The scale of this feverish acquisition of knowledge, the huge size of Islamic libraries compared with collections in the Christian West and the general sophistication of Abbasid administration were such that, from the eighth century, the mass of texts encouraged a new copying technology imported from China along the trade routes which the Eastern Christians dominated: instead of papyrus or expensive parchment, cloth rags were transformed into paper, durable and comparatively easy to make and cheap as a writing material to cope with the demand.24
