"Other papyrus vessels, both larger and smaller, plied the Nile alongside the simple rafts of hunters and farmers: papyrus barges may have helped transport the colossal stone blocks used to build the pyramids, while some translations of the Old Testament say that the basket in which Moses was hidden among the reeds of the Nile's shores was made from papyrus, not bulrushes. Moses may have had Isis to thank for preserving him from the Nile's ravening crocodiles as much as he did his mother. In Egyptian myth, the goddess Isis sailed the Nile on a papyrus boat to search for fragments of the body of Osiris, her husband (and her brother, so the story goes), and it was said that the river's crocodiles feared to attack any such craft lest they encountered a wrathful deity aboard it instead of a cowering human. Dried papyrus is around four times more buoyant than balsa wood, and, while it eventually becomes waterlogged and loses that buoyancy, a boat made from sheaves of plentiful papyrus reeds was easily replaced. But papyrus boats were prized for more than just their buoyancy. "Papyrus stood in for wood in ancient Egyptian boatbuilding, especially for the simple, flat-bottomed punts used for hunting and harvesting in the Nile's papyrus swamps. The roots of the plant were robust enough to be carved into tools and utensils, and, in the form of charcoal, they burned hot enough to smelt iron and copper, reaching temperatures of 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit (900 degrees Celsius). . "In a country that was marshy and arid by turns and conspicuously devoid of trees, papyrus reeds provided a convenient alternative to importing timber.
"The inhabitants of the fertile Nile delta cultivated papyrus for papermaking purposes from the fourth millennium BCE onward, though papyrus reeds were adapted to a bewildering array of other uses too. Here, triangular, grasslike stems crowned by sprays of fine leaves grow from submerged roots to reach around ten feet in height. To the south, beyond the country's borders, the banks of the White Nile and the shores of Lake Victoria, its source, are crowded by stands of papyrus sedge. " Cyperus papyrus has always been an interloper in Egypt, if a welcome one.
Today's selection - from The Book by Keith Houston. The papyrus reed was a key commodity in Ancient Egypt: Papyrus was an alternative to timber - 1/16/19