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Book: Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World
Author: Irene Vallejo
Review by: Trevor Williams, Managing Editor, Global Atlanta
When we crack open a book, we’re partaking in a small miracle, joining in a tradition, millennia in the making, of preserving, disseminating and reveling in the tactile written word — a feat that in a world of Wikipedia and Google seems both miraculous and inevitable, given how humans long for legacy.
As a writer, I’ve always loved books and aspire to write a few one day. But I’m not sure I appreciated the arduous journey that the book, as an instrument to preserve collective memory, has endured from the ancient world to today — until I picked up Papyrus by Irene Vallejo.
Vallejo recounts the history of the Library of Alexandria, the first effort to compile and catalog all the written knowledge of the world. Now lost to history, that physical complex, with its museaum and iconic lighthouse, might be construed as the beginning of history as we know it today, the first unified attempt, at scale, to truly understand the world beyond tribal boundaries and palace accounting. Vallejo unravels a revolutionary world of scribes and scholars, and how their efforts to ingest, copy and preserve knowledge were mercifully insulated from the chaos and war outside for centuries.
The irony is that the first cosmopolitan was also a conqueror — Alexander the Great — the Macedonian ruler who knitted much of the known world together through imperial megalomania but also, evidently, a healthy dose of curiosity about his subjects, from Europe to India.
The fact that the library was constituted by his descendants, the long line of Ptolemies, on the shores of the Nile seems fitting, given the stranglehold Egypt retained on the raw materials used to make the earliest books. A reed grown in marshy land near the river, papyrus offered fibers that could be cross-hatched, pounded, then smoothed with pumice to flatten a surface fit for the quill, then glued together and rolled up in scrolls.
Vallejo, who blends deep knowledge of the classics and imaginative wit with keenly calibrated social antennae, explores the transition from the oral traditions to the written word, describing how the ancient Greeks saw books as dead until enlivened by a human voice. Remarkably, the idea of reading words silently on a page is a relatively recent invention, another modern inheritance we often take for granted along with systems of classification (and therefore discoverability), widespread literacy and even the very idea that books principally should drive public education rather than solidifying the status of elites.
Chock full of insight about the ancient world, the tome also explores the evolution of alphabets, various writing media (stone, wax tablets and parchment), and, poignantly, the paradoxes of the printed word. As Vallejo describes with the help of endless anecdotes, both humorous and humanizing, books can preserve privilege and forge inclusion; they can invite and indict, express and suppress, solidify cultural identity and spur revolutions.
As Vallejo recounts the works lost to history, from the elements or ideological attack, as well as those that somehow found their way down through the ages, it’s inevitable to feel both indebted to history and more deeply connected to it. Reading Papyrus — on paper, or even a screen — is a step toward paying that inheritance forward.
A Chance to Explore Greek Antiquity and Diplomacy Feb. 5
Interestingly, I read this book as we continue to prepare for our Consular Conversation interview with the Greek Consul Konstantinos Adamopolous at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, where guests will be able to walk the exhibits and see artifacts from antiquity. Learn more about the luncheon and sign up here:
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Each year, Global Atlanta asks influential readers and community leaders to review the most impactful book they read during the course of the year. This endeavor has continued annually since 2010.
See last year’s full list of books on BookShop here and see Global Atlanta’s full store, featuring Reader Picks lists going back to 2013 along with lists of books we’ve covered through stories or author talks.
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