An astronomical work discovered by George Smith comprised seventy such tablets, say one hundred and forty pages. The first of these begins with the words “When the gods Anu,” and this seems to have been taken as the title of the work, for each successive tablet bears the notice “First (second or third) tablet of ‘When the gods Anu.’ Further, to guard against all chance of confusion, the last line of one tablet is repeated as the first line of the following one—a fashion which we still see in old books, in which the last word or two at the bottom of a page is repeated at the top of the next.... If the tablets were to be impressed with figures or hieroglyphics in place of or in addition to the cuneiform characters, engraved cylinders were used of some hard stone, such as jasper, cornelian, or agate.... Tablets have also been found (usually in foundation stones) of gold, silver, copper, lead, and tin.”[128]
Referring to the care with which each monarch gathered into his palace the chronicles of his reign, building long series of inscribed tablets into the walls and burying others beneath the foundation stones, Ménant says:
“It was not mere whim which impelled the kings of Assyria to build so assiduously. Palaces had in those times a destination which they have no longer in ours. Not only was the palace indeed the dwelling of royalty, but, as the inscriptions indicate, it was also the Book, which each sovereign began at his accession to the throne, and in which he was to record the history of his reign.”
Painstaking and slow as the method appears to have been in which the Babylonians and Assyrians recorded the earliest known literature of the world, in one respect at least they achieved a success greater than that of any of the literature-producing nations who were to follow them. Their books were made to last, and through forty centuries of vicissitudes such as would have crumbled into unrecognizable dust the collections of the Vatican or of the British Museum, the mounds of Mesopotamia have safely protected the libraries of the Chaldean kings, and it is probable that, notwithstanding the completeness of the devastation that overwhelmed the Assyrian lands, a larger proportion of the entire body of Assyrian literature has been preserved for the students of to-day than of any national literature which came into existence prior to the invention of printing.
The book of Egyptian literature was nearly always written on papyrus, that is, on the tissue prepared from the stems of the papyrus plant, a species of reed which in ancient times abounded on the banks of the Nile. In the earlier days, there are instances of palm-leaves being used for certain classes of documents. According to Wilkinson, the papyrus plant has now entirely disappeared from Egypt. So important was the rôle played by papyrus in the history of classic literature that ancient writers speak as if their literature could hardly have existed, or at least could hardly have been preserved, without it.
Pliny, for instance, writes: Papyri natura dicetur, cum chartæ usu maxime humanitas vitæ constet, certe memoria.[129] Birt renders this: It is on literature that all human development depends, and assuredly to literature is due the transmission of history.[130] Pliny here uses the word charta (i. e., paper made of papyrus) as a general term for literature, and speaks as if papyrus were the only material in use for books. He was writing about the middle of the first century.
From their own land the Greeks could secure no materials for book-making, and their literature, which was to inspire and to enlighten future generations, could be preserved for these generations only by the use of substances imported from other countries. By far, the most important of their book-making materials was the same papyrus plant which had long been utilized by the Egyptians. To the stem of this plant, from which the book “paper” was prepared (the English term being, of course, derived from the Egyptian plant), the Greeks gave the name of βύβλος, or βίβλος. These terms, with the diminutives βύβλίον, βιβλίον, and βιβλάριον speedily came to stand for the book itself instead of for the book-paper, the “book” comprising a series of prepared papyrus sheets, gummed together into a roll. βύβλος usually denoted a single work only, although such work might comprise several volumes or rolls. Suidas, however, whose Lexicon was written about 1000 A.D., asserts that it was also used for a collection of books. The word βύβλος was in like manner used for cordage, i. e., the ropes of ships, for the making of which the papyrus stem was also employed.
We have named first in order papyrus, as the material most universally used by the Greek writers, and βύβλος as the term for book most frequently occurring in Greek literature.
Centuries, however, before the introduction of the papyrus, or of the dressed skins, other materials were employed for writing, such as thinly rolled sheets of lead, used for public documents, and slips of linen sheets, and wax tablets, used for private records and correspondence. Wax tablets were known to Homer, and twelve hundred years after Homer were still in use among the Romans. The Homeric Greeks also utilized slabs of wood and the bark of trees, another material which remained useful for many generations, and which gave to the Romans the term for book, liber. Another term in which the roll nature of the book is clearly indicated is κύλινδρος, a cylinder.[131] This brings us back to one of the Assyrian forms, arrived at, however, in a very different way.
The papyrus book, whether Egyptian, Greek, or Roman, was gotten up very much like a modern mounted map. A length of the material, written on one side only, was fastened to a wooden roller, around which it was wound. The Egyptian name for such a roll was tamā. Such rolls were often twenty, thirty, or even forty yards long.[132] Herodotus tells us the whole of the Odyssey was written on one such roll. He also refers to an Egyptian priest rolling a book about the horns of a sacrificial bull.[133] As the inconvenience of these long rolls became apparent, the practice obtained of breaking up the longer works into sections. Certain suitable sizes became normal, and the conventional length of the roll possibly exercised some influence on the length of what are still called the “books,” i. e., divisions of the classical authors. The Egyptian rolls were kept in jars, holding each from six to twelve.[134]