No. 144.] 89 



The quality and value of this linen for paper making is beyond 

 dispute, for although the ancient Egyptians were unacquainted 

 with this art, and relied, influenced by a religious idea, for their 

 supply of writing materials upon the leaves of the nilitic papyrus, 

 cut into sheets and cemented together by pressure, an historian 

 as early as Abdalatif records that " the Bedouins and other Arabs 

 despoiled the mummies of their wrappings, and sold them for the 

 manufacture of paper," and some specimens of delicate cloth from 

 the tombs of the kings at Thebes, dating at least 1800 years be- 

 fore the Christian era, I have caused to be manufactured into 

 bank note and writing paper of the finest but toughest material 

 and texture, and some coarser fragments found in nearly equally 

 ancient mummies, and evidently substituted by the embalmers 

 between the folds instead of finer cloth (proving that the system 

 of" cabbaging" is not of modern date) makes a paper of " single 

 or double milled" cartridge kind, equal to that of the most recent 

 rags ; and as the Egyptians were but imperfectly acquainted with 

 the art of dyeing, except in the piece, and then only in primitive 

 colors, and not at all with the art of bleaching, the pulp can be 

 readily got up to any degree of whiteness and strength. The lat- 

 ter may be judged of when I state that some bandages, from five 

 inches to five feet wide and nine yards long, have been stiipped 

 from mummies their entire length without tearing. 



For the important purposes of papier mache the coarser kinds 

 of fragmentary rags may be used with great advantage. Indeed, 

 so well is this property known to the Arabs always in attendance 

 on the traveller, that they supply him with a sort of impromptu 

 pulp from the boiled and beaten rags, to take impressions of the 

 hieroglyphics from the monuments ; when hardened they can be 

 rolled up in sheets for transport and future reference. As an in- 

 stance of the sharpness and correctness which the close fibre of 

 the material yields, I enclo^^e an impression of a signet ring, with 

 a Persian proverb in Arabic characters, obtained from a tombstone 

 in lower Egypt, which, when reduced to the necessary size for en- 

 graving, was readily translated by the late Dr. Lee, Proftssor of 

 Oriental languages at Cambridge. 



