![]() One project involved painstakingly piecing together 50,000 scraps of private record like tax receipts. Much of the work in the field consists of piecing together fragments of papyrus of Egyptian, Greek and Latin texts, often using the handwriting of individual scribes as the primary clue. ![]() The largest papyrus collection in the world is at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. There is a such a thing as a field of papryology. A ''volume'' (from the Latin volumen) literally means ''a thing rolled up.'' Michael Schmidt, the author of books about poets and director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University in England, has Schmidt has noted that the fine grain of papyrus promoted the development of writing because it gave ''the ability to vary letter-forms.'' Many modern words for books descend from antiquity, when papyrus scrolls - some up to 100 yards long - were used for storage. The Egyptians built papyrus libraries in 3200 B.C. Black ink was made from lampblack and water. Scribes used a palate with a slit for storing styli and separate wells for red and black ink. The ancient Egyptians wrote with reed styluses that were not all that different from quill pens used until the 19th century. ![]() Papyrus is light and strong and ideal for writing on. Ostraca was a kind of papyrus made of left over stone chips. Strong enough to endure for millennia and be discovered by archaeologists, papyrus is thicker and heavier than modern paper but good quality and good for writing. Papyrus Harrageh Unlike the Mesopotamians who wrote on clay tablets, the Egyptians wrote on papyrus, a brittle paper-like material made from reeds of Nile sedge (a grass-like plant), which were moistened, pounded, smoothed, dried, and pressed woven together like a mat.
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