A Prophecy Fulfilled

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 21, 1874

A Prophecy Fulfilled.

NEVER had prophecy greater circumstances of improbability to overcome, and never was prediction more completely fulfilled than in the case of the prophecy recorded in Isaiah 19:7: “The paper-reeds by the brooks, by the mouth of the brooks, and everything sown by the brooks, shall wither, be driven away, and be no more.” The indispensable papyrus in the time of Isaiah flourished through the whole of the Thebaid, Heptanomos, and the Delta, as the three divisions of ancient Egypt were named. Of its utility no European reader can form an adequate idea. Stringent laws were established for its protection and cultivation, and from its first appearance to maturity, the papyrus was considered to be under the special care of local deities; it was planted, tended, and cut with an almost religious ceremonial. Adaptable for various uses, not only paper, cloth, and brushes, but the roughest and most delicate manufactures were produced from it alike. Sails, cordage, and baskets for shipping, sandals, hats, skirts, carpets, chairs, and seats for domestic service, were made of it. Men and animals fed upon the tender shoots. A sirup was obtained and medicine extracted from it. It formed the cradle of the Nubian baby; it decorated the canopy of Pharaoh’s throne; it was scattered in processions through the streets; it was painted on the houses; it was wrought in granite on the temples. The Egyptian ladies twined the living blossoms in their hair, or wore it in chains around their necks as an amulet. Princes, priests, and peasants, offered it on the altar in commemoration of the dead.

The papyrus was the plaything of the child and the scepter of the god, the glory of the country, the staple of its commerce, and the hieroglyphic emblem of its name. By withholding the supply of the papyrus, Ptolemy Philadelphus was enabled to repress the formation of a rival library by the Pergamean kings; while, by opening the markets of the Delta, the poetry of Greece and the philosophy of Rome were transmitted throughout the whole of the then known world. Alas for the permanence of mundane glories! Thirty centuries of oppression, superstition, and neglect, have dried up the artificial lakes in which the plant was cultivated. Rush after rush has been cut down to warm an Arab’s bath, or litter a pasha’s horse, and no successors have been planted. The hot wind of the south, and the sands of the desert, have exterminated the lovely paper rush in the empire of the Pharaohs, and there is not a single indigenous papyrus in the whole of Egypt proper. A stream in Sicily, and the marshes of Merom in Palestine, alone contain the nearly extinct vegetable; and in the conservatories of London, Sion, and Kew, England actually possesses more living papyri than can be found from Syene to Alexandria.—Treasury.