Papyrus harvest time

This is a drawing of an Ancient Egyptian papyrus boat. 

And a papyrus plant. 

The papyrus plant grows wild in Egypt in the marshes along the Nile river. The harvested papyrus plants are tied into bundles and these bundles are then tied together to make boats...

According to "Papyrus making 101" page about making of the papyrus, "in ancient times, the entire plant was pulled from the root at harvest time. It is unknown at what time of year the ancient Egyptians harvested papyrus, or whether mature papyrus was preferred over young papyrus"...

Here is a great depiction of the papyrus harvesting, currently kept in the Met museum which dates to 1479–1458BC. You can see that the papyrus plant is pulled out from the root all right. What we can also see is that the papyrus plant is in full bloom...

This is kind of important for determining when the papyrus harvest took place. According to the stats collected in the "Ecology and biomass production of Cyperus papyrus L. on the Nile bank at Damietta, Egypt" by Mamdouh S. Serag, papyrus flowering season peaks in Apr/May and is pretty much finished by Jul/Aug...I talked about this in my post "Holy cow"...

So if papyrus was picked during the flowering season, it was picked between Apr/May and Jul/Aug...But I think we can further narrow down the period when the papyrus harvest took place. This is the east wall relief from the tomb of Ptahhotep...

You can find photos of all the reliefs in the  "The mastaba of Ptahhetep and Akhethetep at Saqqareh" published in 1900, but these photos are not very clear... 

So I will here use the drawings from this page on the https://www.osirisnet.net website which are a bit clearer.

The first register depicts a herd crossing water. The continuation of the representation is dedicated to the gathering of blooming papyrus, its processing and its transportation in bundles. Bundles used for the construction of (small) boats, an activity represented in the fifth register.

The important thing here is that the cattle swim in river covered in blooming blue water lilies (blue lotuses)...And on Nile river, blue water lilies bloom in Jul/Aug/Sep...

The people are harvesting papyrus during the time when both papyrus and water lilies are in bloom. If papyrus blooms Apr/May/Jun/Jul/Aug and water lilies bloom Jul/Aug/Sep, the the time when both of these plants are blooming is Jul/Aug. The peak of the flood...

Is this when papyrus was harvested by the ancient Egyptians? 

To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…then check the rest of the blog posts related to animal calendar markers I still didn't add to this page, and finally check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am 9 months behind now...