A Companion to the History of the Book (16 page)

Modern text editions of the ancient scholarly literature have tended to aim for the (re)construction of “complete” works by drawing equally on Assyrian and Babylonian manuscript sources from the eighth to the second centuries bc. This approach unavoidably emphasizes continuity, conservatism, and authorial anonymity over novelty, variation, and individuality. But there was nothing inherently conservative in the medium of the clay tablet itself. While continuity of tradition was valued and upheld through preservation of ancient texts, innovation and intellectual development through new composition remained a vital part of that tradition, right up until the very end. But although cuneiform culture died out nearly two millennia ago, its academic study is less than two centuries old: we are only just beginning to understand it.

References and Further Reading

Black, J. A. (2004) “Lost Libraries of Ancient Mesopotamia.” In J. Raven (ed.),
Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity
, pp. 41–57. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

—, Cunningham, G., Robson, E., and Zólyomi, G. (2004)
The Literature of Ancient Sumer
. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brosius, M. (ed.) (2003)
Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions: Concepts of Record-keeping in the Ancient World
. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fincke, J. C. (2004) “The British Museum’s Ashur-banipal Library Project.”
Iraq
, 66: 55–60.

Frame, G. and George, A. R. (2005) “The Royal Libraries of Nineveh: New Evidence for their Formation.”
Iraq
, 67: 265–84.

Geller, M. J. (1997) “The Last Wedge.”
Zeitschrift für Assyriologie
, 87: 43–95.

George, A. R. (2003)
The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic: Introduction, Critical Edition and Cuneiform Text s
, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gesche, P. (2000)
Schulunterricht in Babylonien im ersten Jahrtausend v. Chr.
[School-teaching in Babylonia in the First Millennium bc]. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.

Lieberman, S. (1990) “Canonical and Official Cuneiform Texts: To wa rds an Understanding of Assurbanipal’s Personal Tablet Collection.” In T. Abusch, J. Huehnergard, and P. Steinkeller (eds.),
Lingering over Words: Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Literature in Honor of William L. Moran
, pp. 305–36. Atlanta: Scholar’s Press.

Linssen, M. J. H. (2003)
The Cults of Uruk and Babylon: The Temple Ritual Texts as Evidence for Hellenistic Cult Practice
. Leiden: Brill.

Ewan, G. J. P. (1981)
Priest and Temple in Hellenistic Babylonia
. Wiesbaden: Steiner.

Michalowski, P. (1992) “Orality, Literacy and Early Mesopotamian Literature.” In M. E. Vogelzang and H. L. J. Vanstiphout (eds.),
Mesopotamian Epic Literature: Oral or Aural?
, pp. 227–45. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen.

— (2003) “The Libraries of Babel: Text, Authority, and Tradition in Ancient Mesopotamia.” In G. J. Dorleijn and H. L. J. Vanstiphout (eds.),
Cultural Repertories: Structure, Function and Dynamics
, pp. 105–29. Leuven: Peeters.

Nissen, H. J., Damerow, P., and Englund, R. K. (1993)
Archaic Bookkeeping: Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East
, trans. P. Larsen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (originally published 1990).

Parpola, S. (1983) “Assyrian Library Records.”
Journal of Near Eastern Studies
, 42: 1–29.

Pedersén, O. (1998)
Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East
. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press.

Robson, E. (2001) “The Tablet House: A Scribal School in Old Babylonian Nippur.”
Revue d ’Assyriologie
, 95: 39–67.

— (forthcoming) “Secrets de famille: prêtre et astronome à Uruk à l’Époque hellénistique [Family Secrets: Astronomy and Priesthood in Hellenistic Uruk].” In C. Jacob (ed.),
Les Lieux de savoir, I: Lieux et communautés
. Paris: Michel Albin.

Rochberg, F. (2004)
The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rochberg-Halton, F. (1984) “Canonicity in Cuneiform Texts.”
Journal of Cuneiform Studies
, 36: 127–44.

Tinney, S. J. (1999) “On the Curricular Setting of Sumerian Literature.”
Iraq
, 61: 159–72.

Van De Mieroop, M. (1997) “Why Did They Write on Clay?”
Klio
, 79: 7–18.

Veldhuis, N. C. (1997) “Elementary Education in Nippur.” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Gröningen.

Walker, C. B. F. (1987)
Cuneiform
. London: British Museum Press.

Wilcke, C. (2000) “Wer las und schrieb in Babylonien und Assyrien: überlegungen zur Literalität im Alten Zweistromland [Who Could Read and Write in Baby lonia and Assyria: Investigations into Literacy in Ancient Mesopotamia].”
Bayer-ische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse, Sitzungsberichte
, 6. Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

6

The Papyrus Roll in Egypt, Greece, and Rome

Cornelia Roemer

For does a crop grow in any field to equal this [papyrus], on which the thoughts of the wise are preserved? … For it opens a field for the elegant with its white surface; its help is always plentiful; and it is so pliant that it can be rolled together, although it is unfolded to a great length. Its joints are seamless, its parts united; it is the snowy pith of a green plant, a writing surface which takes black ink for its ornament; on it, with letters exalted, the flourishing corn-field of words yields the sweetest of harvests to the mind, as often as it meets the reader’s wish. It keeps a faithful witness of human deeds; it speaks of the past, and is the enemy of oblivion.

Cassiodorus,
Variae
, xi. 383–6

Books in Egypt, in classical Greece and Rome were made of papyrus. Sheets of this material are easy to roll, but break when they are folded; hence, it naturally favored the medium of the roll. The codex form, which resembled the modern book, was introduced later, and from the second century ad onwards it made papyrus increasingly redundant as a material for book production. After a time in which codices, too, were made from papyrus, parchment – easily folded and stitched together – became more common as a material for codices. The last extant examples of the type of papyrus roll predominant in the ancient world date from the eleventh century and come from the papal chancery in Rome (Lewis 1974: 92–4).

The ancient Egyptians had used rolls made of papyrus from the early days of the Old Kingdom. The oldest known papyrus roll was found in the tomb of Hemaka in Saqqara, and dates to the 1st dynasty, around 2900 bc (Emery 1938: 14). The hieroglyph for “papyrus roll” existed already in inscriptions from this period. The 1st dynasty roll was blank; the oldest examples with writing date from the 4th and 5th dynasties (Černý 1952: 9–10).

Egypt was and remained essentially the only country in which papyrus was manufactured, and from where it was shipped to all places around the Mediterranean. It is not clear whether the production of papyrus sheets was a state monopoly in Egypt. There is no secure evidence for this assumption in any period, even if the meaning of the Egyptian word papyrus (“that of the king”) may indicate a Pharaonic monopoly in that period.

Thucydides, Plato, and Cicero all wrote on papyrus; their works, both in classical and Hellenistic Athens and in the Roman Empire, were published in rolls. Other writing materials, such as wooden tablets coated in wax, were used for more ephemeral note-taking. The writing on such tablets could be removed easily, and they were therefore used for words and phrases not intended to be kept for long. Papyrus was the writing material
par excellence
for texts meant to be read time and again, and for those whose continuing preservation had a legal force. A fresco of the first century ad from Pompeii shows Terentius Nero and his wife both holding “books.” It tells a story not only about different writing materials, but also about the respective social roles of these materials. While the husband holds a papyrus roll, thus showing his literacy and noble education, his wife holds a wax tablet, presenting herself as a good housewife who keeps her records carefully.

Papyrus is made from the plant from which it takes its name. Papyrus
cyperus L
. grew especially in the swamps of the Nile Delta, where it was manufactured into writing papyrus throughout the Pharaonic, Greek, and Roman periods. It became the heraldic plant of Lower Egypt, while Upper Egypt was represented by the lotus. The names used to describe different grades of quality of papyrus show its geographical home; one degree of quality was named “Saitic” after the town of Sais in the Delta (Pliny,
Naturalis historia
xiii. 69 and 76). The plant had already died out in Egypt when Napoleon entered it in 1798; it is not mentioned in the
Description d´Egypte
. These days, papyrus, produced by the same method as in antiquity, has become a popular tourist souvenir on the Nile.

The triangular stalks of the plant, which can grow to more than 4 meters in height, were cut into pieces of 25–35 cm, and their hard green sheaths peeled away. The pith was then sliced into strips as wide as possible. It looks as if the most common procedure would have been to cut the strips away from the stem slice by slice. But a different, more elaborate method seems also to have been used in which the stem was sliced by a needle that peeled the stalk from the outside to the inside, thus producing very wide single strips, whereas the strips cut by the simpler method could not have been wider than the diameter of the stalk. However they were produced, these strips were laid side by side in one layer, before a second layer was put on top at an angle of 90 degrees. Once it had been formed in this way, the papyrus sheet was pressed, the fluid from the stem being the only glue to hold the layers together. Pliny the Elder, our only source for the manufacturing of papyrus in antiquity (
Naturalis historia
xiii. 68–89), got it wrong when he claimed that it was the muddy water of the Nile that made the layers of the sheet cohere. The finished sheets were polished with shells or pumice-stone. The different qualities of writing-papyrus certainly depended on the methods of production – whether, for instance, the strips were peeled or cut – and perhaps on the parts of the stalk from which the strips were taken. Since all papyrus sheets consist of two layers, all have one side on which the fibers run horizontally (the “recto”) and another on which they run vertically (the “verso”).

The size of the sheet depended on the length of the pieces cut from the stalk; it seems that a height of between 25 and 33 cm was the most common for a roll, at least from the first century ad onwards. Also, the width of the sheets could vary according to their quality. Pliny lists measures of width from 16.7 to 29.6 cm, the widest forming rolls of the most expensive types (Pliny,
Naturalis historia
xiii. 78–80). Single sheets were glued to each other, and theoretically there was no limit to how many sheets could form a roll. The unit sold was not the single sheet but the roll, and pieces were cut from it as required for the length of text to be written.

From the Pharaonic period onward, we have book rolls which measure well over 30 meters, but these were found in tombs, and it is possible that they only served their “readers” in the underworld. The normal roll of the Pharaonic period contained twenty sheets glued together, and was no more than 6 meters in length (Černý 1952: 9). One of the most common texts in Egyptian culture was a collection of spells, ritual declarations, and hymns now known as
The Book of the Dead
. Selections from this anthology were originally inscribed on tomb walls and later painted on coffins; by 1550 bc they were appearing on papyrus. Some versions were extensive, beautifully written, and illustrated; others consisted of a few key texts on a scrap of papyrus. The length of the roll in classical antiquity was certainly dictated by the length of the book to be copied, within the limits of a format that could be handled with ease by the reader. Whether scribes and their clients could have agreed on a product which measured more than 15 meters in length, as has been calculated for a papyrus roll containing one book of the historian Thucydides, is more than questionable (so Johnson 2004: 146–52). A length of even 22.9 meters has been proposed for a roll containing one of the books of Herodotus. The diameter of such a roll would have amounted to more than 10 cm, and it seems rather unlikely that someone would have enjoyed handling such a book, which would not only have been difficult to hold while reading, but also hard to roll back for closing and storage. Since these roll lengths are only calculated from fragments written by the same scribe and in the same format, and no example of such a long roll has come down to us in one piece from the Greco-Roman period, it is possible that the rolls in question contained only excerpts, or that these long books were copied on two or more rolls by the same scribe and according to the same layout. To protect the roll as a book, the first sheet, the so-called
protokollon
, was glued to the rest at an angle of 90 degrees. To facilitate the handling of the roll, a wooden stick could be attached to the last sheet. This
umbelicus
(navel) made it easier to roll the book around its center and to hold it during the reading process.

To make the roll into a Greek or Latin book, a scribe copied a text from a master copy onto the new roll. He started from the left, distributing the text over the entire roll into columns of the same width and height. Little dots in the upper margin may have guided him in keeping the
intercolumnia
, the open spaces between columns, uniform (Johnson 2004: 93–7). The title was usually written at the end of the text. To see the content of the book without rolling it to its end, little pieces of papyrus or parchment, so-called
sillyboi
, were glued to the upper margin of the roll, hanging out and providing the title and the name of the author.

The ink used by the ancient scribes consisted of carbon, gum arabic, and water. This mixture, a black, shiny fluid, was waterproof to a high degree. Only from the third century ad did a new mixture of brown color, containing iron salt or iron-gall, become more popular. Pens were cut from reeds, forming a hard writing instrument with a thin, split nib. This instrument was quite different from the one the Egyptians were accustomed to use. Their script was better adapted to writing with a soft, brush-like pen. The different writing instruments must have influenced the posture in which scribes copied the texts. While the Egyptian scribe sat on his heels on the ground, holding the roll on his lap and writing, the harder writing instruments of the Greeks required a more solid surface on which to put the papyrus. They must have used wooden boards on their laps or sat at tables.

Papyrus rolls usually carried writing only on the inner side, where the fibers of the papyrus sheets ran in a horizontal direction, the so-called recto. But sometimes, for lack of a new roll or because of the destitution of the client, a scribe would copy a literary text on the back of a roll that had been already used for a different text. Often these first texts were tax lists or other official documents that had gone out of use. We may assume that these rolls were produced for very serious readers who did not intend to impress anyone with their ownership of the book, but who were very keen about its content.

The quality and value of a book were established by the quality of the hand, the layout, and the material used. Luxury copies were carefully written in even book hands that followed the handwriting styles fashionable at the time. These could be influenced by the forms of letters in inscriptions, but could also borrow from the contemporary styles of writing found in documents. The handwriting used in the chancery of the Ptolemaic kings in the third century bc in Alexandria, characterized by broad, cursive letters, the high, horizontal strokes of which are emphasized so that they seem to hang from an upper line, had a clearly visible influence on the book hands of the period. Handwriting styles are the main tool by which these books can be dated.

Most scholars agree that the survival of the two long, epic poems of Homer would have been unthinkable without a medium on which the forty-eight books could have been fixed in written form. This means that some sort of books must have existed already in the seventh century bc. How far they were diffused and how many people used them is another question. We hear more of books, and of people reading and using them, only toward the end of the fifth century. In Aristophanes’
Frogs
(produced in 405 bc; v. 1114) the chorus claims that “these days everybody has a book.” This is certainly an exaggeration, and only intended to make fun of the intellectuals in the audience. There is no doubt, however, that the Sophists (intellectuals who showed that, with the art of speech, anyone could be persuaded about anything as long as the right words were used) increased the popularity of the written word and the book (Thomas 1989: 32–3). Only a written record could provide a pattern to follow that promised success to the orator, even if the delivery of the speeches themselves continued to be extempore. But the teaching of this
techne
, a term which became popular in this period, must have been based on written records, and therefore on the availability of books.

Direct evidence for the physical appearance of the book in classical antiquity is not extant before the fourth century bc. For the sixth and fifth centuries, we are dependent on vase paintings (Immerwahr 1964, 1973, with plates 31–3), two illustrative examples being a cup painted by Douris (Berlin 2385; dating to between 490 and 480
BC
) and a hydria showing “Sappho reading” in the National Museum in Athens (no. 1260; dating to between 440 and 430
BC
). The aim of these representations is not to show specific books: the interest of the painter is to show a person in the act of reading. In the case of the Douris cup, a man in a schoolroom is reading a text that recalls the
Iliad
, that being the noblest reading possible for an educated person. The book in the hands of the person reading thus conveys a certain idea (and ideal) of education, and dedication to that idea, the form of the book being a negligible part of the representation. The teacher in the school scene on the Douris cup holds the papyrus roll vertically, so that the viewer can read the opening line of the text more easily. Literary texts were never written in this way on book rolls in antiquity, but always horizontally from left to right.

In representations from the Greek and Roman worlds, we frequently see people reading, but we never see them writing. The act of reading was worthy of the artist’s brush, whereas the act of copying was not. This attitude was completely different from that of the Egyptians, where scribes were held in high honor and numerous sculptures show the scribe in the act of doing his duty. The attitude of the Greeks and Romans toward the activity of writing was to change only in the early Christian period, when the act of copying the Holy Scriptures became a sacred act and therefore worthy of representation in art.