Papyrus Game

One of the considerations in piecing together papyrus fragments involves matching their respective “fingerprints.” In order to understand how this can be done, you need to know how ancient papyrus paper was made. Papyrus comes from the stalk of a reed plant. The stalks were peeled of their tough, outer bark and then the inner bark was sliced into small strips. The strips, after being soaked in water, were laid down vertically, and across them other strips were laid down horizontally. The entire grouping of strips was then pressed down under a weight. As the papyrus dried, the natural starch in the plant would serve as a bonding “glue” and the final product, the oldest form of paper, constituted a web of horizontal and vertical strips.

Each papyrus strip has a particular grain, just like wood. If you want to make sure that a given fragment matches another one, the final and most certain check is to match strip to strip, fiber to fiber, grain to grain. This must be done on both sides of the papyrus. For real papyrus fragments, you must make sure that the shapes match, the text on front and back match, and the grains on both sides match. The skill involved in this is a sub-specialty of epigraphy: papyrology.

Here is a papyrus game to try on your own. Below are nine paired boxes. Click here, print the page, and then cut around each pair and fold down the middle along the dotted line. When you secure the pairs back-to-back with tape or paste, you will then have nine squares with black-and-white lines going vertically on one side and horizontally on the other. Pretend that the squares represent the fragments of an ancient papyrus and that the black-and-white lines are the vertical and horizontal grain of the individual papyrus strands. See if you can match all nine squares (front and back) so they form a single large square.

(From Puzzling Out the Past: Making Sense of Ancient Inscriptions from Biblical Times [An Exhibition at the Dubin/Wolf Exhibition Center, Wilshire Boulevard Temple, April 5th to November 15th, 1987].)