![]() ![]() Still, the scrolls archaeologists find aren't always in great shape. Like all organic material, papyrus tends to rot when exposed to oxygen and moisture, but when it's buried in dry climates like Egypt's, it has a better chance of survival. No glue was necessary the plant's natural stickiness fused the fibers together. To make a paper-like sheet of papyrus, thin strips of the pith from inside the stems of reedy papyrus plants were sliced and arranged in overlapping, perpendicular layers. And yet most of the texts from the island haven't been studied or published-and many haven't even been unfurled because they're so delicate. "I'm not aware of any other place in the world where you have 4,000 years covered by textural resources from one single place," Lepper says. The hundreds of documents that have turned up at Elephantine include 10 different languages and range four continuous millennia, from Egypt's Old Kingdom around 2500 B.C. But for Lepper what is most interesting about this first copy of The Ahiqar is where it came from: Elephantine Island, a narrow patch of land less than a square mile large in the middle of the Nile River, opposite Aswan in southern Egypt. "Literary studies people claim this is the first novel ever to be written," she says. The 2,500-year-old text was written in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, and one of the 15 that Lepper, a curator at the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin, knows herself. Among the manuscripts was a section of The Ahiqar, a proverb-loaded narrative about a betrayed chancellor of the Assyrian King Sennacherib.
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