The Ancient Egyptians did not make paper, indeed paper which was invented in China did not reach the Middle East until after the battle of Tallas in 751ce. The Arabs then moved the captured Chinese papermakers to Samarkand, then the idea spread to Baghdad where Arabic papermaking started, and it is this product- charta Damasura- sold to the west that monks mistook for a new type of papyrus, and called it paper.
Arabic paper making did occur in Egypt, but by this time it had spread to other parts of the Islamic world including Xavier in Spain (1160) and Fabriano in Italy (1180) which were captured by the Christians. Egyptian paper was made from old linen rags, sealed with boiled-up bone glue and occasionally from recycled mummies. It's darker and thicker than the fine Syrian papers or the exquisite Persian tissue-thin polished paper, but not as rough as some of the later Turkish papers. Because the paper was polished with a fine gum arabic coating or gum taragarth, it is easy to repair, as delicate sheets from manuscripts can be split down the middle and gossamer-thin Japanese repair tissue inserted inside to invisibility re-attach the leaf to a binding. The largest problem is storage conditions in the Middle East where many more species of anorexia (carpet beetles) are active and fond of consuming this material, and the unfortunate use of an unstable copper underpainting in gold illumination within some Arabic works.
the finest collection of papers was a set of recycled papers not destroyed by Jewish scribes in Cairo because the paper had the name god written on it. The Khalidi Library in the old city of Jerusalem has 1500 paper manuscripts, with about 400 on Egyptian paper. They also have the oldest wire mark (watermark) paper I have ever discovered, a 10-century Charta Gamasutra CD used for a stunning manuscript about botany in the Golan Heights.
