There wasn’t much to conclude from all this other than adding to the sparse descriptive data on the subject. It would have been nice if it were possible to assign how each piece was specifically used, but there really wasn’t much to go on, unless you wanted to speculate based on size or perhaps a knot or two. There was one aspect of the study, though, that did border on interpretation. The samples of cordage were derived from two excavations at different parts of the site of El-Hibeh, and the kinds retrieved from each were quite different. One might suggest, therefore, perhaps with other supporting data, that these two areas varied in function, based on surviving cordage and other objects. At El-Hibeh the evidence seemed to suggest that this was the case, one excavation revealing domestic or home sites and the other associated with some sort of public architecture. But regardless of what little I could add to the history of ancient Egypt by this study, I at least added to my own knowledge and experience, and my interest was piqued.
During my fortuitous encounter with Harry James on that Red Sea cruise, I asked if the British Museum’s Egyptian collection possessed any cordage. “Bits of string!” replied Harry. “Yes, in fact, we do.” In my own enthusiastic way, I tried to impress upon him how important cordage was to the ancient Egyptians. The man in charge of galleries of superb sculptures, mummies, and priceless works of art was indeed well aware that everything, no matter how mundane, had the potential of contributing a little something to our knowledge. “Come on by the department on your way through London, and we’ll have a look!” I arrived a few weeks later, and, as promised, there were pieces of ancient rope to examine, each well preserved and well cared for.
It was a wonderful collection of ropes from different eras and places in Egypt, which together formed a nice, varied sample. There was a huge fragment almost the diameter of my wrist and another that was lengthy and gathered into a coil. Yet another huge piece was composed mostly of a single very large knot. Harry provided whatever data the museum possessed in its records, and I selected seventeen specimens for detailed analysis based on the extent of surviving information on each item. Most of the samples were collected around or prior to the turn of the century when interest in these sorts of artifacts was not a priority to archaeologists working in Egypt. Thankfully, a number of specimens had made their way to the museum with notes recording such data as their place of discovery and the overall context in which they were found.
From my study of the El-Hibeh material, I had a good idea about how to document this stuff. This time, though, I was intent on pursuing the one vital variable I didn’t have the skills to deal with before: material. What were these artifacts made of? Determining material of manufacture of artifacts made from ancient plants certainly must fall within the realm of botany, and soon after I returned home, I went to the biology department at Pacific Lutheran University looking for a willing consultant. Professor David Hansen must have thought it a strange proposition when approached by an animated ancient rope enthusiast, but I somehow convinced him that the project was sufficiently interesting to give it a deeper look. His lack of background in Egyptian archaeology wasn’t detrimental—I’d cover that—but his botanical knowledge was essential.
After delving into what limited literature we could find on the subject, Dave had a good idea of what would be required. Fiber samples extracted from the ancient ropes could be cut into very thin slices and mounted on slides. As each plant species is anatomically distinct in microscopic cross section, we should be able, in theory at least, to compare the ancient samples with slides made in a similar way from modern reference specimens of plants known to be used in ancient Egypt. So back to London I would need to go, in order to retrieve the necessary fiber samples.
The opportunity came that fall, actually twice, while I was traveling to and from a stint as a tutor aboard an oilman’s private yacht in the Aegean, a curious story in its own right that would only distract from my exciting unfolding tale of ancient rope. Needless to say, it was delightful to spend time in the British Museum. I looked forward each day to showing up at the Egyptian department’s “students’ room,” accessed by a nondescript door between statues of the lion-headed goddess Sekhmet, situated on one of the museum’s grand staircases. Pushing a button would bring a greeter, and soon I would be going about my work, facilitated by a helpful and hospitable staff. It took several days to examine and document the ropes as I conducted my usual descriptive analysis. With permission, of course, I was able to take samples from each artifact, placing a few fibers in small coin envelopes to be brought home with me to PLU.
Back at Dave’s lab, we found that many of the samples were brittle, and the first task was to soften them a bit, which Dave did in an appropriate chemical solution. Afterward individual fibers were embedded into small paraffin blocks before meeting their fate in the microtome. The microtome is a little machine that wields a dangerously sharp blade, capable of slicing samples of many things, from diseased human tissue to ancient cordage fibers, to a thickness of only microns. “It will cut you if you just look at it!” I joked, and I let Dave do the serious stuff. By turning a small crank, like a butcher cutting pastrami in a deli, he guided the microtome to slice each fiber into thin ribbons, which were then mounted on slides and stained to bring out their features.
Under the microscope one could certainly see an array of anatomical features resembling pockets and strands that varied between some specimens but were clearly identical in others. To identify the actual materials, though, a series of reliable reference specimens were needed to compare with our ancient samples. For starters I was able to obtain fibers from date palms growing at the family homestead in Southern California. We would, however, need quite a number of other species, and it was clear that a collecting trip to the place where they grew naturally, Egypt, would be required.
With a list of species in hand, Dave and I ventured off to the Land of the Pharaohs. Unfortunately for my friend, the airline had lost virtually all of his luggage, and Dave was left with just the clothes on his back and a plant press. It’s a device consisting of layers of thick paper and cardboard pressed between two wooden frames by tightening straps. Also unfortunate was that the other necessary tools, including our “floras”—reference books for identifying plant species—were also lost in the luggage, as were some devices for retrieving samples. We suspect that one such device used for coring trees, and somewhat resembling a metal pipe, might have been the culprit that invited airport suspicion and thus caused the vital suitcase to be held. (As an aside, Dave’s suitcase, mostly intact, arrived on his doorstep in Olympia, Washington, without explanation about three months later.) After waiting a few days for the lost bag, we decided to proceed, and I lent Dave some of my clothes, which looked quite comical on him as I was several sizes larger. Nonetheless, we pressed on.
One of our plants of interest was papyrus, a plant almost synonymous with ancient Egypt, where it served as a source material for making paper. The Egyptians had ample use for the product, and during the Greek and Roman dominations of Egypt it was exported all over the Mediterranean. The Egyptians themselves also used the plant for a variety of other things, including the making of naturally buoyant boats, sandals, and yes, ropes. A couple of ancient Greek visitors to Egypt even noted that the plant could be used as food, prompting a colleague of mine—the late, great Donald Farmer—to coin the word “papriphagic.”*
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 tim
es, 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 i
ndicate. 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 climate 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!
Beneath the Sands of Egypt Page 10