In Rome, before the use of bronze tables and columns, the laws were engraven on oak boards. "The annals of the pagan high-priests," says a French writer, "which related day by day the principal events of the year, were probably written with black ink on an album, that is, a wooden plank whitened with white-lead. These annals ceased a hundred and twenty years before Christ, but the use of the album was kept up some time longer." The Romans also wrote their wills on wood.
Linen cloth covered with writing has been found in most of the mummy-cases that have been opened. The Egyptian Museum in the Louvre contains several rituals on cloth. The Sibylline Oracles were traced on cloth. The first copy of the Emperor Aurelian's journal that was made after his death was written on cloth, and is still preserved in the Library of the Vatican. On cloth were written also some of the edicts of the first Christian emperors.
No certain epoch can be ascribed to the fabrication of paper from the papyrus reed. The celebrated French savant, Champollion the younger, discovered during his travels in Egypt several contracts written on papyrus, which by their date must have been drawn up seventeen hundred years B.C.
Egypt appears to have kept the monopoly of the papyrus paper trade. The principal manufactories of it were situated at Alexandria, and so important an article of commerce did it become that a dearth of papyrus was the cause of several popular disturbances in some of the great cities of Italy and Greece. Under the Emperor Tiberius, a scarcity in the supply produced so formidable a riot in Rome, that the senate was compelled to take measures similar to those necessary in years of famine, and actually had to name commissaries, whose duty it was to distribute to each citizen the quantity of writing-paper he absolutely required.
The papyrus reed seems indeed to have been ancient Egypt's greatest material blessing, for not only was it the principal article of foreign commerce and source of immense wealth in the form of paper, but it was also of the most extraordinary utility to the poorer classes. Household utensils of every description were fabricated from its roots; boats were constructed of its stem; roofing, sail-cloth, ropes, and clothes were made of its bark; and from the appellation of "eaters of papyrus," often applied to the Egyptians by the Greeks, some have thought that it was a common article of food. How extraordinary does it then seem that a plant of such inestimable value should ever have disappeared from a land which derived such benefits from it. Nevertheless, it is a singular fact that the papyrus is no longer to be found in Egypt; recent travellers assure us that not a stalk is to be seen at the present day in the Delta. Sicily alone now possesses the beautiful reed.
We are ignorant of the exact period of the introduction of the papyrus paper into Greece and Italy, but Pliny has left us copious details concerning the manipulations it underwent among the Romans. Sizing was then, as it is now, one of the most important operations in paper-making. The membranous covering of the stem of the papyrus reed was far from being of a firm, compact texture, and the Alexandrian factories probably sent it forth very imperfectly prepared. The best quality of paper was made by gluing together, with starch and vinegar, two sheets of papyrus, one transversely to the other, and then sizing them. These sheets were sometimes of considerable dimensions; documents have been discovered written on paper three yards in length.
Those true lovers of literature, art, and science, the Athenians, raised a statue to Philtatius—to him who first taught them the secret of sizing paper!
It is a curious fact that, about thirty years since, the vegetable size used by the ancient Egyptians was introduced, with some slight improvement, as a new discovery, into the paper manufactories of France, and has now almost entirely abolished the use of animal size in that country for all purposes connected with the fabrication of paper.
About the fourth century, the Arabs made Europe acquainted with cotton paper, just then invented in Damascus, thereby causing a great diminution in the papyrus trade. A long struggle ensued between the rival productions, which was only put an end to at the commencement of the twelfth century, by the invention of paper manufactured from flaxen and hempen refuse. The papyrus disappeared at once and completely; soon forgotten by commerce, but immortal in the remembrance of poets and sages—immortal as the pages of Cicero and Virgil, whose sweet and eloquent thoughts were first traced on Egypt's reed.
Until the present time, this flaxen and hempen rag paper has been produced in sufficient quantities for the necessities of our civilization, but as civilization increases, and as education becomes more general, especially among the masses of Europe, it is evident that the supply of rags will be inadequate to the demand, and wood will most probably again be brought into requisition, as in the age of Pericles.