Word: papyruses
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...outermost rooms, that the artifacts were discovered-most of them broken. "Clearly," says Weeks, "the tomb was pretty well gone over in ancient times." The archaeologists have tracked down a record of one of those robberies, which occurred in about 1150 B.C. A 3,000-year-old papyrus fragment housed in a museum in Turin, Italy, recounts the trial of a thief who was caught in the Valley of the Kings. He confessed under torture that he had broken into Ramesses II's tomb and then returned the next night to rob the tomb of Ramesses' children, which lay across...
...equipped and ill-trained Shi'ite fighters have survived largely because of the protection offered by the terrain, with its floating reed islands and 20-ft. tall forests of papyrus and rushes. But once the swamps are dry, the rebels fear not only enemy tanks but also fires, which would push them into the arms of troops surrounding the perimeter. In February three blazes set by Iraqi barrages scorched several hundred square miles of marshland and destroyed dozens of villages...
Northern Africa was a somewhat wetter place five millenniums ago, and the land was fertile in a broad swath on either side of the Nile. Many Egyptians still lived in huts made of papyrus or mud; raised wheat, barley and livestock; and paid homage to the local chiefs. Within just a few hundred years the Pharaoh Narmer would forge the entire area into the great Egyptian Empire. But recent scholarship shows that local chiefdoms were already coalescing into larger kingdoms, as they were in the neighboring land of Nubia, just upriver. As in Europe, a stable food supply created...
...HARD-COVER BOOK IS A PRETTY venerable piece of technology. The letters on the page are descended from movable type pioneered by Johanes Gutenberg in the 1400s. The paper is not all that different from papyrus used by the Pharaohs. Books today may be written with word processors, but they are still printed in ink, bound with thread and delivered essentially by hand...
...writing a play about Cicero and ancient Rome. You want to make it historically accurate, but you hardly know where to begin. What did the Romans write on? Paper? Papyrus? Scrolls? Did they shake hands? How easy was it to get divorced...