There's a 5,000 year-old life form in my kitchen

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It's tall, it's lovely and its frondy top looks like green fireworks going off in all directions.

I see the history of civilization preserved in its sturdy stems every time I look at my papyrus plant towering beside the kitchen window.

Now I do have a confession: my plant itself isn’t exactly 5,000 years old. It’s more like three. And I (and it) have never even been near the Nile River. 

I first met the descendants of these storied civilization-changing plants at the Kennedy Greenhouses, just south of Stouffville. There was a whole table of these wondrous baby plants. It was love at first sight. I hope the forebears of my majestic plant were in sight of at least a couple of pyramids, and maybe a Sphinx or two. Maybe camels plodded through the sifting Egyptian sands in the background.

These pithy triangular stalks have been used by various peoples to record the triumphs, disasters and the mundane of humanity—for about five millennia.

And write they did: in Aramaic, Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Library at Alexandria, Egypt, is reputed to have had 700,000 volumes, many of them papyrus. They recorded knowledge of medicine and science, how materials were transported on the Nile River, gave details about the lives of workers building the pyramids and kept track of correspondence with foreign lands. Before papyrus, tablets were impressed with cuneiform writings using a sharpened reed. Papyrus paper was tough, and —big news—it was portable. Roll it up into a scroll or cut it into sheets and away you go.

It is mind-boggling that today’s scholars are still able to read the oldest known papyrus currently at the Cairo Museum 4,500 years later.

Those ancient Egyptians made use of what they had nearby—acres and acres of papyrus plants along the Nile, their fronds waving in the African breezes. It isn’t known who originally came up with the bright idea of cutting these stems into strips, and pressing them for a few days to let their natural ‘glue’ weld them together. 

It’s a great plant to shake vigorously if you are one and a half years old and want to strike terror into Oma’s heart. When spring comes, it is time to lug it onto the back deck—and husbands make themselves scarce. Something about a recurring backache.

But best of all, the papyrus plants have to be divided every year, and that means you get twice as many!

And yes, I have made a little square of papyrus paper, following directions available from the Cairo Museum. It’s doesn’t look as neat and elegant as the official scrolls, but it is papyrus, linked to humanity’s larger history.