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around 3300 BCE.7 Tokens from this later era were incised with line-drawn depictions of sheep, cattle, ears of barley, and other agricultural commodities, and were often unearthed alongside (or even inside) spherical clay “envelopes” called bullae. These envelopes, Schmandt-Besserat theorized, were receipts. Ancient farmers trading their produce had been obliged to find some mutually acceptable way of recording their transactions, and, by enclosing one token per sheep, cow, or sheaf of barley within a sealed clay envelope, the subjects of such a transaction were simultaneously recorded and
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its contents could only be verified by breaking it open.
figured out that stamping the surface of their clay envelopes with impressions of the tokens sealed inside let them divine an envelope’s contents without having to destroy it.
the tokens themselves became irrelevant: inscribed in h...
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farmers’ decorated tokens were replaced by the symb...
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Writing had arrived.
The rounded wooden rods used for early Sumerian writing gave way to wedge-shaped styli,
around 2800 BCE, the Sumerians took a great step forward when they began to use their symbols to represent not just words but individual sounds.
The cuneiform sign , meaning “reed,” was pronounced gi, as was the word for “reimburse”; thus could be used to mean “reed,” “reimburse,” or any other word or syllable with the same sound.
Ostraca, as these makeshift media are called,
“hard shell,”
impromptu notebooks,
vehicles for bawdy sketches and love poems;
The earliest known examples of written papyrus sheets, discovered and photographed by Pierre Tallet at Wadi el-Jarf on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. They have been dated to around 2600 BCE.18
writing surface more portable
little more gravitas than sherds* of broken pottery.20
The “lion-reclining” hieroglyph (), for instance, could be used to mean “lion” or, depending upon the context, it could stand for an l or r sound.48
Philologists, who study the development of language, have long traced a direct line of descent from the writing of the Phoenicians, the Egyptians’ trading partners in what is now Lebanon, to the twenty-six letters of our alphabet.
by 1000 BCE the Phoenicians had developed an alphabet proper, consisting solely of letters that corresponded to spoken sounds.49
The procession from the Phoenician alphabet to the Roman alphabet had never been much doubted, and the Phoenicians were hailed as the inventors of alphabetic writing.50 In
Sinaitic script.
“proto-Sinaitic” texts meant that a full translation was (and still is) impossible.57 Even so, it was clear that the Phoenician alphabet was no longer the first of its kind, and
The letters in this book are the offspring of ancient Egyptian writing, filtered through four thousand years of human history.
Soon after, sheets of Egyptian papyrus were being exported across the Mediterranean for use with the new script, and the clay tablets of cuneiform were consigned to history.
For at least a thousand years after proto-Sinaitic appeared, Egyptian and Semitic scribes continued to dissolve soot in gum arabic to make their ink, and chewed meditatively at the ends of their sea rushes before cutting them to fibrous points.
the Hellenic world scribes there chose a radical new writing implement. The ancient Greeks wrote with pens, not brushes, that they called calami after the hollow reeds or canes from which they were carved.
whereas the Egyptians’ rushes made for broad, even strokes, the narrow, flat nib of a calamus on papyrus created the conspicuous variation between thick and thin strokes that characterizes handwritten manuscripts from the Middle Ages until the modern day.61 If
scribes themselves barely acknowledged their writing implements.
writers spoke of experiments with pigments such as cuttlefish ink, or sepia; with the residue left after the fermentation of grapes; and with burnt ivory, which yielded elefantinon melan, or “elephant’s ink.”
And though the Romans arrived comparatively late to the literacy party, mostly likely in the third century BCE, they too threw themselves wholeheartedly into the intricacies of ink making.
Vitruvius, an architect who lived during the first century BCE, described how to build a special marble furnace in which to burn resinous pinewood for its soot.66 And Pliny, whose muddled description of papyrus still baffles, explained that adding wormwood to ink helped keep hungry mice away from scrolls.
In spite of all this research and development, neither the Greeks nor the Romans deviated from the old recipe of water, gum arabic, and pigment to create tractable, water-soluble ink.
Martial, a Roman poet writing in the first century CE, enclosed a sponge with poems sent to his patron so that he could wipe off those he disliked.
The parchment that was set to replace papyrus, however, was more problematic: water-based ink sat precariously on parchment’s impenetrable surface, and once dry it flaked off at the slightest provocation.
Predictably, Pliny, too, had something to say about the matter, describing in Natural History how the sap of certain plants could be used in the same way.70
Writing in the third century BCE, an engineer named Philo from the Greek city of Byzantium described what he called “sympathetic ink.”
Ink made from dried tree galls, he wrote, left no trace on papyrus, but when swabbed with a solution of copper sulfate the hidden text would appear as if from nowhere.
By the second century CE, scribes were using ink that differed from Philo’s recipe only in that its two main ingredients were brought together before pen met parchment, not after.
Today we call it “iron gall ink,”
Key to iron gall ink’s success was its ability to bond with parchment.
Once dry, it was almost impossible to remove.
Quill pens (which replaced reed pens but retained their distinctive split nibs), ink horns, penknives, and straightedges were joined by pumice stones to gently abrade parchment, razors for more radical surgery, and chalk to prepare the erased surface to receive new text.
palimpsest is a document that has been erased and then reused.77
Copperas occurred natively in Spain in the form of greenish powder or crystals (later, it was manufactured in a drawn-out, protoindustrial process that took four years from start to finish),
The dried galls were crushed or pounded, then, depending on the ink maker’s proclivities, they were variously soaked, boiled, or fermented in rainwater, wine, or beer, all of which were thought to be purer than drinking water.
When the gall infusion was finally ready, it was fortified with powdered copperas and thickened with ground-up gum arabic.82
iron gall ink’s permanence was the result of a complex chemical metamorphosis that began as soon as it met the air. Kept
As the ink dried, however, the presence of oxygen in the air caused the tannic acids extracted from the tree galls to react with the copperas† to form a darker, insoluble pigment that adhered to the fibers of the parchment, thereby fixing it there for good.
until one day, a man named Gutenberg pulled and released the lever of a makeshift wine press, and everything changed.
the patricians, were constantly at odds with the up-and-coming guilds of the middle class—the goldsmiths, masons, salt measurers, barber-surgeons (in
