Egyptian Bookshelf: Papyrus /anglais

Papyrus: 3100BC-AD750; paper: AD750-present; World Wide Web: 1990-future. You are online and reading it now, but only time will tell if Tim Berners-Lee has given us the new papyrus. It has a long way to go before it matches the history of that most important of inventions. Ancient Egypt, famed for all time for its pyramids, had a far more important achievement. Papyrus was used to record taxes, payrolls, sales receipts, laws and legal documents, war records, official administration, personal letters, funerary works, literary works, medical and veterinary works, mathematical works, and blueprints for pyramids. The kings of Egypt controlled its production and they supplied the Greeks, the Romans, and most of the civilised ancient world.This excellent short book, published in 1995 under the auspices of the British Museum, covers the manufacture, uses, and the handling and storage of papyrus. Aimed at the non-expert, it is clearly written, packed with information, and is well illustrated with photographs and diagrams. Many aspects of history are naturally discussed in the analysis of the substrate of the communication medium, in particular the development of writing and hieroglyphics. There is a highly enlightening two-page section on 'Errors, erasures, and re-use' in the documents, and numerous scattered observations on the same. There is a useful bibliography and index.These writers are very good, but it must be said that there there is one statement that I would question. For example, the authors (clearly quoting other sources), state that the rate of 'full literacy' was only about 0.3-5%, and a prestigious aristocratic and high priestly activity. This ignores the obvious usage of reading and writing at lower levels. Both hieroglyphs and the other forms of writing took several years to fully master, but a basic 'get by' ability was all that most needed. The Egyptian army was a large organisation where literacy was required for orders and reports, and army correspondence has been found. (A payroll of a New Kingdom Egyptian temple records that the lower levels of temple scribe earned no more than a temple guard, see Gillings, R.L., 'Mathematics in the time of the Pharaohs'.) A modern parallel would be mastering the various levels of accountancy, from basic double-entry to actuarial work for the government. Business requirements meant that even copper miners/smelters had basic literacy. But all in all, a very valuable work.