![]() ″I realized there was no place for a tourist to learn about ancient Egypt, about what he was seeing in the museums,″ he said. ![]() ″You even have two villages with 30,000 people who gave up farming a couple of years ago, just to grow, make, paint and market papyrus,″ Ragab said. Hundreds of papyrus factories sprang up, many making fake paper from banana skins or corn husks. Ragab estimates his industry now earns $100 million a year locally, $40 million internationally.īut Ragab’s success was too great. ![]() In 1984, President Hosni Mubarak went to Washington with a Ragab portrait of the Sphinx with President Ronald Reagan’s face instead of a Pharaoh’s. Egyptian presidents give papyrus as gifts. Lightweight and exotic, papyrus is ″the only true Egyptian souvenir,″ Ragab said. His papyrus paper attracted artists, who duplicated tomb paintings, golden faces of King Tut and ancient medical manuscripts. Ragab opened his first Papyrus Institute, which he called ″One of the Seven Wonders of Modern Egypt,″ on a little houseboat in the Nile in 1966, growing the plant in surrounding Nile shallows. ″But fortunately, for the papyrus industry and for me, I discovered my mistakes. One day my wife came in and gave me a choice of her or the dirty bathtub. No one else could help him, he said, because papyrus-making, like mummification, was so sacred the ancients reserved it for the Pharaohs.įor six years Ragab cut papyrus pulp into strips, soaked them, dried them, hammered and pressed them into sheets. In 1960, with papyrus stalks he cut in Sudan, Ragab began experimenting in his bathtub. ″I thought how great it would be if I could start a little industry, making paper again.″ ″Everything was written on it, from peace treaties to marriage contracts to medical instructions.″īut by the middle of the 20th century, ″papyrus was finished in Egypt, except for a few ornamental plants,″ he added. ″I thought of my own country, once world-famous for producing paper from the papyrus plant,″ he said. On a countryside tour, he saw workers making paper by hand. His love affair with the willowy river plant began in 1955, after his appointment as Egypt’s first ambassador to China. The realm of the 78-year-old former diplomat and engineer is Jacob’s Island, a finger of land south of Cairo where he first established a papyrus farm, then re-created a 3,300-year-old village to give tourists glimpses of ancient Egyptian life from flat-bottom barges. Thirty years later they cover an island in the Nile and have made him not only Egypt’s papyrus king but also Pharaoh of a imaginary kingdom from the days of King Tut. Production of Papyrus paper and cultivation of papyrus plantations were neglected after the invention of paper and papyrus actually disappeared from the Egyptian landscape.CAIRO, Egypt (AP) _ Hassan Ragab’s dreams once fit into a bathtub. The ancient subject matter recorded on papyrus can be extremely varied and can include literature, religious texts, magical texts and even instrumental music. The various varieties and sizes of papyrus were often named in honor of emperors or officials. The finest papyrus was made using the innermost pith layers and was said to have come from the Delta region. The finest and most expensive varieties were reserved for religious or literary works. Very cheaply made coarse papyrus was used by merchants to wrap items. There were also Papyrus books called codex, in later periods.Each type of Papyrus was used for different purposes. In fact, papyrus sheets were usually not sold individually, but in rolls. The process differed slightly in different periods of Egyptian history, but the essence was almost the same.įor longer documents, the pages were joined to create a papyrus roll. The outcome was a sheet, which was hammered flat and dried in the sun. The juice of the plant acted like glue and bonded the strips together. Then the whole thing was soaked in water and pressed under a heavy rock for 21 days.
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