Besides the materials already mentioned, other substances were
utilized upon which to impress or embody literature or any historical
data. Thus, sections of the bamboo; the leaves and bark of trees and
plants as the linden, birch, and the palm; tablets of wood, ivory,
gold, bronze, tin, lead, and wax; sheets of silk and linen; sun-dried
and fire-burnt bricks; tablets and cylinders of clay; and slabs and
stelai of stone, were each and all used in variable proportions,
according to taste or necessitous conditions. Of the materials used in
picture writing of the ancient Aztecs of Mexico, Prescott says: "The
manuscripts were made of different materials, cotton cloth or skins
nicely prepared; a composition of silk and gum; but for the most part a
kind of paper from the leaves of the maguey."[33]
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.