The wonders of papyrus were well understood in antiquity. This is the same natural material that Thor Heyerdahl used to build a boat, Ra II, in which he crossed the Atlantic from Africa to the West Indies in 1970. Today, Ethiopians build small papyrus boats as they have for thousands of years on the shores of Lake Tana. In the temple, a bas relief shows a boatman rowing a papyrus boat and wearing a bulky collar made from a bundle of the plant's dried stems.
Its reeds were bundled to make boats and, as suggested by a scene depicted in an ancient temple, it was made into life preservers. Papyrus did even more for cultures that flourished along the Nile. And, according to Hassan Ragab, head of Cairo's Papyrus Institute, which has fostered much of the revived interest in it, the plant's thick rootstock, or rhizome, provided ancient Egyptians an important source of calorie-rich food. It also is the plant that provided early settlers in the cradle of civilization with raw materials to make sandals, twine, mats, cloth, building material and fuel. Papyrus provided ancient peoples with the first useful form of writing paper. From cuttings carefully nurtured in large pots set in the Nile River in Cairo, the reedy plant once worshiped by pharaohs has become a major tourist attraction and is reviving interest in one of history's most important plant-human relationships. Papyrus, the marsh-dwelling wonder plant of ancient Egypt that later vanished from the region, is making a comeback.