It can be put in place at all different levels,' he said. “A lot of the scientists there, the engineers, are beginning to see the value of a filter swamp because it’s cheap. He points to several projects in Egypt to restore the swamps to filter sewage. Gaudet says papyrus - one of the fastest growing plant species on Earth - has recently started to make a comeback. 'And papyrus happens to be a very, very efficient plant in a filter swamp.” “Papyrus actually filtered sewage and runoff and silt all those years,' he said. In addition to the variety of items that can be manufactured from the plant, the swamps provide habitat for birds and fish, and help control pollution. In the process, he says, an incredible natural resource was lost. Gaudet says people saw them as “wasted” spaces that could be better used for farmland or housing. Over the centuries, though, many papyrus swamps were drained. John Gaudet walks through a papyrus swamp in Israel in 2011. So even before paper came to existence, papyrus helped the ancient Egyptians get along on a day-to-day basis.” They made incredible amounts of rope, they exported the rope. Then they found that they could do all kinds of things with papyrus as you can imagine, you can make baskets out of it, you can make sandals, you can make rope.

They didn’t have to build their houses on land they could build them on water.

'Then they found they could also use the boats to build the houses on. People still make them in Ethiopia so we know what they’re like. 'And they used papyrus boats the way people today use fiberglass. “In the Nile Valley, to do things on a day-to-day basis, you also had to be able to get on the water so they used to use papyrus boats,' he said. Egyptian civilization, he adds, might not have developed without papyrus. Writer and ecologist John Gaudet says ancient scholars considered it the wonder of the age. Hundreds of thousands of books in the Royal Library in Alexandria and Rome's 58 public libraries were made of papyrus, almost all of the Western world’s literature and sacred texts at the time.īut the value of papyrus is not limited to paper. Ancient Egyptians turned papyrus into paper and provided the world with it for thousands of years.

Papyrus reed