Word: papyrus
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...owes its very existence, says Professor André Bataille, director of the institute, to the fact that during the 2nd and 3rd centuries B.C. wood was too expensive to be used in mummy cases for average Egyptians. As a result, funeral directors enclosed corpses in waste papyrus manuscripts coated with plaster and molded to a shape vaguely reminiscent of a human body...
...Glue. First step in the delicate process of retrieving the papyrus intact is to spray the mummy with hot diluted hydrochloric acid. In about ten minutes most of the plaster dissolves, and the wad of papyrus that is left is laid on a wire tray over a tank of steaming water. It poaches there for a while, gradually softening as the papyrologists encourage the process and separate the stuff with delicate tweezings...
This might not work with paper, but papyrus is tougher. It was made by cutting thin slices of the pith of the papyrus plant, laying them side by side and pressing two layers together with their grains running at right angles. Professor Bataille thinks that no glue or paste was used; the natural sap of the fresh-cut pith made the layers stick together. Sometimes the hot-water treatment restores the sheets until they are almost as good...
...material, the institute depends mostly on mummies from the cemetery of Ghoran, a village in Upper Egypt. Since Ghoran's unlettered countryfolk produced too little waste papyrus to wrap their own dead, their undertakers went to Arsinoë, the provincial capital, and bought the contents of its wastebaskets, which were kept filled by the papyrus work of the swarming provincial bureaucracy. Most of the papyrus sheets that Professor Bataille untangles are startlingly similar to the waste paper of a modern office building -receipted bills, accounts, inventories, private and government contracts. This material fascinates historians with the light it casts...
Sometimes among the bills and accounts he finds a literary prize. Not long ago while his assistant, Mlle. Nicole Parichon, was cleaning the plaster off a mummy, she spotted a piece of papyrus that looked unusual. Other pieces matched it, and eventually a dozen pieces fitted together. They turned out to be part of a long, rolled-up scroll that contained 400 lines of a hitherto unknown play of Menander, a Greek playwright who died in 290 B.C. It is one of the oldest Greek manuscripts known, but the writing is almost as clear as fresh print...