Forty Centuries of Ink / Or, A chronological narrative concerning ink and its backgrounds, introducing incidental observations and deductions, parallels of time and color phenomena, bibliography, chemistry, poetical effusions, citations, anecdotes and curiosa together with some evidence respecting the evanescent character of most inks of to-day and an epitome of chemico-legal ink.

by David Nunes Carvalho

TO THE PHOENICIAN.

"Creator of celestial arts,
Thy painted word speaks to the eye;
To simple lines thy skill imparts
The glowing spirit's ecstasy."

The oldest piece of literary composition known in the oldest book (roll) in existence is to be found in the celebrated papyrus Prisse, now in the Louvre at Paris. It consists of eighteen pieces in Egyptian hieratic writing, ascribed to about the year B. C. 2500.

While the papyrus plant has almost vanished from Egypt, it still grows in Nubia and Abyssinia. It is related by the Arab traveler, Ibn-Haukal, that in the tenth century, in the neighborhood of Palermo in Sicily, the papyrus plant grew with luxuriance in the Papirito, a stream to which it gave its name.

Du Cange, 1376, cites the following lines from a French metrical romance, written about that time, to show that waxen tablets continued to be occasionally used till a late period:

"Some with antiquated style
In waxen tablets promptly write;
Others with finer pen, the while
Form letters lovelier to the sight."

The laws of Greece were promulgated by means of MSS. on linen, as they were also in Rome, and in addition to linen; cloth and silk were occasionally used. Skins of various kinds of fish, and even the "intestines of serpents" were employed as writing materials. Zonaras states that the fire which took place at Constantinople in the reign of Emperor Basiliscus consumed, among other valuable remains of antiquity, a copy of the Iliad and Odyssey, and some other ancient poems, written in letters of gold upon material formed of the intestines of a serpent. We are also informed by Purcelli that monuments of much more modern dates, the charter of Hugo and Lothaire, A. D. 933 (kings of Italy), preserved in the archives of Milan, are written upon fish skins.

Constantine authorized his soldiers dying on the field of battle to write their last will and testament with the point of their sword on its sheath or on a shield.

B. C. 270. The Jewish elders, by order of the high priest, carried a copy of the law to Ptolemy Philadelphus, written in letters of gold upon skins, the pieces of which were so artfully put together that the joinings did not appear.

No monuments of Hebrew writing exist which are not posterior even to the Christian era, with the exception of those on the coins of the Maccabees, which are in the ancient or what is termed the Samaritan forms of the Hebrew letters. This coinage took place about B. C. 144.