CAIRO, Egypt -- Any Westerner strolling the streets of Cairo is certain to be spotted almost immediately by eager souvenir vendors swarming out from their tiny shops.
"Welcome in Egypt! Come into my shop! No charge for looking. Do you want perfume, statues, brass plates, papyrus?"Ah, papyrus. The paper used more than 3,000 years ago by ancient Egyptians to record their story in hieroglyphs is today one of the most popular souvenirs of Egypt. Tourists are drawn to the thin, durable papyrus, especially when they find that an average 30.5-by-43-centimeter (12-by-17-inch) piece can be had for as little as $1.
Australian businessman Mark Toohey says he wasn't intending to purchase papyrus during a recent business trip to Egypt.
But three paintings -- of the goddess Isis, the jackal-headed god Anubis and a horoscope -- "just caught my eye," Toohey says. He hates bargaining and admits he paid "generous" prices.
"Papyrus has a certain glamour," says Hassan Ragab, 88, who is credited with bringing papyrus back to Egypt 35 years ago. The plant had become extinct in the land that made it famous.
Ragab, who was Egypt's first ambassador to China, has built an industry around papyrus. After rediscovering the process of making the ancient paper in 1965, he set up the Dr. Ragab Papyrus Institute, where visitors can see how papyrus is made and select souvenirs from a large showroom.
He is also the founder of Dr. Ragab's Pharaonic Village, a park featuring actors in period costume recreating scenes of ancient Egyptian life. The park includes 20 acres (eight hectares) of papyrus.
In his doctorate on papyrus, Ragab explains that Egyptians stopped using the tall water plant around the 10th century when the invading Arabs introduced the simpler Chinese method of making paper by spreading a pulp of flax or other fibers evenly over a rectangular mold.
Papyrus paper requires a more lengthy process. First, the outer green layer of the stalk is stripped away and the inner pith cut into slices and soaked for a few days in water. Then the soft, spongy tissue is rolled flat and left to dry. The strips are cut to the desired length and placed in two layers -- one vertical and one horizontal to give it strength -- then flattened in a press. After three or four days the strips meld into a sheet, creating a piece of paper fit for a pharaoh.
"People have no idea of the work and skill needed. It gives different meaning to the souvenir to see how it's made," says Mari Feigin, a tourist from Florida who saw the procedure at a workshop in Cairo.
The quality of papyrus varies from smooth, resilient paper of a uniform color to a brittle, multitoned patchwork. The art, too, ranges dramatically from stock prints with dull coloring to delicate hand-painted creations that give detailed attention to even the smallest feather on the dress of an Egyptian goddess.
"The difference in papyrus is in the work, only the work. The details," says shop owner Shafik Ali, 35, who has sold wares in Cairo's famous Khan el-Khalili market for 25 years.
Tourists can find papyrus bearing oblong shapes containing hieroglyphs known as cartouches; scarabs, the beetle sacred to ancient Egyptians; or King Tut's famous funeral mask. But most papyrus paintings are copies of reliefs painted thousands of years ago on the walls of the pharaoh's tombs.
Lowest-quality papyrus, with its ragged edges and machine-stamped artwork, is usually sold for less than three Egyptian pounds (about $1). An average-sized papyrus with acceptable hand-painted work can be bought for 15-25 Egyptian pounds (about $3 to $7.35), depending on the tourist's bargaining skills.
Organized tour groups are almost always taken to papyrus museums or workshops where the work is well done but the nonnegotiable prices are marked up to allow for a percentage for the tour operators.
No matter what tourists end up paying, they can be almost certain that they have the real thing. Most papyrus bears a government authentication stamp, and stories of dealers passing off banana-stalk paper as papyrus are rare these days.