Oh, neat! I was repeating a thing I'd heard, but is apparently misleading. According to a few sources I've found, paper is the name for anything primarily made

Oh, neat! I was repeating a thing I'd heard, but is apparently misleading. According to a few sources I've found, paper is the name for anything primarily made of tangled cellulose fibers, which can be harvested from many different plant products. The more restrictive "definition", which I had been alluding to, considers only cellulose fibers derived from wood pulp as "true" paper. Papyrus, the ancient Egyptian writing surface, is not considered paper because the raw material is not processed to remove most non-cellulose contents. Other non-paper writing surfaces throughout history include: vellum/parchment (made from prepared animal skins), clay, animal bones, bamboo and wooden slips, silk, leaves, bark, and I'm sure dozens of others. I found this wikipedia page to be a good jumping off point for this knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_material https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_material