Archaeology Wordsmith

Results for papyrus:

papyrus: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Cyperus papyrus
CATEGORY: flora; language
DEFINITION: A reed of the sedge family growing in Mediterranean lands, particularly Egypt along the banks of the Nile. It is the flexible writing material produced from the plant. By splitting and opening out its stems, laying them together in two layers at right angles to each other, then beating them together, activating the plant's natural starch to form an adhesive -- an inexpensive writing material was created. Examples preserved by the dry climate of Egypt and other regions in tombs, caves, etc., have yielded invaluable evidence on the ancient history of the area. 'Papyrus' is the Latin form, from which our word 'paper' derives. Its stems were also bound together in bundles together to make lightweight boats. Used first in Egypt, it later replaced clay tablets in the Near East when the Aramaic alphabet replaced the cuneiform script. Unlike engraved clay tablets, papyrus allowed a light, cursive script, thus encouraging the spread of a technique that was originally very restricted and specialized. The earliest papyrus dates to the 1st Dynasty, the latest to the Islamic Period, when the plant died out in Egypt.
papyrus column: CATEGORY: structure; artifact
DEFINITION: In Egyptian religion, an amulet that conveyed freshness, youth, vigor, and the continuance of life to its wearer. It is also the name of the mighty columns erected at Karnak, 134 total, 12 of which formed the higher central aisle (76 feet /23 meters) of the hypostyle hall.
Turin Papyrus: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Turin Royal Canon, Turin Papyrus of Kings, Turin Canon
CATEGORY: artifact; language
DEFINITION: A hieratic manuscript of the 19th dynasty of Egypt which lists the kings of Egypt from earliest times to the reign of Ramses II (1279-1213 BC), under whom it was written. The papyrus is now in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, in very fragmentary condition, but it is still considered the most detailed and reliable of the existing Egyptian king lists. It lists not only names but also regnal years, months, and days and also divides pharaonic history into dynasties and into three major periods -- Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom. It was evidently copied from a more complete original.
Anuket: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Anqet, Anukis
CATEGORY: deity
DEFINITION: Goddess of Sehel, the Nile cataract region near Aswan. She is generally represented as a woman holding a papyrus scepter and wearing a tall plumed crown.
Book of the Dead: CATEGORY: language
DEFINITION: The modern name given to a collection of ancient Egyptian mortuary texts made up of spells or magic formulas, placed in tombs and believed to protect and aid the deceased in the hereafter. The collection, literally titled The Chapters of Coming-Forth-by-Day received its present name from Karl Richard Lepsius, German Egyptologist who published the first collection of the texts in 1842. It was probably compiled and re-edited during the 16th century BC, and over half of the collection is comprised of the Coffin Texts dating from c 2000 BC and the Pyramid Texts dating from c 2400 BC. The Book of the Dead had numerous authors, compilers, and sources. Scribes copied the texts on rolls of papyrus, often with illustrations, and sold them to individuals for use in burials. Many copies of the book have been found in Egyptian tombs, but none contains all of the approximately 200 chapters. The choice of spells varies from copy to copy.
Byblos: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: modern Gebeil, Gubla, Jubeil, Gebail, Jubayl, Jebeil; ancient/biblical Gebal; adjective Jiblite (Kubna, ancient Egyptian; Gubla, Akkadian)
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: An ancient seaport on the Mediterranean coast just north of Beirut, Lebanon and one of the oldest continuously inhabited towns in the world. Papyrus received its early Greek name (byblos, byblinos) from its being exported to the Aegean through Byblos. The English word Bible is derived from byblos as the (papyrus) book." Excavations revealed that Byblos was occupied at least by the Neolithic period (c 8000-4000 BC) and that an extensive settlement developed during the 4th millennium BC. Byblos was the main harbor for exporting cedar and other valuable wood to Egypt from 3000 BC on. Egyptian monuments and inscriptions on the site describe to close relations with the Nile valley throughout the second half of the 2nd millennium. During Egypt's 12th dynasty (1938-1756 BC) Byblos became an Egyptian dependency and the chief goddess of the city Baalat with her well-known temple at Byblos was worshipped in Egypt. After the collapse of the Egyptian New Kingdom in the 11th century BC Byblos became the most important city of Phoenicia. Byblos has yielded almost all of the known early Phoenician inscriptions most of them dating from the 10th century BC. The crusaders captured the town in 1103 but they later lost it to the Ayyubids in 1189. The ruins today consist of the crusader ramparts and gate; a Roman colonnade and small theater; Phoenician ramparts three major temples and a necropolis."
cartonnage: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: cartonage
CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: An Egyptian mummy case made of layers of papyrus or linen soaked in gesso plaster and shaped around an embalmed body, much like papier maché, and then decorated with paint or gilding when dry. The term also refers to the material thus used and for mummy masks, anthropoid coffins, and other funerary items made in the same manner.
clay tablet: CATEGORY: artifact
DEFINITION: The main writing material used by the scribes of early civilizations. Signs were impressed or inscribed on the soft clay, which was then dried in the sun. The ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hittites wrote on tablets made from water-cleaned clay. A common form was a thin quadrilateral tile about five inches long which, while still wet, was inscribed by a stylus with cuneiform characters. By writing on the surface in small characters, a scribe could copy a substantial text on a single tablet. For longer texts, several tablets were used and then linked by numbers or catchwords. Book production on clay tablets probably continued for 2,000 years in Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Either dried in the sun or baked in a kiln, clay tablets were almost indestructible. The latter process was used for texts of special value, legal codes, royal annals, and epics to ensure greater preservation. Buried for thousands of years in the mounds of forgotten cities, they have been removed intact or almost so in modern archaeological excavations. The number of clay tablets recovered is nearly half a million, but there are constantly new finds. The largest surviving category consists of private commercial documents and government archives. When the Aramaic language and alphabet arose in the 6th century BC, the clay tablet book declined because clay was less suited than papyrus to the Aramaic characters.
Dead Sea Scrolls: CATEGORY: artifact; language
DEFINITION: Ancient Hebrew manuscripts recovered from five cave sites in which they had been hidden at the northwest corner of the Dead Sea. They are believed to be the religious writings of the Essenes, a sect who in the 1st century BC and 1st century AD dwelt in a monastery at Khirbet Qumran. This material, first found in 1947, is extremely relevant to the origins of Christianity. The library included all the Old Testament texts as well as sectarian works. The scrolls, together with the excavations at Qumran, have provided much information about the beliefs and way of life of the Essenes. It is thought that the library was hidden in the cave in anticipation of the destruction of Khirbet Qumran by the Romans, which occurred in 67-73 AD. The manuscripts of leather, papyrus, and copper are among the more important discoveries in the history of modern archaeology. Their recovery has enabled scholars to push back the date of the Hebrew Bible to no later than 70 AD and to reconstruct the history of Palestine from the 4th century BC to 135 AD.
epigraphy: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: epigrapher
CATEGORY: branch
DEFINITION: The study of ancient inscriptions and letter forms on buildings, statuary, tablets, and other durable materials and objects (such as wood, bone, pottery, stone). An expert in such studies is an epigrapher or epigraphist. Such texts are often the only surviving records of extinct cultures and chronicle ancient events, beliefs, and lists of kings. Epigraphy encompasses inscriptions from the earliest complex societies to those of modern states. Epigraphy sometimes does not include the study of texts painted on ceramics or written on papyrus or wood, which are regarded as within the studies of ceramics and papyrology, respectively. Epigraphy deals both with the form of the inscriptions, and with their content: study of the form enables assessment of the development of language and the alphabet; their content is, however, usually more important for the light thrown on the social, political, religious, and economic life of the ancient world. The science includes decipherment, translation, explanation, and evaluation of the inscriptions.
Fayyum, al- or Fayum: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Fayoum, Fayum region, ancient Ta-she, She-resy, Moeris
CATEGORY: site
DEFINITION: A large fertile depression in the Libyan Desert, southwest of Cairo near the west bank of the Nile, with two prehistoric cultures dating to c 5000 BC and c 4500 BC. These early settlements were of the first food-producing peoples of Egypt. Emmer and barley were cultivated and cattle, sheep, and pigs bred. Saw-edged sickle flints, mat-lined silo pits, and saddle querns have been found and ax heads were of flaked flint or ground pebbles. Hollow-based flint arrowheads, bone dart tips, stone maceheads, and bone harpoons were used for hunting and fishing. Artifacts of special note include a threshing flail and a wooden sickle set with flint teeth. Pottery was in use and beads of ostrich eggshell and seashells of both Mediterranean and Red Sea types were imported. Lake Qarun had fish which were a delicacy for Egyptians throughout the ages. In Middle Empire (c 2000 BC), the pharaohs (Amenemhet III) engaged in huge irrigation and drainage schemes and the area was famous for orchards and gardens. After a period of decline, the Ptolemies in turn took an interest in the area, establishing a number of small towns there, the papyrus archives which have survived in great quantity and excellent state of preservation. The region incorporates archaeological sites dating from the late Palaeolithic to the late Roman and Christian periods (c 8000 BC-641 AD), including Shedet (later Crocodilopolis), chief center for worship of the crocodile-god Sebek, near which al-Fayyum town now lies.
Gerzean: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: Nagada II
CATEGORY: culture
DEFINITION: A late predynastic culture of Upper Egypt, successor of the Amratian, c 4000-3500 BC. It is named after the site of El Gerza or Gerzeh in the Fayum and is well represented at the cemetery of Naqada in Upper Egypt; another important site is Hierakonpolis. Flintwork included ripple-flaked knives and their was metalworking as copper was coming into use for axes, daggers, etc. Faience was introduced and ground stone vessels were popular and very finely worked. Typical pottery is a light-colored fabric in shapes imitating the stone vessels, decorated with red painted designs. These include imitations of stone markings, geometrical patterns and designs taken from nature. Ships were common, especially the papyrus-bundle craft used on the Nile. There is much evidence of contacts with southwestern Asia (in wavy-ledged handles on the jars, in cylinder seals, representations of mythical animals, the use of mudbrick in architecture, and possibly writing). These seem to have led to the advances which brought Egypt to the level of unified civilization at the start of the Dynastic period c 3200 BC.
hieratic: CATEGORY: language
DEFINITION: A cursive form of the Egyptian hieroglyphs developed for everyday use in handwritten documents. It arose from the use of brush pen on papyrus for business and similar non-monumental purposes, starting at the end of the Early Dynastic Period (c 2686 BC). It was gradually replaced by demotic starting in the 7th century BC, but survived for religious use to the end of paganism in Egypt. The word comes from Greek hieratika sacred". Hieratic signs lost the pictorial character of hieroglyphs and are often joined together. Hieratic was written in one direction only from right to left. In earlier times the lines had run vertically and later about 2000 BC horizontally. Subsequently the papyrus scrolls were written in columns of changing widths. There were ligatures in hieratic so that two but no more than two signs could be written in one stroke. As a consequence of its decreased legibility the spelling of the hieratic script was more rigid than that of hieroglyphic writing. Variations from uniformity at a given time were minor; but during the course of the various periods the spelling developed and changed. As a result hieratic texts do not correspond exactly to contemporary hieroglyphic texts either in the placing of signs or in the spelling of words. Hieratic used diacritical additions to distinguish between two signs that had grown similar to one another because of cursive writing. In the life of the Egyptians hieratic script played a larger role than hieroglyphic writing and was also taught earlier in the schools. The latest hieratic texts are from the end of the 1st century or the beginning of the 2nd century AD. Hieratic should not be confused with 'cursive hieroglyphs' which were used for most of the Pharaonic period in such religious writings as the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead."
library: CATEGORY: structure
DEFINITION: Collection of books used for reading or study, or the building or room in which such a collection is kept. The origin of libraries came in the 3rd millennium BC, when records on clay tablets were stored in a temple in the Babylonian town of Nippur. In the 7th century BC, the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal assembled and organized a collection of records, of which some 20,000 tablets and fragments have survived. The first libraries as repositories of books were those of the Greek temples and those established in conjunction with the Greek schools of philosophy in the 4th century BC. Important libraries of the ancient world were those of Aristotle, the great Library of Alexandria with its thousands of papyrus and vellum scrolls, its rival at Pergamum that included many works on parchment, the Bibliotheca Ulpia of Rome, and the Imperial Library at Byzantium set up by Constantine the Great in the 4th century AD. China also has a long tradition of record keeping and book collecting, in private libraries as well as in centralized government libraries. Extant Greek and Roman literary works were preserved alongside the early Christian literature in Constantine's library and, beginning in the 2nd century, in libraries of monasteries. The loss of the Great Library at Alexandria, which was burned to the ground in the late third century AD, was devastating. The Alexandria library had probably been established by Ptolemy I Soter (305-285 BC), who also founded the Museum ('shrine of the Muses'), initially creating both institutions as annexes to his palace. Later in the Ptolemaic period, another large library was created, probably within the Alexandria serapeum, but this too was destroyed in 391 AD.
parchment: CATEGORY: term; language
DEFINITION: Writing material made from the skin of calves, sheep, or goat, which gradually replaced papyrus during the late Roman empire, resulting in the book (codex) replacing the scroll. The name apparently derives from the ancient Greek city of Pergamum (in Turkey), where parchment is said to have been invented in the 2nd century BC. It is less fragile, and could also be reused after the original text had been erased by scraping (called palimpsests). The finer kind of parchment known as vellum is from the skins of calves, kids, and dead-born lambs. In the 4th century AD, vellum or parchment as a material and the codex as a form became dominant, although there are later examples of rolls, and papyrus was occasionally used for official documents until the 10th century. Paper then took over from 14th century.
philyra: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: philura
CATEGORY: artifact; language
DEFINITION: Strips of papyrus used for making a sheet of writing paper; 10-12 strips of papyrus were first glued together lengthwise and then a sufficient number of strips were fastened crosswise underneath to double the thickness of the surface.
sa: CATEGORY: term
DEFINITION: A hieroglyphic sign meaning 'protection', which may have originally represented the rolled-up reed mat that would have sheltered herdsmen or been the papyrus 'life-vest' for boatmen. The sign was used either as an amulet or symbol and held by deities Bes and Taweret.
stamp seal: CATEGORY: artifact; language
DEFINITION: A small, hard block that has a flat surface engraved with a design that can be transferred to soft clay or wax as a mark of ownership or authenticity. Stamp seals appear in Mesopotamia from the Halafian period in the fifth millennium BC, when they were used to impress ownership marks on lumps of clay which were then attached to goods. In the Bronze Age, it was differently shaped for different cultures: square in the Indus, round in the Persian Gulf (Barbar), and compartmented in central Asia (Bactrian). Stamp seals preceded cylinders and developed over a period of about 1,500 years until largely replaced by the cylinder in the 3rd millennium BC. Seals came into use before the invention of writing for the securing of property and the method was either to shape clay over the stopper or lid or to make a fastening with cord and place clay around the knot and then impress it with the seal. The sealing of written documents, mainly clay tablets and papyrus scrolls, became regularly established in the latter part of the 3rd millennium BC.
stylus: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: stilus; plural styli, styluses
CATEGORY: artifact; language
DEFINITION: Pointed writing instrument made from a variety of materials: reed stem, bone, ivory, or metal (iron, bronze, silver). The sharpened implement is shaped like a pen with a wedge-shaped tip and one end flattened like a spatula; the latter served either to spread the wax on a writing tablet or to erase by smoothing. The stylus was used in ancient times as a tool for writing on parchment or papyrus. The early Greeks incised letters on wax-covered boxwood tablets using a stylus. A stylus was also used for impressing cuneiform writing into wet clay tablets, which were then baked.
tablet: SYNONYMS OR RELATED TERMS: clay tablet
CATEGORY: artifact; language
DEFINITION: Any flat surface for inscriptions, especially those on which cuneiform inscriptions were written. Tablets were normally of clay but were also made of stone or metal. The shape and size varied according to the nature of the inscription and the period when the tablet was inscribed. An impressed tablet is one bearing notations impressed with tokens or the blunt end of a stylus. These tablets were referred to in literature as numerical tablets" as they noted units of goods. An incised tablet bears notations traced with the sharp end of a stylus. A pictographic tablet is one bearing notations traced with the sharp end of a stylus; these two types of tablets had signs in the shape of the things they represented. The earliest known books are the clay tablets of Mesopotamia (and the papyrus rolls of Egypt)dating from the early 3rd millennium BC."
writing: CATEGORY: language
DEFINITION: Any system for symbolizing the symbols of a language. Writing was developed independently several times in different places and both the writing materials and the types of script show great variation. The earliest true writing developed in southern Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC Uruk culture. The writing material was clay; it was first inscribed and later impressed with a stylus to produce the wedge-shaped cuneiform signs. The earliest signs were pictograms ('picture writing', in which the signs represent stylized pictures of the objects in question), but these rapidly developed into ideograms (the signs indicated not only the original object, but also associated objects or concepts). The Egyptian hieroglyphic script, used for inscriptions on stone, painting on walls, and also writing on papyrus, appears well before 3000 BC. There is dispute as to whether the Egyptians developed writing independently or whether the art was diffused from Mesopotamia. The Harappan Civilization of the Indus Valley had a writing system of its own, dated to the second half of the 3rd millennium BC and is found almost exclusively on stamp seals and seal impressions. It has not been deciphered. The first true alphabet, with signs for individual letters, seems to have developed in the Levant, probably in the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. The first definite evidence comes from Ugarit in the mid-2nd millennium BC. The Phoenicians spread the alphabet throughout the Mediterranean and theirs is ancestral to most of the alphabets in use today. In China, writing developed independently, first appearing on oracle bones of the Shang dynasty. In Europe the only pre-Classical writing occurs in the Aegean in the 2nd millennium BC -- the hieroglyphic and Linear A scripts of the Minoans, as yet undeciphered, and the Linear B of the Mycenaeans, used to record an early form of Greek. The development of writing in the Americas occurred only in Mesoamerica -- the glyphic writing of the Maya and related groups, found in inscriptions carved on monuments, and the pictographic writing of Post-Classic groups such as the Mixtecs and Aztecs, found on manuscripts of bark or deerskin known as codices.

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