WRITING MATERIALS OF THE ANCIENTS.

It is curious to remark the various and apparently incongruous substances which men, in their efforts to preserve knowledge or transmit ideas, have used as writing materials. The animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms have each and all been laid under contribution. In every land and in every age, stone and marble have been employed to perpetuate the remembrance of the great deeds of history. Inscriptions cut in jasper, cornelian, and agate are to be met with in every collection of antiquities. A cone of basalt covered with cuneiform characters was found some years since in the river Euphrates, and is now preserved in the Imperial Library of Paris, side by side with the sun-baked bricks on which the Babylonian astronomers were wont during seven centuries to inscribe their observations on the starry heavens.

The Romans made books of bronze, in which they engraved the concessions granted to their colonies; and they preserved on tablets and pillars of the same durable material the decrees and treaties of the senate, and sometimes, even, the speeches of their emperors.

"The Bœotians," says the learned Greek geographer Pausanias, "showed me a roll of lead on which was inscribed the whole work of Hesiod, but in characters that time had nearly effaced."

"Who will grant me," cries Job, "that my words may be written? who will grant me that they may be marked down in a book? With an iron pen and in a plate of lead, or else be graven with an instrument in flintstone?" (xix. 23 24.)

Tanned skins were likewise employed for writing purposes by the Asiatics, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Celts. In the Brussels library there is to be seen a manuscript of the Pentateuch, believed to be anterior to the ninth century, written on fifty-seven skins sewed together, and forming a roll more than thirty-six yards long.

The custom of writing on leathern garments appears to have been prevalent during the middle ages. The great Italian poet, Petrarch, used to wear a leathern vest, on which, while sitting or sauntering near the shaded margin of the fountain of Vaucluse, he would note each passing thought, each poetic fancy. This precious relic, covered with erasures, still existed in 1527.

We read, too, of a certain abbot who strictly enjoined his monks, if they happened to meet with any of the works of St. Athanasius, to transcribe the precious volumes on their clothes, should paper be unattainable.

The use of prepared sheep-skin, that is, parchment, dates from about a hundred and fifty years before the Christian era; its Latin name, pergamena, is very evidently derived from Pergamos, but whether because invented there, or because it was more perfectly prepared in that city than elsewhere, is a question not yet decided. Besides white and yellow parchment, the ancients employed purple, blue, and violet. These dark shades were intended to be written on with gold and silver ink. Several very beautiful manuscripts of this description are to be seen in the Imperial Library of Paris. Parchment manuscripts were sometimes of great size; thus, the roll containing the inquiry concerning the Knights Templars, which is still preserved in the archives of France, is full twenty-three yards long.

Parchment became very scarce during the invasions of the barbarians, and this scarcity gave rise to the custom of effacing the characters of ancient manuscripts in order to write a second time on the skin. This unfortunate practice, most prevalent among the Romans, and which was continued until the invention of rag paper, has occasioned the loss of many literary and scientific treasures. The primitive characters of some few of these doubly-written manuscripts, or palimpsests, as they are called, have been restored by chemical science, and several valuable works recovered; among others, for instance, Cicero's admirable treatise on the Republic.

Even the intestines of animals have been used as writing material. The magnificent library of Constantinople, burnt under the Emperor of the East, Basiliscus, is said to have contained, among its other curiosities, the Iliad and the Odyssey, traced in letters of gold on the intestine of a serpent. This rare specimen of caligraphy measured one hundred and twenty feet.

The most ancient inscribed characters we possess are upon wood. A sycamore tablet containing an engraved inscription was discovered, about thirty years since, in one of the Memphis pyramids; the learned Egyptologist who deciphered it pronounced it to have been in existence some five thousand nine hundred years! The Chinese, also, before they invented paper two thousand years ago, wrote upon wood and bamboo. Many oriental nations still make books of palm-leaves, on which the characters are scratched with a sharp-pointed instrument. The Syracusans of bygone times used to write their votes on an olive-leaf. The modern Maldivians trace their hopes, fears, and wishes on the gigantic foliage of their favorite tree, the makareko, of which each leaf is a yard long and half a yard wide. The Imperial Library of Paris, rich in all that is rare and interesting, possesses several ancient leaf manuscripts, some beautifully varnished and gilt.

In Rome, before the use of bronze tables and columns, the laws were engraven on oak boards. "The annals of the pagan high-priests," says a French writer, "which related day by day the principal events of the year, were probably written with black ink on an album, that is, a wooden plank whitened with white-lead. These annals ceased a hundred and twenty years before Christ, but the use of the album was kept up some time longer." The Romans also wrote their wills on wood.

Linen cloth covered with writing has been found in most of the mummy-cases that have been opened. The Egyptian Museum in the Louvre contains several rituals on cloth. The Sibylline Oracles were traced on cloth. The first copy of the Emperor Aurelian's journal that was made after his death was written on cloth, and is still preserved in the Library of the Vatican. On cloth were written also some of the edicts of the first Christian emperors.

No certain epoch can be ascribed to the fabrication of paper from the papyrus reed. The celebrated French savant, Champollion the younger, discovered during his travels in Egypt several contracts written on papyrus, which by their date must have been drawn up seventeen hundred years B.C.

Egypt appears to have kept the monopoly of the papyrus paper trade. The principal manufactories of it were situated at Alexandria, and so important an article of commerce did it become that a dearth of papyrus was the cause of several popular disturbances in some of the great cities of Italy and Greece. Under the Emperor Tiberius, a scarcity in the supply produced so formidable a riot in Rome, that the senate was compelled to take measures similar to those necessary in years of famine, and actually had to name commissaries, whose duty it was to distribute to each citizen the quantity of writing-paper he absolutely required.

The papyrus reed seems indeed to have been ancient Egypt's greatest material blessing, for not only was it the principal article of foreign commerce and source of immense wealth in the form of paper, but it was also of the most extraordinary utility to the poorer classes. Household utensils of every description were fabricated from its roots; boats were constructed of its stem; roofing, sail-cloth, ropes, and clothes were made of its bark; and from the appellation of "eaters of papyrus," often applied to the Egyptians by the Greeks, some have thought that it was a common article of food. How extraordinary does it then seem that a plant of such inestimable value should ever have disappeared from a land which derived such benefits from it. Nevertheless, it is a singular fact that the papyrus is no longer to be found in Egypt; recent travellers assure us that not a stalk is to be seen at the present day in the Delta. Sicily alone now possesses the beautiful reed.

We are ignorant of the exact period of the introduction of the papyrus paper into Greece and Italy, but Pliny has left us copious details concerning the manipulations it underwent among the Romans. Sizing was then, as it is now, one of the most important operations in paper-making. The membranous covering of the stem of the papyrus reed was far from being of a firm, compact texture, and the Alexandrian factories probably sent it forth very imperfectly prepared. The best quality of paper was made by gluing together, with starch and vinegar, two sheets of papyrus, one transversely to the other, and then sizing them. These sheets were sometimes of considerable dimensions; documents have been discovered written on paper three yards in length.

Those true lovers of literature, art, and science, the Athenians, raised a statue to Philtatius—to him who first taught them the secret of sizing paper!

It is a curious fact that, about thirty years since, the vegetable size used by the ancient Egyptians was introduced, with some slight improvement, as a new discovery, into the paper manufactories of France, and has now almost entirely abolished the use of animal size in that country for all purposes connected with the fabrication of paper.

About the fourth century, the Arabs made Europe acquainted with cotton paper, just then invented in Damascus, thereby causing a great diminution in the papyrus trade. A long struggle ensued between the rival productions, which was only put an end to at the commencement of the twelfth century, by the invention of paper manufactured from flaxen and hempen refuse. The papyrus disappeared at once and completely; soon forgotten by commerce, but immortal in the remembrance of poets and sages—immortal as the pages of Cicero and Virgil, whose sweet and eloquent thoughts were first traced on Egypt's reed.

Until the present time, this flaxen and hempen rag paper has been produced in sufficient quantities for the necessities of our civilization, but as civilization increases, and as education becomes more general, especially among the masses of Europe, it is evident that the supply of rags will be inadequate to the demand, and wood will most probably again be brought into requisition, as in the age of Pericles.

Not, however, in the form of the ancient tablets, but transformed by mechanical and chemical science into sheets of white and pliant paper; or the numerous fibrous plants of Algeria, Cuba, and other tropical countries will be turned to account, and no longer permitted to waste their usefulness on the desert air. Even now, in France, among the Vosges Mountains, there is a paper manufactory where wood is manipulated with the most complete success. And some few years since, a newspaper paragraph informed the civilized world that a process of making paper from marble had been discovered by a canny Scotchman of Glasgow! It is not, indeed, impossible that the marble painfully hewn and engraven by our forefathers to perpetuate the memory of a bloody struggle or of some vain triumph, may in time to come, by the magic power of modern science, become a sheet of snowy tissue, whereon the fair, slight hand of beauty shall trace the dainty nothings of fashionable life!

The tablets so continually mentioned by ancient writers must be noted. They were made of parchment, thin boards, ivory, or metal, prepared to receive ink, or coated with wax and written on with a stylus, or sharp-pointed pencil. In the Fourth Book of Kings we read: "I will efface Jerusalem as tables are wont to be effaced, and I will erase and turn it, and draw the pencil over the face thereof." Herodotus and Demosthenes speak of their tablets. In Rome, they were used not only as note-books and journals, but also for correspondence in the city and its environs, while the papyrus served for letters intended to be sent to a distance. The receiver of one of these notes not unfrequently returned his answer on the same tablet. Made of African cypress and highly ornamented and inlaid, they were given as presents, precisely as portfolios, souvenirs, and note-books are nowadays. On the wax-covered tablets was generally traced the first rough copy of any document, to be afterward neatly written out either on papyrus or parchment. These wax-covered tablets were used in France until the beginning of the last century.

Two-leaved tablets were called diptychs, and were sometimes of extraordinary cost and beauty. The Roman consuls and high magistrates were accustomed, on their first appointment to office, to present their friends with ivory diptychs, exquisitely engraved and carved, and ornamented with gold.

Ancient ink was composed of lamp-black and gum-water. Pliny says that the addition of a little vinegar rendered it ineffaceable, and that a little wormwood infused in it preserved the manuscript from mice. This ink was used until the twelfth century, when our present common ink was invented.

Not only black, but also red, blue, green, and yellow inks were employed in antiquity. Sepia ink and Indian ink are mentioned by Pliny. Red ink, made from a murex, was especially esteemed, and reserved for the emperor's exclusive use, under pain of death to all infringers of the privilege. Gold and silver inks, principally used from the eighth to the tenth centuries, were also prized; writers in gold, termed chrysographers, formed a class apart among writers in general. The Imperial Library of Paris possesses several Greek Gospels, and the Livre des Heures of Charles the Bold, entirely written in gold. Few manuscripts are extant written in silver; the most celebrated are the Gospels, preserved in the Upsal Library.

The stylus, a dangerous weapon when made in iron, and proscribed by Roman law, which required it to be of bone; the painting brush, used still by the Chinese; the reed, which was cut and shaped like our modern pen, and with which some oriental nations write even now; and the feather pen, which is mentioned by an anonymous writer of the fifth century, were the general writing implements of antiquity and the middle ages. Metallic pens are also supposed to have been known; the Patriarchs of Constantinople were accustomed to sign their official acts with a silver reed, probably of the form of a pen.

Some paintings found in Herculaneum give evidence that the ancients were accustomed to make use of most, if not of all the various conveniences with which modern writers surround themselves. The writing-desk, the inkstand, the penknife, the eraser, the hone, and the powder-box were well-known. They do not seem, however, to have had the habit of sitting up to a table to write, but rested their tablet or paper on their knee, or on their left hand, as the orientals do at the present day.