial. As a rule, the fishmongers at that time were more likely to have wrapped their goods in “charter emporitica”, “merchant paper”. "It is unusable for writing and is used to wrap [other] paper or to pack goods," wrote Pliny the Elder around the year 70 AD particularly reliable - busy with the papyrus. According to Pliny, emporitica was the cheapest of six quality grades in which papyrus sheets were available at the time, the most expensive was called "Augusta" - imperial paper.
Ulf von Rauchhaupt
Responsible for the “Science” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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Unfortunately, not much more has come down to us about the ancient papyrus industry.
The product of the sour grass family
Cyperus papyrus
was an all-too-common article, especially for writers, to have many words about it. “We know that papyrus has been recycled, but the practical organization of this recycling is beyond our grasp,” writes the Finnish papyrologist Erja Salmenkivi in a book article in 2020. Even the production process for papyrus sheets is nowhere reliably passed down. Pliny gives a description, but as the American papyrologist Naphtali Lewis once remarked, the passage does not give the impression that the Roman scholar ever witnessed papyrus-making himself. Even from Egypt, where scrolls can be traced back to before the turn of the third millennium BC, papyrus production is nowhere described, not even illustrated,the plant itself and its harvest - but not its processing into writing material.
From a tax point of view, olives were more important
Whether you are in the home country of
C. papyrus
wanted to control the entire value chain and therefore keep the process secret? After all, the country on the Nile was the main supplier for the entire Mediterranean region - and that early on. In Greece, for example, papyrus must have been written on by the 7th century BC at the latest, says Kilian Fleischer from the University of Würzburg, who is researching the documents from the "Villa dei Papiri" that were preserved during the eruption of Vesuvius in 79. The works of Hesiod and Homer were already distributed on papyrus rolls. “Although nothing speaks against a somewhat earlier point in time,” says Fleischer. “However, papyri are likely to have been used soon after the Phoenician alphabet was adopted, around the 9th century BC, presumably to a modest but notable extent from the 8th century.“On the other hand, there is no clear evidence of an even earlier use of papyrus, for example in the Mycenaean period.
However, even in the Hellenistic and Roman epochs, papyrus export was hardly a major item in the Egyptian trade balance.
The papyrus industry did not represent a completely negligible economic sector, which can be seen from the fact that the state levied a tax on writing materials, the “Chartēra”.
But as Erja Salmenkivi writes, this papyrus tax is only documented in nine places between the middle of the 3rd century before and the 4th century after Christ.
In the same period, a tax on linen was mentioned ten times, and one on olive oil even 28 times, which is why the papyrus industry was probably of relatively minor importance.