Nat Friedman: preference

Transcript context

…You made some scrolls right? Yeah. This is a papyrus, and it's a grassy reed that grows on the Nile in Egypt. And for many 1000s of years they've been making paper out of it. And the way they do it is they take the outer rind off of the papyrus and then they cut the inner core into these strips. They lay the strips out parallel to one another and they put another layer to 90 degrees to that bottom layer. And they press it together in a press or under stones and let it dry out. And that's Papyrus, essentially. And then they'll take some of those sheets and glue them together with paste, usually made out of flour, and get a long scroll. You can still buy it, I bought this on Amazon, and it's interesting because it's got a lot of texture. Those fibers, ridges of the papyrus plant, and so when you write on it, you really feel the texture. I got it because I wanted to understand what these artifacts that we're working with. So we made an attempt to simulate carbonizing a few of these. We basically took a Dutch oven, because when you carbonized something and you make charcoal, it's not like burning it with oxygen, you remove the oxygen, heat it up and let it carbonize. We tried to simulate that with a Dutch oven, which is probably imperfect, and left it in the oven at 500 degrees Fahrenheit for maybe five or six hours. These things are incredibly light snd if you try to unfold them, they just fall apart in your hand very readily. I assume these are in somewhat better shape than the ones that were found because these were not in a volcanic eruption and covered in mud. Maybe that mud was hotter than my oven can go. And they’re just flakes, just squeeze it and it’s just dust in your hand. And so we actually tried to replicate many of the heartbreaking 1700s, 18th century unrolling techniques. They used rose water, for example, or they tried to use different oils to soften it and unroll it. And most of them are just very destructive. They poured mercury into it because they thought mercury would slip between the layers potentially. So yeah, this is sort of what they look like. They shrink and they turn to ash. For those listening, by the way, just imagine the ash of a cigar but blacker and it crumbles the same way. It's just a blistered black piece of rolled up Papyrus.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.