The earliest description of papyrus-making comes from the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder. While the arrangement is clear, the exact method of papyrus-making is, unfortunately, undocumented by the ancient Egyptians, and therefore some of the details of the procedure have been pondered over by modern scholars. The crisscross structure is formed by creating a sheet with two layers (for the majority of papyri) of pith slices arranged perpendicularly. The morphology of the papyrus pith is what lends a papyrus sheet its characteristic crisscross pattern: the fibrovascular bundles are the more substantial woody striations running horizontally across the recto of a papyrus (and vertically on the verso), and the parenchyma cells are the paler, more delicate “filling” between the striations. The pith is composed of the rigid ligneous and cellulosic fibrovascular bundles, and empty parenchyma cells with cellulose and hemi-cellulose walls, which function as air passages and give buoyancy to the stalk. The tough green rind of the papyrus stalk encloses the white pith, from which the papyrus sheet is made. Water and nutrients are carried from the roots, via a system of longitudinal fibrovascular bundles, up a thick and tapering triangular stalk that measures around 5–8 centimeters in diameter at its base to the wide flower head, or umbrel, at a height of around 4 meters (or 13 feet). Papyrus plants are native to river banks and marshy areas as they consume great quantities of water. While papyrus grew wild along the Nile, the possibility that it also may have been cultivated for use in papermaking has been explored but remains an open question. Although today the plant no longer grows in the Egyptian Nile Valley, it is generally accepted that during antiquity it was common and indigenous to the area. The botanical name for the papyrus plant is Cyperus papyrus, denoting that it belongs in the large Cyperaceae family of sedge plants. In addition to its function as a material for writing, papyrus was used in rope, basketry, sandals ( 10.184.1a,b), and other everyday items. With minor variations, the papyrus roll was produced essentially the same way throughout its approximately 4,000-year history. In ancient Egypt, texts could be written on papyrus in hieroglyphs, hieratic script, or Demotic script, and later papyrus was used in Greek ( 09.182.50), Coptic, Latin, Aramaic, and Arabic documents. even as paper, invented in China, became the most popular writing material for the Arab world around the eighth century A.D. Excavators of a tomb at Saqqara discovered the earliest known roll of papyrus, dated to around 2900 B.C., and papyrus continued to be used until the eleventh century A.D. The word papyrus refers both to the writing support invented by the ancient Egyptians ( 35.9.19a–e), and the plant from which they made this material.
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