Could papyrus scroll in sealed jar last until the present?

galanx

What it says- based on a fantasy that archeologists discover a tomb in Egypt that dates around First Century AD with an inscription "Here lies Bibliophilus, surrounded by his dearest companions" filled with the lost works of Aristotle, Sophocles etc.
 
Pangur

Pangur

Donor
galanx said:
What it says- based on a fantasy that archeologists discover a tomb in Egypt that dates around First Century AD with an inscription "Here lies Bibliophilus, surrounded by his dearest companions" filled with the lost works of Aristotle, Sophocles etc.
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Well papyrus have survived far longer so it would more a question of where it was stored - basically the answer is yes
 

Mongo

As long as the environment was sufficiently dry, then yes they can.

Of course they will still need careful handling. I recall that several such scrolls were destroyed by the finders attempting to unroll them, causing them to crumble into tiny fragments.
 

ComradeHuxley

Donor
Kalki said:
Weren't the dead sea scrolls like parchment? Well at least most of them? I forget if parchment is more durable than papyrus, but afaik it is.
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Doesn't seem to be that much of a problem apparently:

The Ebers Papyrus, also known a Papyrus Ebers, is an Egyptian medical papyrus of herbal knowledge dating to c. 1550 BC. Among the oldest and most important medical papyri of, it was purchased at Luxor in the winter of 1873–74 by ]Georg Ebers. It is currently kept at the library of the University of Leipzig, in Germany.
Ebers Papyrus
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

ComradeHuxley said:
Doesn't seem to be that much of a problem apparently:

The Ebers Papyrus, also known a Papyrus Ebers, is an Egyptian medical papyrus of herbal knowledge dating to c. 1550 BC. Among the oldest and most important medical papyri of, it was purchased at Luxor in the winter of 1873–74 by ]Georg Ebers. It is currently kept at the library of the University of Leipzig, in Germany.
Ebers Papyrus
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Aha! much better example. Thank you.
 

carlton_bach

If you know what you are doing, you can preserve papyrus very efficiently. The key is to keep it dry, hence all the survivals in desert locations. We have documents from Pharaonic times in our museums because of this (but practically none from Italy because of rain).

A sealed jar will only help so far, though. To be effective, it would need to be glazed pottery (uncommon in antiquity), stone, non-reactive metal or glass. A hypothetical Hellenistic Egyptian who would store scrolls in glass jars sealed shut with lead might well preserve his entire library (assuming the finders were reasonably good at recovering the material).

BTW, the most likely find spot for new and important papyri today is not the ground, but the storage vaults of universities, collectors and the antiquities market. People took them out of Egypt by the tonne in the late 19th and early 20th century, and many are still unread.
 
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