People have eyes, yet they see so little. They are not trained to see. To most men a rose is only a flower, but to the exceptional man it is a miracle, for as he gazes at the glorious bloom with its many-tinted petals he visualizes the tiny single rose—the common dog-rose—from which all roses in their wondrous diversity of colour and shape and size and perfume have sprung. Many people regard the earthworm as an annoyance which disfigures the lawn, but Darwin saw in it the lowly creature that is helping to keep the earth sweet and clean by removing the decaying leaves, a blind thing that is continually providing the earth with a layer of new soil in which man may plant his seeds and harvest his crops. Countless earthworms are the servants of men.
The diggers toiling in the heat of the sun in Egypt and Mesopotamia and Crete and other places are blessed with this keen vision. Without it they would be useless. If the Rosetta Stone to them were just a broken piece of rock, the romance of the past would not appeal to them. They would not possess the imagination which drives them into the lonely places to find traces of many lost civilizations.
When they glimpse a ruin they can close their eyes and see the men quarrying the stones and the masons squaring them and the sculptors carving them; they can see kings consulting their architects, and architects giving orders to the masons; they can see the stone blocks being hauled in place and set one upon another. These and many other things they can see. They are using their eyes to benefit the majority of people, who cannot see these things for themselves.
Unfortunately the men who were early interested in the past of Egypt had little to guide them, and they sought for written records. They were all papyri mad. So long as they could find papyri and carry them off to their museums they were content.
In the light of our later knowledge we are wont to blame them, but there may be some excuse for them. The Egyptian papyri are wonderful, quite apart from what is written upon them. They are the gift of the Nile and of Egypt to the world. Almost they might be called the first sheets of paper ever made.
Papyrus nearly six thousand years old has already been found, and it appears doubtful whether we shall ever be able to trace the name of the first man who thought of using the stem of the papyrus plant in so useful a manner.
It seems likely that the discovery may have been due to Egyptian children. If you walk about the English country-side when the bulrushes are flourishing, it is a common sight to see children plucking the rushes and skinning them to make flowers out of the pith. The papyrus plant flourishes in the Nile water, where it roots in the mud just as the bulrush roots in the mud of English ponds. It often attains a height of 15 feet or more, and the green stem of the plant grows straight up without any joints from top to bottom.
What children do in one country in one age they are likely to do in all countries in all ages. Human nature is fairly constant, and rushes growing in a river will always attract children. Probably some dark-skinned Egyptian children in the misty ages picked the skin off the papyrus reeds in order to play with the pith, which differs materially from that of the English bulrush. In the course of their childish games they may have cut the fibrous pith into layers and spread them on a rock, just as children spread out things to play at shops, whereupon the hot sun of Egypt would quickly dry the fragments.
Perhaps the father, interested in the games of his children, seized on this curious substance and was struck by its fine texture and smooth surface. Experimenting for himself out of sheer curiosity, he may have cut some strips of pith and joined them in a simple manner by pressing the edges with his finger while they were still moist with sap, thus making the first sheet of papyrus. Whatever its origin, papyrus in time was made by cutting the pith into thin strips, placing the strips so that one edge overlapped another, and pressing them all together. When they dried, the overlapped edges adhered, and the result was a continuous sheet of white material on which it was possible to work with a brush and a reed pen.
The papyrus reed still flourishes in the Upper Nile as it did in ancient days. Indeed it has become rather a curse to the country, and a few years ago it threatened to choke the river completely. It was such a menace, owing to its interfering with the flow of water on which the whole life of Egypt depends, that drastic steps, costing a huge sum of money, had to be taken to clear the upper reaches. Steamers slowly ate their way into it for hundreds of miles, clearing channels and destroying the sudd, as it is called, the sudd which is largely composed of the papyrus on which the ancients relied for their writing materials! Nowadays, the sudd is being compressed into blocks and used as fuel, so the papyrus is still serving humanity.