For over 3,000 years, papyrus was the dominant writing material in the Middle East and Mediterranean world before the introduction of paper.  Languages as diverse as Egyptian, Greek and Arabic were written on it. The Special Collections Department of the J. Willard Marriott Library is home to 770 fragments of Arabic language papyri, dating from the 8^th through the 10^th centuries CE; it is one of the largest collections of Arabic language papyri in the United States.

Providing insight into the daily life of the period, the contents of the Library’s collection are primarily of an economic character, containing tax receipts, land tenancy and other business matters. There are also over 100 fragments containing portions of letters or literary texts. All of these comprise part of a larger collection that includes 1300 early Arabic-language paper and parchment manuscripts and fragments, mostly originating from Egypt.

Housed between panes of glass in the 1960s for scholarly study, the Preservation Department of the Marriott Library is revisiting this collection to ensure its continued availability for scholarly use and physical safety in the event of earthquake. What follows is the story of a remarkable couple – the man who donated the collection to the University and woman who cared for it – and the current efforts to ensure its future preservation.

About the Donor, Aziz S. Atiya, Ph.D. 

Institutions in the United States began collecting papyrus in the late 19^th and early 20^th century either through excavation programs in Egypt or through purchase from antiquities dealers. These included the universities of Michigan, Cornell, Princeton and Columbia. The University of Utah’s papyrus collection, however, was the donation of an Egyptian scholar in the 1960s who established the University’s Middle East program.

Dr. Aziz S. Atiya was a Coptic Christian, born in Egypt in 1898. As he told an interviewer in the 1980s, he considered himself to have lived a blessed life and that everything occurred for a reason. This included the winding path of his education. From the village of his upbringing, he was sent to Cairo to receive secondary schooling where he focused on science. In the early 20^th century, there were no universities in the country and advanced educational opportunities in Egypt were limited. One could train as a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher. Atiya spent time in all three programs, attending medical school for two years before he was expelled for participating in a riot during the 1919 revolution against British occupation, then starting over at the French School of Law. All the while, he worked at a government ministry and earned extra money teaching English to private clients.

With the end of the revolution, the new semi-independent Egyptian government needed teachers, so Atiya switched to the teaching college. This was a fateful decision, he later said, for after graduating in 1927, the government sent him to the University of Liverpool with a stipend for further education— what he called the first miracle of his life. While there, he began spending one third of his monthly government stipend on a growing personal library. He also fell in love with the medieval period and went on to earn a Bachelors of Art in Medieval History in 1931; he received first-class honors as well as a Charles Beard Fellowship and a Ramsay Muir Fellowship. This was his second miracle, he later told Everett C. Cooley, head of the Library’s Special Collections Department, because the prize money allowed him to begin a research career by traveling to European manuscript repositories including the University of Bonn.

While in Bonn Atiya completed a Ph.D. in 1933 at the University of London, writing on the Crusade of Nicopolis, where the Ottomans defeated a European army in 1396. Atiya’s research rewrote the later history of the Crusades, which, at that time – 1930s – was commonly held to have ended in 1291 with the fall of Acre. For this work, the University of Liverpool awarded Atiya with an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1938, the first non-Brit and the first one from the Middle East to earn this distinction.

With the beginning of the Second World War Atiya fled Europe through the port of Marseille on a ship bound for Egypt. At just the same time, aboard another ship, a young Egyptian woman named Lola Messiha was also escaping back to Egypt.

Lola Atiya 

Lola came from a wealthy Coptic family in Cairo. Her father was a government accountant, her mother from a well-to-do family, who attended Greek schools and spoke Coptic, Greek, as well as French, and was an avid traveler. Lola grew up speaking Arabic, French and English at home, and attended a French Lycee instead of a religious school and was planning to attend school in England at the outbreak of the war. Her great interests were and remained archaeology and reading, though libraries were not readily available to the general public in Egypt at that time. She later said that one of the things that most impressed her about America were the bookmobiles that she visited in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and later in Salt Lake City near the University campus. She earned a degree in French, and later learned German and Italian as well as English. Her family traveled to Europe and Lebanon, and she obtained one of the first driver’s licenses issued to women in Egypt.

Lola met Aziz through a cousin, and she later said that his library was what inspired her to marry him. “I had never seen such an amount of books,” she later confided to Everett Cooley. An oral history with Lola Atiya can be found in the Manuscripts Department.

Mount Sinai Project 

A crucial event in Atiya’s career was his participation in an expedition to the Monastery of St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai in 1950. The Library of Congress with other institutions wanted to microfilm the rare manuscripts held in the monastery library. After returning to Egypt in 1939, Atiya took a position at the University of Alexandria as professor of Medieval history. His research led to his acquaintance with the archbishop of Mount Sinai and to his visit to the monastery, and when the Library of Congress sought a go-between to facilitate access to the documents, Atiya was selected as the likely choice. The monks were afraid of their documents being stolen, and Atiya swore to keep a close eye on all the activities during the project.

The microfilming project was a great success. Over a 6-month period, they filmed two million manuscript pages in 12 languages, opening new avenues for historical and biblical research. On a personal level for Atiya, the project was highlighted in particular by his finding and later promotion of what he named the “Codex Arabicus.” The book, he believed, was a palimpsest, wherein the writing on the vellum pages had been erased and overwritten five times beginning with two early Syriac texts dating to the 5^th-6^th century. These were later erased and the book reused for a Greek text, and finally for two successive Arabic texts dating to the late 8^th-early 9^th centuries for which he named the book. Many of Dr. Atiya’s Mount Sinai documents can be found in the Aziz S. Atiya papers in the Manuscripts Department.

Lecturing 

The Mount Sinai project became another turning point in Atiya’s life, as it brought him to the United States, initially to edit the microfilm catalog published by the Library of Congress. Thanks to his published study on the Crusades, he was now a recognized authority on Medieval history, and in 1950-51 he received a Fulbright Exchange Professorship. Lola joined him and for eight months he traveled the country lecturing at universities including Yale, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Chicago. The Codex Arabicus was a frequent theme of these talks.

During this lecture tour, he attracted the attention of then-president of the University of Utah, A. Ray Olpin, and while on his way to Berkeley and Stanford, Olpin invited him to stop at the University of Utah, where he spoke about the Mt. Sinai project. Their relationship continued to grow over the years.

The Atiyas and Olpin met again in 1954. Olpin was eager to develop opportunities at the University for foreign professors and exchange students, and for this purpose was traveling to different countries when he arrived in Cairo and met the Atiyas again. Aziz remembered Olpin and the kind welcome he received while in Salt Lake City. They showed Olpin the city and their home where Olpin wrote of “the best private library of Egyptian materials extant.” Olpin did not mentioned papyri, but they were already a part of Atiya’s large library.

Olpin continued to correspond with the Atiyas, and visited them while they taught at Michigan in 1955 and again when Atiya was teaching at Columbia and Union Theological Seminary. Olpin invited Atiya to give the 1956 commencement address at the U.

An Intercultural Research Center 

And then, in 1959 while Atiya was at Princeton’s Institute for Advance Study, Olpin offered him a tenured professorship at the U and the opportunity to establish an Intercultural Studies Center with an emphasis on the Middle East. The new program would be funded through the National Defense Education Act, a post-Sputnik federal program to strengthen math, science and modern language programs, what later became the U’s Middle East Center.

Initially Atiya turned down the offer, wanting his children Nayra and Ramez to attend school in Egypt, but he put the question to Lola for a decision. Both the University and local churches in Utah had welcomed them warmly, and they enjoyed traveling the region including to Yellowstone, Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks. With this in mind Lola recalled saying to Aziz: “’Do you know? If I had to choose a place where I would like to spend my old days, it would be Utah.’ Little did I know then,” she later told Cooley, “that this would be a reality one day!”

In the early 1960s, there was little Middle East-oriented material in the University’s library to support this new Intercultural Studies program, in particular for graduate studies. To address this, Atiya was sent on a book buying trip to Egypt in 1961. He departed with $20,000 and returned with 11,000 books, purchased from publishers, local book shops, and from buying private libraries, many of them book dealers he already knew through his own collecting. He and Lola both later stated to Cooley that few other institutions were interested in Arabic material at that time, and Atiya was able to acquire the books cheaply.

Around this time, Atiya also had his own personal library brought from Egypt to Utah. These were eventually donated to the Library to help build the Middle East collection, and they can be identified today by book plates bearing his name. With this beginning, the Library’s Middle East collection grew rapidly, and by the mid-1970s ranked 6^th in size in the United States. When the new J. Willard Marriot Library was built in 19—the Middle East Library occupied its own space on the 5^th floor.

He also brought his papyrus and paper collection to Utah. These fragments are all Arabic language documents he had been collecting for years during his travels. His donation of this collection to the Library was in part a political move. In the early 1960s, McCarthyism and the Red Scare were still in the air; Vietnam was on the horizon; and Nasser had allied Egypt with the Soviet Union, raising Cold War tensions. Because of this international tension there was concern at the U that the new Middle East program might be eliminated. Dr. Atiya felt that donation of this collection would bring attention to the program and help ensure its survival.

About Papyrus 

Papyrus first appears as a writing material in Egypt around 2500 BCE in the 5^th Dynasty Period, and its use spread throughout the Mediterranean World and Middle East and continued in use through the Greek and Roman periods into the Arabic period. It was only replaced by paper in Egypt in the 11^th century. Dr. Atiya’s collection therefore falls toward the end of this history of its use.

Papyrus manufacture was described by Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) in his Natural History (c.77 CE). It was produced in individual rectangular or square sheets. A section of the papyrus stalk was cut into thin strips and laid on a wet board. This was overlaid with a cross layer and the sheet was pressed with the plant’s sap bonding the individual strips together.

Individual sheets were pasted together along the edges to form rolls. When buying papyri in rolled form, one asked for a roll of a given quality and length. The best quality, in Pliny’s day, was named for the Emperor Augustus, followed by Livia, named after his wife, followed by hieratic, and other cruder grades, down to wrapping material. A roll could theoretically be of any length, but very long rolls tend to be ornamental books, like some copies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, meant to be placed in burials. Greek rolls were generally much shorter, though few complete rolls exist.

With the exception of those found in Egyptian tombs, papyri are typically recovered from excavated sites. Abandoned houses in towns often served as rubbish dumps, and might include discarded papyri. Over the centuries, these sites could grew into mounds, sometimes up to 20 meters in height. Because this rubbish contained valuable organic material, local farmers dug it out for fertilizer. Over the centuries, an unknown number of papyri have been dug out and lost in this way.

Lola’s Treatment of the Papyri 

Once Atiya donated his papyri and paper collection to the Library, they needed to be prepared for handling and research. To accomplish this, Lola was hired by the Library and given a work space in the Park Building where the University museum was then located. Most of them were fragmentary, some of them very fragile. Nevertheless, Lola was able to treat them using simple methods, and housed the fragments between panes of glass.

She compiled brief records on each piece she treated, noting the quality of the papyrus, its dimensions, the number of written lines, the number of calligraphic hands involved, and its general condition. Her notes do not indicate her procedure for handling the fragments, but she apparently had some understanding of papyrus and its fragility. In a 1989 interview regarding her work on the collection she told Special Collections Librarian Everett Cooley, “I had just an inkling on how to restore the papyri here for the university, and I did it by my very own methods. In the old country the way to relax papyri was to put the pieces between clover.”

“Clover?” Cooley asked.

Lola replied, “Yes, to have the papyrus absorb some moisture. And then it becomes manageable. But here I thought of devising another method by putting the papyri between blotting paper and letting it absorb moisture from the blotting paper. I had to be very careful, because there is a point at which to stop, otherwise it could ruin the papyrus. One has to develop a feeling towards the material.”

While these remarks on Lola’s technique do not indicate her working procedure – she probably did not use clover – she appears to have followed the conventional practice at the time of humidifying, flattening and cleaning the papyri, and mounting them between window glass. These essential techniques can be dated to the late 19^th century. Arthur Hunt, an archaeologist associated with the British Egyptian Exploration Fund who worked in the Fayum and later at Oxyrhynchus, noted in 1920 the procedure for working on papyri included cleaning with small brushes, laying out between clean cloths to dampen and flatten, followed by drying between sheets of dry paper. Lola did the same.

New Conservation In 2024 

In the 60 years since Lola Atiya completed her work on the papyri, no work has been done on this collection, although new approaches in the treatment and storage of papyri have developed. In summer 2024, Preservation Department conservator Jeffrey Hunt attended a seminar at the University of Michigan on papyrus conservation taught by conservator Marieka Kaye. Techniques in cleaning, repair and reglazing of papyri were learned which are now being applied to the Marriott Library collection. Pressure sensitive tape, commonly used in the past to make repairs but which can adversely affect all heritage materials, will be replaced by archival materials and water soluble adhesives that will not damage the fragile material. The papyri are being removed from the old glass, the tape removed and minor repairs made to improve the readability, appearance and stability of the fragments. New images will posted online with additional metadata added from Lola Atiya’s original notes as well as additional information as available. Finally, each fragment will be reglazed in tougher shatter-proof glass, an important consideration in a region susceptible to earthquakes. Each glazed piece will be placed in a foam pouch and placed in hanging folders in storage cabinets that are bolted to the walls and will not fall over in the event of an earthquake.

Dr. Atiya rescued these fragments of history from market stalls and book shops in Europe and the Middle East, and his wife Lola did heroic work in cleaning and housing them for the benefit of researchers everywhere. Our current efforts are intended to further preserve them for the future.