Beneath the Sands of Egypt (12 page)

Curiously, the papyrus plant went virtually extinct in Egypt after the ancient civilization declined. It made a comeback, however, about fifty years ago thanks to a man named Hassan Ragab. He was a fascinating individual, having among other things served as an Egyptian military general, as Egypt's ambassador to Italy and Yugoslavia, and as the country's first ambassador to the People's Republic of China. Ragab was intrigued with papyrus, and after having successfully transplanted the plant back to Egypt, he discovered a way of replicating paper. Although it can't be definitively determined that his method is exactly what was used in ancient times, it creates some fine, durable, and usable sheets.

A clever man, he founded “Dr. Ragab's Papyrus Institute,” in which he sold sheets of papyrus paper hand-decorated with everything from pharaonic tomb scenes to verses from the Koran. In doing so he unintentionally introduced an industry that continues to thrive today, and dozens of papyrus factories can be found selling these very popular souvenirs in the major Egyptian tourist areas. Unfortunately, some are made of bogus products such as banana leaves, and though the end product is visually similar, the counterfeits will fall apart shortly after the tourist returns home.

At face value one might assume that Ragab's Papyrus Institute was simply a moneymaking venture operating under an educational moniker. I had often heard Egyptologists scoff at the Papyrus Institute, making comments about tacky exploitation of pharaonic heritage or other flippant, skeptical remarks, yet few admitted to having actually been there. They were wrong. The institute actually
did have an educational component. From a riverside street, visitors would descend a set of steps to a pleasant garden, where a young employee would provide an explanation and a demonstration of the paper-making process. Fresh green stalks of papyrus would be trimmed to reveal their pithy white interiors, which were then cut into thin strips, laid at right angles, and pressed, the natural sugars within the plant creating a bonding agent. Eventually, a lovely sheet of sturdy paper would be displayed. From there one was escorted into a houseboat moored on the Nile to peruse a showroom of painted papyrus for sale, along with paper-making kits and books, free of sales pressure.

I met Hassan Ragab more than once and found the elderly man charming and positively interested in the subject of ancient Egyptian technology. His brother, Mohammed, who ran the daily operations of the business, was likewise extremely knowledgeable of things ancient and botanical. Arriving in Egypt without our reference materials, I had no doubt that the Ragab brothers could save us. Once we had explained our dilemma to Mohammed, he led us to a narrow room on the premises of the institute, where we found a wonderful library of all things botanical and agricultural relating to Egypt, including all the essential books that had been lost in the luggage fiasco. We were free to consult and photocopy whatever we liked. Furthermore, many of the plants we sought were currently being grown in a garden upstream at a new commercial educational venture under development, called the Pharaonic Village. And on top of that, a driver was put at our disposal to take us to the garden, where we could sample what we wished.

With our laundry list in hand, Dave and I intended to collect plants known to have been utilized not only in ancient ropes but also in other fibers objects, including baskets, mats, and such, along with woods that could be used to identify coffin and other artifact
materials. The trip to the Ragab plantation allowed us to obtain much of what we were looking for in one place in a matter of hours. There was a collection of trees, for example, all scientifically labeled and easily confirmed by Dave. It doesn't get much simpler than that. Did the Ragab brothers operate a genuine “papyrus institute”? Absolutely, and their expertise and resources were always available to anyone with a real interest, even skeptical Egyptologists and foreign botanists lacking luggage.

Botanist Dr. David Hansen wrestles the wild
Juncus acutus
while retrieving specimens to be used in identifying ancient artifact materials.
Donald P. Ryan

There were several common wild species, though, that required us to make field trips into the countryside to obtain. Halfa grass, for example, had been reported as a common source of ancient fibers, and we found that there were two grasses of similar appearance that
bore the same Arabic name. We would need to collect them both, so I hired a driver who promised that he could take us anywhere. As we rode, Dave would lean slightly out the window of the moving vehicle, his eyes trained off to the side of the road. With each sighting of a likely species, we pulled over, consulted the reference books, and if we had a match, a sample was taken and placed into the ever-thickening plant press. It was a good deal of fun, like a strange kind of safari where instead of hunting for wild game we were in search of leaves from the likes of
Juncus acutus,
fibers from dom palm, and stalks of reeds.

At one point during our plant hunt, we made an effort to visit a village to see if rope was still being manufactured. After asking around, we were taken to an open area in a palm grove, where an elderly man sat amid a pile of brown fibers pulled from the trees. What we witnessed was utterly stunning. With an expertise likely honed over a lifetime of repetition, he clutched lengths of fibers between his toes, skillfully twisting and rolling his palms as lengths of good-quality cordage emerged from his hands. This fellow, with his dark, wizened face, was a veritable human cordage factory and seemed unaffected by the two foreigners gawking in amazement. Unfortunately, our Arabic at the time was insufficient to interview him, as we'd have had many questions. How long had he practiced this profession? Was it difficult to learn? Did he make other things? How did he go about choosing his materials? We did manage to learn that fibers from the date palm were the usual material of choice, but he also pointed to a patch of halfa grass as a second source.

Observing a contemporary rope maker was impressive and edifying, but what of the ancient Egyptians themselves? Fortunately, their propensity for carving and painting scenes of daily life on the tomb walls of the elite served us well. There are a number of such
scenes to be found that provide an artistic snapshot of this dynamic process, and it was essential in our research to study as many of these as we could locate. In the Old Kingdom tomb of Ptahhotep at Sakkara, for example, one can see an ancient scene of rope makers at work in association with the making of small papyrus boats. It's convenient that some such scenes often provided hieroglyphic captions, making it clear what task is being performed. Likewise, the New Kingdom tomb of Khaemwaset found in the necropolis of Thebes contains a painted scene of three men manufacturing rope in the midst of a papyrus swamp, complete with materials, tools, and coils of the finished product on display.

Ptahhotep's tomb has long been open to the public, so it was just a matter of visiting the vast cemetery of Sakkara to take a look. The tomb is huge, its walls covered with a myriad of fascinating scenes that proved a wonderful distraction while I searched for the one little section of particular interest. Khaemwaset's modest tomb was a different matter altogether. It was rarely visited, and special permission was required to visit and a map to locate it. Accompanied by an Egyptian antiquities inspector, we managed to find the tomb's small doorway, which was closed with an iron gate fronted by a mud-brick wall. I paid a local man to assist in the opening, and as sunlight streamed into the tomb, for perhaps the first time in decades, I was amazed at the small size of the painting and impressed by its detail and the vibrancy of the colors. Although the scene was technically static, there were enough clues and details to really bring it to life. A few notes and photographs, and the tomb was once again closed to await other future scholars on a curious mission of their own.

With a wonderful collection of fiber and wood samples and a bulging plant press, Dave Hansen and I returned to PLU to take the next step. The newly acquired reference specimens needed to
be processed, and once again we hauled out the microtome and made slides. Now we could finally address the business of identifying the ancient materials. Even to this nonbotanist, it soon became easy to discern the differences between various species, both ancient and modern, based on their anatomical characteristics. Much to our surprise, we found that many of the museum specimens had been misidentified. Many were labeled as palm when in fact they were made of halfa grass.

I gave this problem some thought and concluded that most of these erroneous identifications were based on the assumptions of the original collectors of the ancient rope. During the nineteenth century or so, when many of the artifacts were collected, date palm was a major source of cordage fibers as manufactured in the villages and sold in marketplaces. This, though, was not the case in ancient times, as our old specimens seem to indicate. Back then halfa grass appears to have been the material of preference. There was also a sample labeled as hemp—a common material used in ship's rigging during the British Empire—that was actually a Southeast Asian plant apparently unknown to the ancient Egyptians. Our conclusions? A lot of dirty old ropes look the same, and the early excavators were probably basing their observations on recent practices along with the assumption that something as basic as rope making would remain essentially unchanged.

It seems true that there is nothing specific that distinguishes rope making in ancient Egypt from that in any other part of the modern rural world. The end result is basically the same, whether it's made from coconut fibers in Polynesia or cedar root in the Pacific Northwest. It's one of those fundamental technologies whose obvious utility is universally recognized, and perhaps it was independently invented dozens of times. Preference of materials, though, varies with geography and might change in availability due to cli
mate change or other factors. Papyrus, for example, a popular material for ancient ropes, went extinct in Egypt, and the widespread cultivation of the date palm is a relatively recent phenomenon. The best way to confidently identify artifact materials is to do it as we did, by ignoring external appearances and looking at their inner characteristics. These observations formed the basis of my first scientific publication.

So, you might ask, we now know that ancient Egyptian rope was made from halfa grass, papyrus, and occasionally a few other things and otherwise has nothing particularly distinct about it. Who cares? In reality, some really do have some fascinating stories to tell!

One of the rope artifacts I examined in the British Museum, for example, was a wonderfully preserved large fragment discovered with six others in the limestone quarries at Tura southeast of Cairo in May 1942. The thick diameters of these ropes and their discovery within a source of stone used for, among other things, the Giza pyramids, led to some excitement regarding their possible role in the quarrying of the blocks used to build those massive monuments. Our analysis determined that the specimen, which had a diameter of approximately 7.6 centimeters (3 inches), its structure being Z = s/s/s (that is, three left-twisted strands combined to form a right-twisted rope), was made from
Cyperus papyrus
. Radiocarbon dating has proved, however, a much younger date than anticipated, about two thousand years old, from the Greco-Roman period in Egypt. Although not Old Kingdom pyramid-building rope, its place of finding and sturdy size, material, and construction suggest that it very well might have been used in stonework, or in the conveyance of quarried blocks used to produce wonderful things in its day.

Another British Museum rope specimen is one of the most interesting Egyptian artifacts I have ever had the pleasure of exam
ining. This rope was originally retrieved by the famous Italian adventurer Giovanni Belzoni in 1817, during his discovery of the tomb of the pharaoh Seti I in the Valley of the Kings. Upon entering the tomb, Belzoni passed through three decorated corridors before being stopped by a deep vertical shaft, the “well” feature found in a number of New Kingdom royal tombs. In Belzoni's words:

The first rope and the wood to which it was attached “crumbled to dust on [my] touching them,” noted Belzoni, while the rope on the opposite side of the well “remained pretty strong.” It is this second rope that is housed today at the British Museum; it was originally displayed at an Egyptian exhibition in London put together by Belzoni and eventually was auctioned off with the rest of his collection.