Some of these materials were used transiently and in small areas; others of them were widely used and for a long period of time. Mr. G. H. Putnam instances the case of wax tablets which were known to Homer as being still in use among the Romans twelve hundred years later. In Palestine and Phœnicia and, indeed, in many places if not everywhere, the earliest writing was on stone, of which the famous Rosetta and the Moabite stones and the inscriptions cut on temple walls, gates, stone cliffs, and monuments, as in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Crete, and in the western hemisphere also, are examples from the remote past. In Assyria and Babylonia clay was all but universally employed as the material upon which to write, and because it was everywhere available. Clay was the material at hand and was used for vari-sized tablets and for hollow hexagonal or octagonal cylinders.
[In this connection it will be of interest to note two important "finds" of the cuneiform writing which have recently been brought to light in Upper Egypt and in Babylon, respectively. There was discovered in 1891-92, by Professor Petrie, at Tel-el-Amarna, above the city of Cairo on the east bank of the Nile, a body of tablets—over three hundred in number—written in cuneiform or Babylonian characters. The scholars were astonished at finding this collection in Egypt, so remote from the home of the cuneiform writing. The inscriptions on them increased their surprise, for these tablets were written in Jerusalem, Tyre, Gezer, and other cities of Palestine and Syria and sent by these subject peoples to their Egyptian masters and rulers. They show, as Professor Sayce holds, that writing on tablets was, at least in the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt (1,000 B. C.), the normal form of official correspondence between Egypt and her foreign provinces.[34] The greater part of these tablets were purchased for the Berlin Museum, though quite a number of them were secured for the British Museum. (Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition.)
The other important "find"—an elaborate monument of early civilization and embodying, perhaps, the most ancient of all codes—was that discovered on the acropolis of ancient Susa in Persia during the winter of 1901-02 by the French Expedition. This discovery consisted of three fragments of black diorite stone and constituted, when fitted together, a monument nearly eight feet in height. This monument embodies a bas-relief of King Hammurabi receiving the Laws from the sun-god, and an inscription of about four thousand lines (the longest inscription yet discovered) arranged in forty-four columns, engraven on the stele in cuneiform characters as were the Tel-el-Amarna tablets. It is believed by the scholars that this Code was set up in the principal cities of the realm and was designed to be read and observed by the King's subjects. This Hammurabi (identified by most Assyriologists as the Amraphel of the Old Testament, Genesis 14:1) was the sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon and reigned for fifty-five years, about 2250 B. C. He was a great scholar and a pious and god-fearing King who codified existing laws and had them widely promulgated.[35]]
Wood was used in some countries as the material upon which to write or carve records and laws. The mummy-cases were both written upon and carved with Egyptian characters and the laws of Solon were inscribed on tablets of wood. The word codex which has come to have different significations meant, originally, the trunk of a tree but came to be the designation for a wooden tablet coated with wax for writing purposes. Pliny is authority for the statement that the bark of trees was used for writing upon before the papyrus was adopted for this purpose. It is held that in China writing was very early made permanent on sections of the bamboo, being burned therein by a heated metal stylus somewhat after the fashion of the modern pyrography; this material was displaced, however, in the third century B. C. by silk or cloth, and these, in turn, were superseded by a kind of paper made from the inner bark of the mulberry tree, bamboo fibre, and other substances which came into extensive use during the Han Dynasty (206 B. C.–25 A. D.) and, under the incentive of which, as we are told, an extensive imperial library of the reigning house was collected. And, to the present day, palm leaves are used for writing material in parts of India.
Besides the simpler arrangements of the materials, as in the roll, tablet, or leaf, there were arrangements of the material more resembling the book form of to-day, as in the diptych and the triptych. The diptych was made of two tablets of wood or of other material and resembled our double slates, having the tablets for the writing sunken below the protecting edges. These were hinged together and covered on their protected sides with a coating of wax. On this wax surface the Greeks and Romans wrote with a stylus. The writing could easily be obliterated by simply melting the wax, when it became a prepared plate for another inscription. The triptych and the polyptych, as the respective words suggest, consisted of three or four or more leaves hinged together and made available for literary or other inscriptions, after the manner of the diptych.
[XII]
INKS
Any reference to the literary productions of the past and to the materials preserving and perpetuating written records, including the Bible and sacred history, would be deficient were the qualities of the early inks disregarded. The very ink in which the ancient literature, sacred and classic, was embodied had an importance scarcely, if any, less than the materials upon which the writing was impressed or recorded. The task of transcribing a book, e. g., the Gallic Wars, the Epic of Virgil, or the Bible, was an undertaking of so great magnitude that the conservation of energy, if nothing else, taught the importance of securing and using an ink that had "staying" qualities. No sensible person, no matter when or where he might live, would be apt to spend the time required to copy the Bible in its entirety (a task necessitating the labor of a skillful calligraphist for nearly three years) when all his work would soon be wasted by reason of an impermanent ink.
The makers of the inks used in the early ages had a skill and knowledge in the mixing of pigments or in compounding the ingredients of their inks undiscovered, as yet, and unequaled in modern times. The superiority of the inks known to the ancients has long been the object of surprise and admiration. The inscriptions on mummy-cases, made at a time long antedating the Christian Era, and the writing on manuscripts made in the early centuries of Christian history, in addition to the beauty of the form and finish of the writing, have a freshness of appearance as though they were only of years' instead of centuries' duration. "The survival of papyrus rolls containing the text of the Egyptian ritual known as 'The Book of the Dead,' dating back fifteen centuries B. C., and accompanied with numerous scenes painted in brilliant colors, proves how ancient was this very natural method of elucidating a written text by means of pictures."[36] And among the ancient archæological treasures recently discovered in Crete are stucco designs, the colors of which are almost as brilliant as when laid on, over three thousand years ago.