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The
Evolution
o f
the
Book
Frederick G.
Kilgour
N e w
Y o r k
O x f o r d
Oxfo rd University Press 1998
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O x f o r d
Un ivers i ty Press
O x f o r d New York
At he ns Auc kl a nd Ba ngkok Bogot a Bomba y
Bueno s Aires Calcut ta Cape Town
Dar es
Salaam
Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi
Kuala Lumpur M a d r a s Madrid M e l b o u r n e
Mex ico City Nairo bi Paris Singapore
Taipei Tokyo Tor onto Warsaw
an d
associated companies
in
B erl in I ba d a n
Copyr i ght © 1998 by Fre de r ic k G . Ki l gour
Published
by
O x for d Uni ve r s i t y Pr e s s , I nc .
,
198
M a d i s on Ave nue ,
N ew
Y o r k ,
N ew
Y o r k 1 0 0 1
6
O x f o r d i s a r e g i s t er e d t r a d e ma r k o f O x for d Uni ve r s i t y Pr e s s
All rights reserved. No
part
of this publ icat ion may be
r e p r o d u c e d ,
stored in a
r e t r i e va l s ys t e m,
o r
t r a ns mi t t e d ,
i n a ny fo r m or by any me a ns , e l e c t r on i c , me c ha ni c a l ,
phot oc opyi ng ,
recording, or otherwise,
w i t h o u t
the prior
pe r mi s s i on
o f
O x for d Uni ve r s i t y Pr e s s .
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publicat ion Data
The evolution of the book /
by Fr e d e r i c k
G ,
Kl i gour .
p. cm.
Includes bibl iographical
r e fe r e nc e s a nd i nd e x .
ISBN 0 - 1 9 - 5 - 1 185-9-6
1.
B o o k s
—
History.
I.
Title.
Z
4.K54
0 0 2 ' . 0 9 — D C
2
j
9 7 - 1 4 4 3 0
kilgour freteriex
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Printed in the United States of America
eduacid-free paper
1998
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Fo r
Eleanor
companion
o n th e
journey
with
love,
gratitude,
and
appreciation
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Contents
1. Dynamics of the B o o k 3
2 . Incunables
o n
Clay
11
3.
Papyr us Ro lls
2 2
4. The
Greco-Roman Wor ld
34
5 . The C o d e x ,
100-700
48
6.
Islam , 622-1300
5 7
7.
W estern Chr is tendom ,
600-1400 68
8. Pr inti ng , 1400-1800
81
9. Po wer Re vo lutio n, 1800-1840 98
10.
Climax
o f
Book s Pr in ted f r o m Cast Type, 1840-1940
114
11.
C o m p u t e r -D r i v e n B o o k P r o d u c ti o n 133
12 .
The Electron ic Bo ok 15 1
N o t e s 161
Ind ex
173
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The
Evolution
o f
the
B o o k
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Dynamics
o f t h
B o o k
IN
TH E
LAST
T H I R D of the twentieth century, th e b o o k in the shape o f a long-
familiar object composed
o f
inked sheets folded, cut,
and
bound began
to
metamorphose into the book as a screen display on an electronic machine; the
t r a n s f o r m a t i o n ,
in m aterials, shape, and structure, of the device fo r carrying
writ-
ten and graphic info rm atio n was mo re ex treme than any since the or iginal cre-
ations
o n
clay
and
papyrus
in the
third m il lennium
B.C.
Through
historical analy-
sis
of the
societal needs that have invok ed
th e
t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s
of the
b o o k ,
and the
technologies that have shaped them, The Evolutio n o f th e B o o k aims
to
shed light
on the present emergence o f the electronic boo k.
This
work t reats a
"book"
as a storehouse of hu m an kno wledge intended for dis-
semination
in the f o r m of an artifact
that
is portable—or at
least transportable—
and that contains ar rangem ents of s igns that convey info rm ation . The info rm atio n
m ay
comprise stories, myths,
songs,
and reality; the signs may be representations
o f
hum an speech or gr aphic presentation s o f such things as m aps, musical
notes,
o r
pictures. With respect to portability, a volume of the elephant
folio
of Audubon 's
B irds of
Am erica
and a copy of the Co mprehensive Edi tion o f The Times Atlas o f the
World
might
be
looked upon
as
transportable,
and a
volume
of the
Gutenberg B ible
as
portable, even
if a bit difficult to lug
about .
T he
electronic-book system, when
fully
developed, will need
to be
accessible
by a
device tha t will serve
as a
c o m f o r t-
able
vade
mecum fo r an
ind ividual user .
O v e r
the
last
five
thou sand years there have been
f o u r
t r a n s f o r m a t i o n s
of the
"book" in
which each mani fes ta t ion
has differed f r o m it s
p r e d e c e s s o r s
in
shape
and
s t ructu re .
T he
successive, som etimes ov erlapp ing,
f o r m s
w e r e
the
clay tablet
3
1
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4
The
Evo lution o f
the
B o o k
inscribed
with a stylus
(2500
B . C . — A . D . 100), th e papyrus ro l l wri t ten o n with brush
or pen (2000
B . C . — A . D .
700), th e codex, originally inscribed with pen (A.D. 100),
and the elect ronic book, current ly in the process of innovat ion. There have also
been three
ma jo r
t ransfo rm at ions in method and power appl ica tion in repro-
ducing the codex: machine pr int ing f r o m cast type, powered by human muscle
(1455—1814); nonhuman power dr iving both presses and typecast ing machines
(1814-1970); and computer-dr iven photocomposi t ion combined with offset pr in t -
in g (1970— ). Extre m ely long pe rio ds o f stabili ty characterize the first three shapes
o f
th e book; clay tablets and papyrus-rol l books existed for twenty-five hundred
years , and the codex for near ly two thousand years . An Egyptian of the twent ieth
c e nt u r y
B.C.
wo uld imm ediately have recognized, could
he
have seen
it, a
G r e e k
o r
Roman papyrus- ro l l book
of the
time
o f
Christ; similarly,
a
Greek
o r
Roman l iv-
ing in the second century A.D. who had become familiar with the then new hand-
writ ten codex wo uld have n o t ro uble recognizing o ur machine-pr inted book of the
twentieth century.
The historical pattern of the book, in which long per iods o f s tabi li ty in for m at
al ternate with per iods o f radical change, resembles the pat tern observed in org anic
evolut ion by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in 1972.
1
T o p a r a p h r a s e
Eldredge, punctuated equilibria at i ts simplest entails the recognition of lack
o f
change
and the
realization that patterns
o f
change
in the
fossil
record,
when
they d o occur , are best explained by extinction and change in geographically iso-
lated species. In shor t , the theo ry po stulates
long-term
stability of species (with, at
most , minor modif icat ions) in paleontologic t ime, and punctuat ing bursts of t ime
in which many species were extinguished. I t has been estimated that as many as
four and a
half million species,
or 90
percent
of the
whole, became ext inct
at the
end of the
Paleozoic era;
new
species evolved
f ro m
parental species that escaped
extinction by virtue of their geographic isolation.
2
A
similar
pattern of punctuated equilibria prevails in the evolution of the book.
The
Sum erians invented w ri t ing tow ard
the end of the four th
mil lennium B.C.
and
f ro m their u biqui tou s clay developed th e tablet o n which to inscribe it. The Egyp-
tians soon afterward learned
o f
wri t ing f r o m
th e
Mesopotamians
and
used
the pa-
pyrus plant, which existed only in Egypt , to develop th e papyrus ro l l o n which to
write. Although neither the clay tablet no r the papyr us r o ll changed in
f o r m
dur ing
the next thre e tho usand years, a
significant modification
re lated to bo th boo k fo r ms
did take place in that the num bers o f wri t ing symbo ls were r educed du r ing that pe-
r iod
f ro m
a couple of thousand pictographs to a dozen or so alphabetic characters,
resulting in great increases in the speed of writ ing.
Form
aside, the m a j o r change
throughout
th e
entire history
of the
book
has been in the
continuous increase
in
speed of product ion: f ro m the days required to handwrite a single copy, to the
minutes to
m achine-pr in t
tho usand s of copies , to the seconds to com pose and dis-
play
text on an
elect ro nic screen.
T he
ext inct ion
o f clay
tablets
w as
ensured
by the
difficulty
o f
inscribing curvi-
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Dynamics o f
the
Book 5
l inear
alphabet-like symbols on clay. Papyrus, however, being admirably suited to
cursive
writing
with brush
or
pen, persisted
until the
sixth century A.D., together
with
the
writing tablet (made
of two or
more pieces
of
wood embedded with
wax
and
held
together
with threads
or
thongs), which
had been in
existence
at least
since the fourteenth century B.C. The need to find information more rapidly than
is
possible
in a
papyrus-roll-form book initiated
the
development
of the
Greco-
Roman codex in the second century A.D. Although the codex is still with us, the
one m a j o r change in it having been the replacement of manual writing by machine
printing, the introduction of computer-driven photocomposition and the emer-
gence of the electronic book in the last third of the twentieth century provide the
next
two punctuation points in the
book's history
of alternating
equilibrium
and
change. Figure 1.1 displays these seven punctuations of equilibria.
For each of the major innovations in the f o r m of the book, five concurrent ele-
m e n t s
were necessary:
(1)
societal need
for
information;
(2)
technological knowl-
edge and experience; (3) organizational experience and capability; (4) the capability
Figure
1.1. Seven punctuations of equilibria of the
b o o k
over
fo r ty-f ive
h u n d r e d
years.
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6
The, Evo lution o f
the
B o o k
o f
integrating
a new f o r m
into existing info rm atio n systems;
and (5 )
econo mic via-
bility. T he Sumerians, w ho lived in southern M esopotamia (now roughly the lower
half of Ira q), were the first to create wo rd w rit ing, in 3100 B.C., and the first to pro -
duce textboo ks, in 2900 B.C. Their need to record accounts mo t ivated them, abo ut
3500
B.C., to
invent
an
elementary protowri t ing
fo r
m a r k i ng
o n
spherical
o r oblong
hollow clay balls that contained tokens. During the next
f o ur
centuries they devel-
oped thei r protowri t ing system through pictograph and logogram to the
full
cunei form system of wri t ing on clay tablets . Product ion of books in cuneiform
script
o n clay tablets that we re either sun d ried or kiln baked persisted until the first
century
A.D.
Pictographic wri t ing was almost cer tainly int roduced into
Egypt
f r o m
M e s o -
potamia, and the Egypt ians f i rs t inscr ibed pictographs—later known as hiero-
glyphs—on stone abo ut 3100 B.C.
A
century later ,
and a
century
after th e
S u m e -
rians,
Egyptians had converted their picture
writing
to wo rd wri t ing, and
f ro m
that
t ime
fo rwar d h ieroglyphs were used only
o n
m o n u m e n t s .
Fo r
w ri t ing
o n
papyrus ,
mostly done with a rush brush, there evolved a cursive script known as hieratic.
The need both for administ rat ive records, as in Sumer, and for records to sup-
po r t Eg ypt ian religious life shaped the dev elopm ent of the papyr us-ro l l book. T he
earliest known papyri date
f r o m
a b o u t
2500
B.C. ,
in the
m iddle per iod
of the Old
Kingdom. Their contents encompass descr ipt ions
o f
pr iest ly dut ies
and
cere-
monies,
and
temple documents such
as
income
and
exp end i ture accounts . Subse-
quently the Egyptians produced books containing myths, ta les , and magic, and
such
celebrated works as the Ramesseum Dramatic Papyrus, the earliest i l lustrated
book (c. 1980
B.C.);
the R hind M athem atical Papy rus (c. 1700 B.C.); the Ebers Pa-
pyrus, a medical wo rk , and the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyru s (both c. 1600 B.C.);
and the
H a r r i s P a p y r u s
(c.
1 2 5 0
B.C.).
The Greek s adop ted the papy rus ro ll for boo ks so metime befo re the fo ur th cen-
tury B.C.,
th e
date
of the
ear l iest surviving fragments
o f
G r e e k b o o k s .
B y
about
th e eleventh century B.C. the G r e e k s had taken over f r o m th e Phoenicians an
alphabet-l ike consonantal system of writ ing,
f ro m
which
they
constructed the first
com plete alphabet by conver t ing
four
Pho enician conso nants to vowels and ad ding
a
fi f th vowel , thereby w ri t ing each sound individual ly. Although the Gr eeks con-
t inued to employ the papyrus ro l l for books after the invent ion of the codex-form
b o o k ,
by the
fo ur th cen tury A.D. only
a
quar te r
o f
Greek l i terary
and
scientific
texts wer e
o n rolls.
T he c o d e x - f o r m book of the second century w as s t ruc tura l ly th e same as our
present-day bo ok
in
being co mpo sed
o f
leaves bound together between
tw o
cov-
ers. Its
f o r m
der ived
f ro m
th e wo od en w ri t ing tablets that h ad been used fo r fi fteen
hundred years to reco rd impermanent commerc ia l and administ rat ive records,
notes , school exercises ,
and the
dictated
first
dra f t s
o f
b o o k s . C o d e x texts
w e re
t ra ns f e r re d , at
least
at first,
f r o m pap yru s ro l l s.
In
1970
K u r t
W ei tz mann accura te ly
character ized
th is in t ro du ct ion: T he mo st
f unda me nta l
change in the whole his-
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Dynamics of the
B o o k
7
t o ry
of the
book
w as
that
f ro m
rol l
to
codex."
3
A
quarter century later Weitz-
mann's evaluatio n is sti ll accurate, but a quarter century hence i t may n ot be.
Early Christians, l ike their modern counterparts, were a disputatious lot , given
to writ ten and oral debates supported by extensive quotations
f ro m
texts that were
difficult to search o n papyrus rolls. Fo r readier access they used th e technique o f
sewing together gatherings of
folded
sheets of papyrus or parchment and sewing
the
outermost gather ings
to wood,
papyrus ,
o r
leather covers.
In
addition
to
m a k -
in g
parts
o f
text more readily available,
th e
codex
w as
more compact
and
less
costly
to
produce
and
store than
the
papyrus ro l l .
T he
success
of the new f o r m
is revealed by the fact that 158 of 172 kno wn bibl ical manuscr ipts w ri t ten befo re
A.D.
400 are
codices,
and
only
14 are
rolls;
of the 118
Ch ristian non biblical texts
o f
the same period 83 are codices, and only 35 are rolls.
From 400 to 1300, By zantium , Islam, and to a lesser ex tent the C hristian West
preserved and t ransmit ted to Europe the corpus of Greek wri t ings that f i red the
Renaissance. Byzant ium added new knowledge and l i terature. Is lam led the ad-
vance
of the
b o o k
by
making innumerable contr ibut ions, including
the
i m p o r t a -
tion of the Chinese method of making paper, until the
twelfth
century, at which
time
there began
tw o
centuries
o f
decline
in
Islam
and two
centuries
o f
advance
in the West. By the fourteenth century the West was far in the lead of
book
p r o -
duction.
From the fifth century until the twelfth the Chris t ian church dominated cul ture
in the W est, par ticularly in i ts mo nasteries. Saint Bened ict, pro m ulgating his Rule
in the first half of the sixth century, prescribed
f o ur
hours of daily reading, all of
which w as done o ra l ly by selected readers to the rest of the monks . This edict no t
only impelled copying
and
preservation
o f
books
in
monastic l ibraries
but
also
generated scriptoria in which books were copied. The Carolingian revival o f cul-
ture in the
last
half of the eighth century renewed the scholarly activity of inter-
preting biblical texts
and the
texts writ ten
by the
church fathers, generating
a
con-
sequent increase in copying.
The acceleration, st i l l continuing, of the Western demand for information be-
gan in the
eleventh century with
th e
appearance
o f
universities, notably
a
med ical
school at Salerno and a law school at Bologna. To satisfy the r ising number of fac-
ulty and studen t users o f boo ks, station ers associated with universities developed a
prim itive mu ltiple-copy publishing system by lend ing to clients, for a fee, an exem-
plar
(a university-approved copy) for producing personal copies. Tables of con-
tents
and
indexes, which began
to be
a d d e d
to
b o o k s
o f
that t ime, greatly improved
ret r ieval of information
f ro m
within texts , another boon to scholars . Two other
events
fueled
the increasing demand for books—the invention of eyeglasses, at the
end of the thirteenth century, and the development of si lent reading, particularly
a m o n g th e
elite
of the
fourteenth
century. Fo r
f o u r
tho usan d years , reading had
m e a n t read ing aloud and o ne bo ok cou ld be shared with man y lis teners , whereas
silent
re aders needed
a
copy apiece.
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8 The Evolution o f the B o o k
In
the early fifteenth century, wood-block prints depicting saints, and scenes
f r o m the Bible and f r o m legends, began to be produced in Germany and the Nether-
lands
and enjoyed
great popularity with
the
illiterate masses. Later
in the fifteenth
century captions were added to these prints, and by the
14203
there were book-form
sequences composed of block prints, carrying elaborated captions, that outlined the
biblical stories
and
legends. These block books were also extremely popular.
The
technologies that Gutenberg successfully brought
together to
invent print-
ing f r o m cast metal type included metallurgy and the techniques for providing
molds, presses, inks, and paper. Gutenberg's typecasting mold, a success in
itself,
is
still used in some shops today. The wooden screw press had been in use in produc-
ing papyrus and paper for thousands of years before Gutenberg
modi f ied
it in the
fifteenth century to make it a printing press. Paper technology was well-known by
Gutenberg's
time,
but for
printing f r o m type there needed
to be
developed oil-
based inks that would adhere to metal, as the water-based inks previously used by
scribes would not.
Gutenberg was an inventive genius, but he did not possess the entrepreneurial
skill to crown his immeasurably important creation with commercial success; that
was accomplished by Johann Fust, who converted Gutenberg's invention into a
business enterprise that could exist on the revenue it brought in.
Fust,
having fi-
nanced the development of the process of printing f r o m cast type by lending
Gutenberg huge sums
of
money, none
of
which
was left
after Gutenberg
finished
printing his famous Bible, brought a
successful
suit for foreclosure, thereby acquir-
ing Gutenberg's shop, equipment,
tools,
inventory, and supplies. He
successful ly
transformed the moribund printshop into the first m a j o r publishing business. The
publishing of literally millions of copies of books printed f r o m cast type in the last
third of the fifteenth century attests to the volume of society's pent-up demand for
book
information
and the
success
of the
printing press
in
supplying
it.
A
century
and a
half
after
Gutenberg
the
need
for
timely information became
sufficiently
intense to bring newspapers into being. The oldest known newspaper
sheets were printed in the Netherlands in 1605, the first British newspaper appeared
in 1621, and the first Paris weekly began publication in 1631; the Swedish court pa-
per started publication
f o u r t e e n
years later and has continued ever since, making it
the oldest surviving newspaper. In 1665 the first journals appeared: the Journal des
Sfavans,
published in Paris by the Academie des Sciences, and the
Philosophical
Transactions o f th e Royal Society, published
in
London, where
it
still continues.
M a j o r
modifications to the fifteenth-century Gutenberg system of hand compo-
sition of type and printing on a wooden press did not come until the nineteenth
century. In the first year or two of the nineteenth century, Charles,
Third
Earl
Stanhope, invented
the
all-metal press.
A
dozen years later Friedrich Koenig built
the first
steam-powered press
for the Times;
Koenig's invention, which came
to be
known as the flatbed cylinder press, would make eleven hundred impressions an
hour.
In
1846
in the
U n i t e d
States Richard
Hoe
invented
the first
rotary press,
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Dynamics
of the B o o k 9
which could pr int up to two thousand impressions an hour per "feeder." In 1886
O t tmar Mergenthaler p roduced the first really
successful
mechanized composi tor ,
the Lino type linecasting m achine. All
f o ur
inventions were direct responses to so-
cietal pressure for increased speed in the dissemination of information. The twen-
tieth century
has
seen remarkable increases
in
speed
o f
composi t ion
and
printing.
Electronic phototypeset ters , a recent development, can p r o d u c e and compose
36,000,000 characters
a n
h o u r ;
th e
offset press, invented
in
1904,
can now
p r o d u c e
20,000 sheet impression s
an
hour . Dur ing
the
last third
of the
century
offset
print-
ing,
th e
combination
o f
these
tw o
techniques,
has
superseded letterpress printing
f ro m cast metal type.
T he transition
f r o m
th e codex to the presently evolving electronic
book,
the
four t h f o r m
of the book in history, will not happen overnight. With some pre-
ceding forms of the
book,
as will be seen in the early chapters of this history, the
realization of all five elements necessary to effect a transition f ro m an earlier
f o r m — n a m e l y ,
users'
needs, adequate technology, new organizations, successful
integration with existing systems, and cost effectiveness—was a matter of several
centuries. Once operational,
a
system acquires mo men tum,
but its
replacement
o f
th e previo us system is no t im me diate; to take one exam ple, the ro ll-fo rm book per-
sisted
fo r
f o ur
centuries
after
th e
successful
introduction
of the
codex.
It is
doubt-
ful,
therefore , that
th e
electronic
book,
even when widely adopted, wil l immedi-
ately replace th e printed book. It s pr incipa l initial function will be to fulfill existing
societal needs not satisfied by printed
books
and periodicals.
The ever-increasing in fo rm atio na l need s o f society, which have driven the evo-
lution of the book, do no t adm it of clear, simple, detailed analysis, nor have histor i-
cal
analyses been carried out. Indeed, Fritz Machlup's concept
o f a
know ledge
in -
dus t ry
is but a third of a centur y
old.
4
Nevertheless, the larger picture of kno wledge
growth is discernible. Since Aristotle men have been aware that the thought
processes—med itat ion, judgm ent, creat ion,
a nd
invention— require k now ledge
in-
put if they are to be productive. Learning
f r o m
sources beyond
one's
personal ex-
perience requires accumulation of kno wledge provided by others. T he
book,
and its
offspr ing
the periodical , which hold mo re kno wledge than one human m em o ry can
retain, have long served as extensions to h um an mem o ries.
Technological developments
in the
physical
and
biological environment have
enhanced
access
to
informat ion
in
books.
Impro vements
in
storage
o f
b o o k m a t e -
rials have progressed f ro m th e clay-tablet shelves at Ebla of the twenty-second
century B.C.
to the
random-access electronic databases
o f
today. Increases
in
illu-
mination, f rom l ight admit ted only through open doors to l ight admit ted through
windows,
and f r o m
i l lumination provided
by oi l
lamps, candles,
and gaslight to
that provided
by
electricity, have m eant steadily increasing ho urs
fo r
reading.
Auxi l ia ry
m a r k s
and
displays
to facilitate finding
i n f o r m a t i o n
in
text have
ap-
peared,
d isappeared ,
an d
reappeared th rougho ut
the
his to ry
of the book.
N u m b e r -
ing of
columns, sheets,
and
pages
is one of the
m o s t
effective
auxi l ia ry
markings,
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1
The Evo lution o f
the
B o o k
yet
page numbering
did no t
become common unt i l
the
pr inted
book. One o f the
very earliest uses of displays appears in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, in
which the titles and diagnoses of the ma jo r i ty of cases discussed are written in red
ink. A capital letter has long designated the start of a sentence, and it has some-
times been embellished w ith a t ick o f red ink , as in some co pies of the Gu tenberg
Bible. Over
the course of t ime other conventions have been added to the organiza-
tion
o f
texts
to
make them easier
to
use: headings
fo r
chapters
and
sections; signs,
including blank spaces, to signal th e beginnings o f paragraphs and sentences and
the separat ion of words; and punctuat ion marks to clari fy meaning and separate
grammatical structures. Additional helps
to the
user have been tables
o f
contents
and
indexes. Computerized screen display o f text has already created
whole
new
families
o f
aids, some helpful , some annoying (sparing
use o f
color,
f o r
example,
is
helpful to the read er, but an excess can rend er a text almo st unr ead able).
Other
ad -
juncts, including audio signals, such as pronunciation of words in electronic dic-
tionaries, impossible to conceive o f in printing and hand-pro duc ed technologies,
will
sure ly follow.
Like biological evolution, technological evolution is predictable only for very
short periods of t ime, largely because the elements required for successful innova-
tion
are
many
and
complex.
The
Evo lution
o f
the
B o o k
cannot
foretell
i n f o r m a t i o n a l
systems of the twenty-first century except to say that
they
will be supplying in fo r-
mat ion more effectively than the Gutenberg system.
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Incunables
o n
Clay
T H E
URBAN CIVILIZATION
that
led to the invention o f writing began in south-
^—.ern Mesopotamia, in the tr iangle of land, between the Tigris and Euphra tes
Rivers and south o f present-day Baghdad, that came to be k n o w n as Sumer.
There
m en
developed
an
agr icul tural economy dependent
o n
irr igation,
and
there,
by
3400
B .C ., the earliest cities aro se. These cities were the nuclei of city-states in
which citizens initially made the decisions, but subsequent need for leaders
brought about th e establishment o f kingships, one of the pr imary dut ies o f which
w as
to pro tec t the
poor.
T he result was an economic
stratification
f r o m kings to
slaves. T he need to record and
transfer
info rmat ion , a need created largely by the
growth
o f
t rade, administ rat ion,
and
government
in the
city-states, gave rise
to the
invention o f writing and the development of the clay tablet.
In
8500
B.C.
1
the food-gather ing nomads of James Breasted 's Fer t i le Crescent ,
who had moved f ro m campsite to cam psite as the wild plants and an imals that con-
stituted their foo d supp ly dim inishe d, began to do mesticate plants and animals and
to bui ld permanent houses,
often
on former campsi tes . At f i rs t a l l members of
these initial villages were engaged
in
food p r o d u c t i o n
fo r
subsistence,
but as
they
improved their abili ty
to
pro du ce crops, raise livestock,
and
irr igate land, they pro -
duced surplus foo d, f reeing some m em bers of the com mu nity to develop skills for
com m erce, indust ry, social o rganization,
and
ad minist ration,
and to
become priests
and teachers . Increasing agr icul tural
efficiency
cont inued to free grea te r numbers
fo r
such activities, so that by 3000 B.C . there were a half -dozen S umer ian cities
within which almo st no one wa s di rec t ly involved in p r o d u c i n g f o o d f r o m th e land.
A l t h o u g h
the
m a j o r i t y
o f
S um er ian wo rkers remained
o n
f a r m s
(a
c i rcum stance
II
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12 The Evo lution of
the
B o o k
that has persisted thro ugho ut the spread o f civilization and stil l obtains in Iraq, the
twentieth-century M esopo tamia, where in 1980, 5 9 percent of the labor
force
was
in agriculture), much of the new agricultural society had become stratified and
specialized
into administrators, supervisors,
and
workers with various skills other
than farming, and most of them needed to be reimbursed for their productive ac-
tivities. Their reimbursement, chiefly in the f o r m of daily redistribution of food-
stuffs, necessitated the keeping o f ex tensive reco rds o f r eceipts and disburs als. In a
recently
published monograph Denise Schmandt-Besserat has shown that a token
system that was invented to record the essential accounting information was also
th e
precursor
o f
writing.
2
Origin and Development o f Writing
Of the only three ways to convert spoken language into writing, the first and sim-
plest is to draw a picture to r epr esent a wo rd; fo r example, a line draw ing of a man
represents th e
wo rd man. Thousands
o f
these pictograms
are
required
to
record
a significant amount
o f i nfor ma t i on . The
second method
is
syllabic,
in
that
o ne
sign,
o r
several signs
put
together,
can
represent
th e
sound
o f a
word; syllabic
writing requires
at
most only
a few
hundred signs. With
th e
third method, alpha-
betic writing, sounds of words can be assembled f r o m litt le more than a couple of
dozen signs.
Schmandt-Besserat
was the first scholar to discover a creditable origin of writ-
ing.
As she put it, To
recognize that
th e
tokens constituted
an
accounting system
that existed
fo r f ive
thou sand years
in
prehistory
and was
widely used
in the
entire
N e a r
East
was to be my own
cont r ibu t ion .
I was
also able
to
draw paral lels
be-
tween the shapes of the tokens and those of the first incised signs of writing and
establish
th e
continuity between
the two
record ing systems."
3
T he
tokens
to
which
Schmandt-Besserat referred began to be prod uced abo ut 8000 B.C. and wer e pe r-
haps the first
ar tifacts
made of hand-molded clay, and also among the first objects
to be
baked into
a
ceramic material, which resulted
in
their preservat ion. Tokens
were in at least sixteen shapes, including cones, spheres, disks, cylinders, tetrahe-
drons , ovoids, triangles, and rectangles, and most were 1—3 centimeters across.
Later, about 3700 B.C.,
tw o
techniques
f o r
grouping tokens came into existence,
namely,
running
a
st r ing through perforat ions
in
tokens
and
tying them
together,
o r
enclosing tokens
in
clay envelopes. Schm andt-Besserat
has
postulated that these
techniques insured that gro ups
o f
tokens representing
o ne
account were securely
held
together."
The clay envelopes, each measuring 5—7 centimeters in longest di-
mension
and
having
a
cavity
2—4
centimeters wide
and
clay walls
1 . 5 — 2 . 5
centime-
ters thick, were hand -mo lded,
closed,
and
baked, presumably after tokens
had
been
inserted. Their principal d r a w b a c k w as that th e n u m b e r and types o f tokens in a
closed
envelope could not be determined. This shortcoming was soon el iminated
by
impress ing
an
envelope,
befo re
bak ing, with
th e
n u m b e r
o f
images
of the
var i -
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14
The Evolution
of
the Book
become the lingua f ranca of the ancient Near East and w as being used fo r most, i f
n o t all, diplomatic communication. The so-called Amarna tablets, recovered f r o m
that fourteenth-century Egyptian capital,
had
been written
in
cuneiform Akkadian
by Egyptian royal scribes and their counterparts in other kingdoms.
A s mentioned in the previous chapter, the m a j o r continuing modification in
production o f texts for the past five thousand years h as been increase in speed. Fig-
ure 2.1 reveals three increments in the speed of writing Sumerian. The conversion
f r o m the f reehand drawing shown in the first and second columns to the cuneiform
shown in the fifth column; th e sim plification o f signs
after
2500 B.C. and the reduc-
t ion
f r o m 2,000 to 570, of which only 200 to 300 were in constant use. This reduc-
tion
in the
number
of
signs
a
writer
had to
learn
and
memorize made
the
work
of
th e scribe go
faster.
C u n e i f o r m writing sporadically included signs
and
displays designed
to
assist
in
finding
and understanding content information.
The
beginning
and
ending
of a
text were signaled
by
leaving
the
right-hand edge
of the
tablet blank when
the
f r ont , back, bottom, top, and left-hand edges were all written o n. When the text
only partially filled the tablet, the ending, and hence the beginning, in the upper-
left corner
of the
f r ont , were obvious. Summaries were sometimes added begin-
Figure
2.1. Development
o f
cuneiform
writing. Courtesy
Dr. Albertine
Gaur)
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Inciinables on
Clay 15
ning in the upper- lef t corner of the back, and colophons were at t imes added to
later literary texts. These colophons might contain the first line of the text, always
t reated
as the
title;
the first
line
of the
n ext tablet when
th e
text
was on two o r
m o r e
tablets; sometimes the nam e of the scribe o r o wner; and o ccasionally an attestation
to the
accuracy
and
collation
of the
copy.
Sections, and sometimes sentences, were now and then marked off by l ines
drawn across the tablet
befo re
and
after
the section, or by blank l ines preceding
and following. Sometimes the first sign following a marker or blank l ine was
slightly indented. Another auxiliary marking
o f
text
was the
occasional placing
o f
the figure for the numb er ten at the beginning of every tenth l ine.
Four kinds of auxiliary marks were at t imes used within sentences. A word-
separator ma rk , equivalent to tod ay's blank space, was perhaps the most useful d e-
vice; when emplo yed it certainly mu st have been a godsend to the early decipherers
o f cuneiform text . A name marker often preceded a name— another boon to the
readers. Tw o auxiliary marks that enhanced th e
specificity
o f a sign when placed
b e f o r e o r
after
it were a determinative sign and a phonetic complement. Deter-
minatives indicated the
class
to which an
object
belonged, such as mammals or
birds, m e n o r women, metal o r wood, towns o r cities, and gods. A phonet ic com-
plement
specified
th e
correct pronunciat ion
as
does
th e
st
in
ist edition, which
signals that
th e
pronunciat ion should
be
first.
M uch com munica tion
in
m o d e r n b o o k s
is
no nverbal; m achine designs
and
elec-
tronic circuitry
are but two o f
h u n d r e d s
o f
examples. Ano ther
is
maps, which w ere
the first type o f nonverbal "writing." T he earliest known map, depicting a S ume-
rian estate,
w as
d o n e
in the
last quarter
of the
thi rd mil lennium.
The first
u r b a n
ma p, do ne about 1500 B.C., i s of the M esopotamian city o f Nippur . To co m mu ni-
cate in words th e reality of the i n f o r m a t i o n in this m ap wo uld be impossible. The
visual conception and depiction of a map was the first ma jo r innovation in the
b o o k after the invention of writ ing.
O ne
immediate result
of the
invention
o f
writ ing
w as
training
in
writing
and
reading (in the ear ly centur ies undo ubtedly by the apprenticeship system), the ear-
liest evidence of instruction being lists of words on clay tablets
f ro m
about 3000
B.C. For the
next
five
hundred years
th e
development
o f
schools, each called
a
tablet ho use in Su m er ian, was slow, as was that o f wr iting itself; ne verthe-
less, pedagogical treatises had come into being by
2500
B.C., and du ring the secon d
half
of the
third millennium schools
had
developed
a
regularized system
o f
teach-
ing. The chief objective of the schools was the prepara t ion o f boys to become
"scribes," to use the designation Sumerians gave their administrators; an analogy
might be made to the colleges established in colonial America to t rain young m en
fo r the ministry. There were, it might be noted, only a few contempo rary mentions
o f women scribes. Cities, even the
earliest
ones , needed adm inis t ra to r s who could
read and
w r i t e
in
o r d e r
to
mainta in reco rds
o f
income, ex pendi tures , equipmen t ,
bui ldings
and
thei r ma intenan ce, taxes,
and
const ruct ion. Scr ibes,
a nd
s tudents
in
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16 The
Evolution o f
the
B o o k
prepara t ion
to
becom e scribes, belonged
to the
elite
o f
Sumerian society;
an
analy-
sis of the
parents
o f
s o m e
five
hundred scr ibes revealed that
th e
fa thers
o f
students
were
governors,
priests, managers, supervisors, accountants,
and
archivists.
7
Clay- Tablet
System
T he
m a j o r
components of the clay-tablet system, which was mature by 2 50 0 B.C.,
were manual writing, clay technology,
and the
organization
o f
collections
o f
tablets, all of which r equired centuries for de velop m ent. The clay tablet possessed
an advantage
in its
ease
o f
use,
for i t
would
lie firm on a flat
surface
o r
could
be
held in one hand, unl ike the later papyrus ro l l o r even some present-day pr inted
b o o k s .
Sume r was devoid of wood and s tone, and i ts only mineral was clay, renewed
annually,
together with silt, by the f lood ing—somet imes disast rous—of the Eu-
phrates and the Tigris. This alluvial clay wa s fine grained and re quired tempe ring
with var iou s materials, including chaff f rom the threshing floor, before i t could be
f o r m e d in molds. The resultant bricks, which were being produced wel l before
3500
B.C., have proved rem ark ably perm anent . Seton Lloy d
has
stated that The
raw material that ep itom ized Meso po tam ian civilization was clay: in the almo st ex-
clusively
mud-brick architecture and in the number and variety of clay figurines
and pottery artifacts, Mesopotamia bears the stamp of clay as does no other civi-
lization;
and no wh ere in the world but in M esopo tamia and the regions over which
it s influence w as diffused w as clay used as the vehicle o f writing."
8
Little is known of the exact procedures the Sumerians used to process clay for
wr it ing tablets, but technical analyses o f ancient po tt ing m etho ds
suggest
that their
procedures were essentially
th e
same
as
those
o f
people
in the
M i d d l e
Ages and o f
primitive peoples today.
Thus,
one may surmise that the Sumerians repeatedly
wash ed clay w ith water, allow ed it to settle in a vat, then strained it to o btain a fine-
grained clay. The tablet
f o r m e d
f ro m i t was wri t ten o n while dam p and then d r ied,
usually in the sun but som etimes by being bak ed in a kiln. These drying and baking
processes endowed a tablet with exceptional durabili ty, as witnessed by the exis-
tence in m u s e u m s of an estimated half a m ill ion o r m or e tablets and fragments .
The Sum erians contr ived with a store of perhaps several thousan d tablets what
has come to be known as an archive because of the preponderance of administ ra-
tive
record s—by some estimates as much as 95 perce nt— that i t co ntained. For the
most part such archives have been unearthed
f ro m
palaces and temples, but some
have even been f o und in residences. As the accum ulatio n of clay tablets grew into
the tens of thou sand s in the second half of the third m illennium B.C., the last m a j o r
component of the clay-tablet system, organized
collections
of tablets, came into
being.
T he bes t -documented a rchive , th e Royal Archive at Ebla, in nor thern S yr ia ,
contained fifteen
thousand
tablets
and
f ra gme nts
wri t ten
in the
Eblai te langua ge
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Incunables on Clay
17
using cune ifor m signs. T he archive room, measuring only 5 .10 by 3 . 5 5 meters, w as
housed
in a
st ructur e designated
as
Royal Palace
G ,
which
w as
destroyed
by fire
about 2 2 5 0 B.C.
T he
tablets
had
been stored
o n
three wo o den shelves, each
0.8 me-
ters deep, o n three sides of the ro o m. The vertical distance between shelves was
half a meter. Gio vanni Pettinato, th e epigrapher at Ebla, ascertained that th e area
o f
the no rth w all co ntained texts of a lexical charac ter, while the east sector was re-
served for the tablets o f a commercial nature. It seems, therefore, that th e scribes
had
ordered th e material also, an d perhaps chiefly, o n a basis o f conten t ... a
fact
o f
considerable importance
fo r
libr ar y science.
9
Indeed
it
was,
fo r
such
shelv-
ing of
l ibrary m ater ials und er bro ad subjects persisted unti l
th e
last years
of the
nineteenth century.
Another collection
o f
M esop o tamian tablets , found
in a
late-third-
and
early-
second-mil lennium B.C. residential quarter
of Ur , has
yielded impo r tan t in form a-
t ion about foreign t rading; one recorded event is of Mesopotamian
goods
having
been t ransported
to
Bahrain, where they were exchanged
fo r
copper
and
ivory.
Seven
more archives
are
k n o w n
in
addition
to
those
in
Ebla
and Ur, f ive of
which
were located
in
temples
and two in
palaces.
Their
approximate dates
range
f ro m
c.
2000 B.C.,
for the
collection
in the
Enlil temple
in
Nippur ,
to 612
B.C., when
th e
Ashurbanipal
archive of some twenty thousand tablets and fragments, the greatest
collection of
all,
w as
sacked.
A t
least
fifteen
lists
o f
tablets, which co ntain altogether m o re than
a
h u n d r e d
ti -
tles
o f
l i terary wo rks, have been recovered
and
analyzed. Altho ugh
th e
purposes
o f
th e lists have no t been d eter m ined , it has been suggested that they may be catalogs
o f
collections.
No one has
been able
to
detect
a
principle that guided
th e
organiza-
tion of the ti t les within the lists. The most that Samuel Noah Kramer could say
abo ut these lists wa s that they w ere prepared by the O ld Baby lonian m en of let-
ters, that
is ,
lists
o f
incipits compiled
by
them
fo r one
reason
o r
another ,
and
arranged in accordance with a varied assortment of scribal procedures."
10
There is
little eviden ce
of the
ex istence
o f
windows
in
M esopo tamian build ings
that wo uld have admitted
sufficient
light
to
p e r m i t
the
reading
o f
tablets; w here win-
d o w s
d id
exist they were high
in the
w alls
a nd
usually small. Flo or plans
o f
palaces
and
temples reveal that perh aps half the tablet roo ms opened through a do or way
onto
a sunlit area, while the othe r half opened into a sunlit ro o m . Pr o bab ly tablets
wer e taken into d irect daylight
f o r
use.
Cuneiform Texts
T he
earliest known Sumerian texts
are
word lists f ro m 2900 B.C.
and
pr im ers p re-
pared for
schools abo ut
25 00 B.C. T he
p r i m e r s
are
similar
to the
small
schoolbooks
used
in
teaching m o der n e lementary-schoo l ch i ld ren ,
but in the
m i d d le
o f the
third
millennium they encompassed much that
w as
t he n k n o w n . L i t e r a r y mater ials
in-
cluded
myths, epic tales, lame ntat ions , hymns, incantat ion s,
an d
collections
of
say-
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18 The Evolution
of the
Book
ings, proverbs, fables, and essays. Among the several thousand
recovered
tablets
and tablet fragments o f these literary documents are a significant number copied
by students. A n early specimen, a copy of the Enlil myth, is dated about 2400 B.C.,
an
era
f r om
which only a few literary texts have been recovered. Among them the
epic tale of the hero Gilgamesh is certainly the best known; its popularity persists,
fo r at
least sixteen editions have appeared
in the
twentieth century.
The
literary
genre also included grammars
and
dictionaries. Most
of the
known Sumerian liter-
ary
works,
o n
some
five
thousand tablets
and
fragments,
are in
poetic f o r m
and
were written between 2100 a nd 1800 B.C.
11
Mathematical texts of the early period were arithmetics, of great practical value
to
students training
to
become administrators
and to
officials
who
would have
had
to
produce
and
manipulate counts
of
such things
as
taxes, supplies,
and
provisions
fo r
trade; reckon payment o f wages and time
worked,
calendar time, land areas,
w a t e r
amounts, and equipment; and keep track o f workers, soldiers, and fellow o f-
ficials. The
Sumerian mixed decimal-sexagesimal counting system remains some-
thing o f a puzzle.
George
Sarton, the eminent historian o f science and himself a
mathematician, writing
in the
m id—twentieth century, observed that
"to
appreciate
their genius it will suffice to recall that the extension of the same ideas to the deci-
m al
system
was
only conceived
in
1 5 8 5
. . . ,
that
its
implementation
was
begun
only during
the
French Revolution,
and is not yet
completed today."
12
Meso-
potamians also invented and developed algebraic operations and could solve
simple quadratic equations
by the
time
o f
Hammurabi (ruled 1792—1750
B.C.), but
their mathematics
is
known only f r o m fewer than
a
hundred tablets
and
fragments,
no full treatise having yet been discovered.
Scientific
texts consisted largely
of
topics
in
natural history that were little more
than classed lists
of
mammals, birds, insects, trees, plants, rocks, stones,
and
miner-
als.
In
addition there were lists
of
villages, cities, city-states,
and
countries outside
M esopotam ia . There
were also lists of stars and planets. In the Old Babylonian pe-
riod, astronomers
had
distinguished among
the
stars, moon,
and
planets
and had
compiled lengthy tables
o f
positions
o f
Venus including dates
o f
last appearance
at
sunset
and first at
sunrise.
To
make such observations
it
was,
of
course, necessary
to have a calendar, and well before the end of the third millennium the Mesopo-
tamians had
devised
a
lunar calendar, which required intercalation
of an
extra
month every eight years
to
keep
the
lunar
and
solar cycles synchronized.
These
texts were not scientific in the modern sense, since they did not seek the regulari-
ties that underlie
the
appearance
of
nature—it
was the
Greeks
who
later invented
that basic concept
of
science—but
the
Sumerians recorded
and
contributed many
o f
the
observations that
the
Greeks incorporated into their
new
science.
Perhaps
th e
earliest medical work
is a
text
o f a
dozen medical recipes written
a b o u t 2100 B.C. I t says nothing about the ailments that the concoctions were to treat,
no r
does
it
contain
any
mention
o f
incantations, magic, demons,
o r
gods,
all of
w hich played
a
m a j o r
role
in
M e s o p o t a m i an
and
other primitive medical systems.
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Incunables
on
Clay
19
By 2400 B.C . texts
o f
politics, history,
and
l i terature
h ad
appeared.
A
po litical
work written by an archivist describes how a new ruler of the city of Lagash had
established
th e
f r ee d o m
of i ts
citizenry ,
a
r e f o r m achieved
by
rest raining
the bu-
reaucratic scribes,
who had
invented taxes
o n
just about everything that
was in
sight, and on
some things, such
as
divorce, that were not ,
and who
also made
th e
r o u n d s
to
co llect them.
T he r e f o rm
went
fur ther , fo r
m en
o f power"
were also
re-
strained f ro m exploiting the
poor.
13
O ne
historical text, which covers
tw o
centuries, recounts
the
troubles that
o c-
curred over the establishment of a boundary ditch between the city of Lagash and
its
northern neighbor ,
th e
city
o f
U m m a .
T he
original dispute, which arose about
2600
B.C. ,
w as
settled
in
favor
o f
Lagash,
but
s o o n
af terward
U m m a in v ad e d
La-
gash
and
took over
th e
ditch together with some
o f
Lagash 's nor thern ter r i tory.
T w o
generations later Lagash attacked
and defeated
Umma, res to red
th e
original
boundary d i tch ,
and
recovered
the
t e r r i t o r y
it had
lost.
After
another generat ion
had passed, Umma invaded Lagash's reclaimed terr i tory, only to be disast rously
defeated by Lagash and dr iven back to i ts ow n borders. Soon thereafter the city of
Zablam, to the nor th , conquered Umma and
reignited
the boundary dispute by
withholding water
f r o m the
bo undary d itch
and refusing to pay the
revenues that
Lagash
had
demanded
f r o m
U m m a .
This
time
a
solution
w as
arr ived
at by
c o m -
prom ise ra ther than
b y a
m il itary
clash.
14
Texts
o f
myths also
first
appear about 2400 B.C.,
one of the
earliest being
an
Enlil
m yth. Enlil,
the air god w ho
presided over
th e
Sumer ian pantheon
o f
gods
fo r
a thousand years beginning about
2500
B.C.,
w as
held
to
have created
th e
concept
of universal laws ruling all existence and to have invented the pickax, a basic tool
o f Sum erian farm ing, thereby dem o nstrat ing a n ear ly Sumer ian capacity f o r philo-
sophical thought
and
pract ical accom plishment. A no ther l i terary f o r m ,
the
lament,
appea ring at about the same time as the m yths, po etically deplo red the destruction
and
loo ting of tem ples and other structure s in the city o f Lagash. It was the
begin-
ning
o f a m a j o r
category
o f
Sumerian l iterature that
flour ished on the
seemingly
constant internecine
strife
among the Sumerian city-states.
The ear l iest known legal text is the Ur-Nammu law code, proclaimed by a
Sumerian
king sometime
after
he
became
th e
ru ler about
205 0
B.C. Rules
o f
con-
duct and rights had long been proclaim ed by chiefs and rulers, but the U r - N a m m u
code appears to have been the first to set down such rules in writing. The tablet
contains
an
un k n o w n n u m b e r
o f
laws,
o f
which only
five are
sufficiently decipher-
able
to be at least partially under stoo d. The next k no w n code is that of King L ipit-
Ishtar, dated about 1900 B.C., thirty-seven laws o f which have been deciphered in
whole o r in part . What the to tal num ber o f laws may have been is not k now n, but
their principle of protecting the
economically weak
f r o m being
overpowered
by
th e strong w as
clear ly stated: The o rph an
did no t fall a
prey
to the
wealthy;
th e
w i d o w
did not
fall
a
p r e y
to the
pow erful ;
the man of one
shekel
did no t
fall
a
prey
to the man of one mina.
1 5
(A mina was equal to sixty
shekels.)
A century and a
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2 The
Evolution
o f
the Booh
half later Hammurabi promulgated
his
celebrated Code, which contained nearly
three hundred provisions dealing with such topics as commercial, criminal, and
civil
law; it is inscribed on an eight-foot-tall slab o f stone, however, no t on a clay
tablet.
The
Ashurbanipal
Library
The
history
of
clay tablets culminates with
the
famous library
of
Ashurbanipal,
the last of the p o w e r f u l kings o f Assyria and the most learned, w ho reigned f r o m
668 to 6 27 B.C. at Nineveh. T he f a m e of his library rests on its huge size (nearly
twenty thousand tablets and fragments are in the British Museum) and on i ts hav-
ing been the first to be organized by topic. Ashurbanipal acquired in his youth a
thorough knowledge o f priestly an d scribal learning and knew th e Sumerian and
Akkadian languages
and
their scripts.
He
brought together collections
of his
pre-
decessors f r o m their neighboring palaces
at
Ashur, Calah,
and
Nineveh itself,
and
a dde d to them a multitude o f texts that his scribes searched out and copied f r om
temple collections. Five m a j o r groups were (1) lexicographical texts listing Sume-
r ian,
Akkadian, and other words; (2) incantations, prayers, wisdom sayings, and
fables;
(3) omen texts based on al l manner o f observations and correlations,
rang-
ing f r o m heavenly bodies to men's features and events; (4) mathematical and scien-
tific texts;
and (5) the
ancient epics. Indeed,
the
Ashurbanipal library
is our m a j o r
source of the Sumerian epics of tw o thousand years earlier. A decade and a half af-
ter Ashurbanipal's death, invading Medes
f r o m
Persia besieged, captured, an d
sacked Nineveh. It was probably at that time that
fire
destroyed the palace contain-
ing the library, which soon became forgotten and so remained until British excava-
tors
uncovered
it in the
middle
of the
nineteenth century.
The
discovery revealed that
the
library contained
a
wealth
of
Mesopotamian
knowledge that
was
basic
to f u t u re
transitions
of the
book.
For
example, their clay
tablets contained information concerning the technical activity o f glassmaking,
im po r tant in the evolution of the book in respect to both the materials used and the
resul tant
products. The latter ultimately included clear glass (ancient glass was
co lo red and ornamental) suitable fo r eyeglasses, which enabled persons of im -
paired vision to read. There are some three dozen tablets and fragments con-
cerning glassmaking,
all but
three
of
them
f r o m
the
Ashurbanipal archive.
They
contain descriptions
of
tools, ingredients,
and
production,
but not
precise recipes
o r instructions. Accurate information about th e materials that went into Meso-
p o t a m i a n glass conies f r om a relatively few glass objects.
16
That
lead and anti-
mony were among the ingredients is of interest because o f their subsequent inclu-
sion in Gutenberg's type met a l . Lead antimonate, which contains both elements, is
a yellow pigment that has long been used in glassmaking. M e s o p o t a m i a n glass-
m a k e r s
also used antimony oxide to par t ial ly decolorize glass and to remove bub-
bles. By
1000 B.C.
M e s o p o t a m ia n
glassmakers
h ad
discovered that
th e
addition
o f
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Incunables on Clay 21
fai rly large amounts of lead reduced shrinkage of glass on cooling, thereby pre-
venting the glass f r o m cracking when it was used as a glaze. Antimony was also
available
in pure f o r m ; a few objects containing pure antimony have been found.
Pure lead and pigs of lead were being imported f r o m Cappadocia, in eastern Asia
Minor, by 2000 B.C. Pure tin (the third ingredient in type metal) was available by
1500
B.C.
End o f the Clay- Tablet
System
The clay-tablet book was technologically mature by the middle of the third mil-
lennium
B.C.
and
enjoyed
a
technical stability without change
f o r tw o a nd a
half
millennia.
The decline of c u n e i f o r m clay tablets began with the introduction of
West Semitic alphabet-like syllabaries
in the
second millennium B.C. Although
bulky,
they were a vast improvement over the previous cuneiform and hieratic sys-
tems with
their
many hundreds of symbols. By 1100 B.C. the Greeks had taken
over the Phoenician alphabet of
twenty-two
characters in script and
modif ied
it by
converting
f o u r
consonants to vowels and adding five new characters, one of them
a
vowel,
to
improve
its
efficiency
and
accuracy
fo r
writing
a
non-Semitic language.
The two
dozen
or so
characters could
be
learned much more rapidly than
six
hun-
d red or so signs, and alphabetic writing could be done far more speedily than
c u n e i f o r m .
Furthermore, since
it was difficult to
render curved lines
o n
moist clay,
as
was noted earlier with respect to pictographic writing, papyrus, as a far more
suitable mater ia l
on which to draw curvilinear alphabetic
writing,
began to replace
clay
by the
sixth century B.C.
By the
second century A.D.
th e
clay tablet
was the
first f o r m of the
book
to
have become extinct.
At the
present time, mention
of
evolutionary extinction immediately calls
to
m ind
mass extinctions such as the one of immense proportions (90 percent of all
species was wiped out) during the Permian Period, at the end of the Paleozoic Era,
225 million years ago,
and the
extinction
at the end of the
Cretaceous Period,
65
million years ago, that destroyed
the
dinosaurs. "But there
is
also 'background
ex-
tinction,'" as
Eldredge
has
termed
it, "in
which species drop
by the
wayside unac-
companied."
17
It is the latter type of extinction that the clay-tablet book experi-
enced, and that we will witness again in subsequent chapters of this book.
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3
Papyrus
Rol l s
S O M E T I M E A R O U N D 3 10 0 B . C . K in g N a r m e r a ls o k n o w n a s M e n e s u n ite d th e
k ingdom s o f Upper and L o wer E gypt and became th e f irst king o f the F irst
Dynasty.
It was
also
at
this time that
th e
earliest known Egyptian writ ing
w as
done; the pictographs on the oft - reproduced s late Palet te of Narmer provide one
example. Narmer 's dynasty and the dynasty that fo l lowed, which began about
2900
B.C. and lasted fo r ano ther tw o hundred years , comprised th e Early Dynas-
t ic Per iod .
Thirty
more dynasties followed, with the last , the Ptolemaic, ending in
30 B.C.
Egyptian chrono logy
has
suffered,
and
still
suffers, f r o m wand er ing dates gener-
ated by various chronological schemes adopted at various t imes. Flinders Petrie 's
design
o f
sequence dating, long useful
for the
study
o f
Egyptian prehistory,
w as
predicated
on the
assumption that absolute dating
w as
impossible, which
w as
cer-
tainly
the case in
1901,
when Petrie put for th his proposal. In recent decades, how-
ever , car bo n-i4 dat ing has pro duced prehistor ic dates within usefully n arro w l imits;
although they have replaced
Pet r ie ' s
chronology, there
are
natural ly some older
mo no graph s sti ll being rep rinted tha t con tain his sequence dates. Fur ther co nfusio n
arises as dynastic da tes have been, and are sti ll being, ch anged as kn o wledge of an-
cient Egyp t expand s.
Ancient
Egypt , like M esop otam ia, w as r iver dependent , the flow o f the Nile f o r
the 750 m iles f r o m the first cataract a t Aswan nor th to the M e d i t er r a n e a n Sea p r o -
viding
its n o u r i s h m e n t . M e a sur ing south f r o m Aswan to the Ni le ' s sources in
Ethiopia and U g a n d a th e r e ar e
near ly
3,400 miles m o re of f lowing water , mak ing
the
Nile
the longest r ive r in the wo rld. In An cient Egy ptian t imes the r iver
emp-
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Papyrus Ro l ls
23
tied
into
the sea
through
a
150-mile-long delta
and had
seven mouths; there
are
now only two. The marshy, flat area of the delta is Lower Egypt; the 6oo-mile val-
ley to the south, Upper Egypt.
The
basis
of the
Egyptian econo my
w as
agr iculture,
in
which most
of the
labor
force w as
engaged
and
which still employs two-fifths
o f
modern Egypt ian
w o r k -
ers. Life on the fa rm was not easy, at least as it was described with prejudice b y a
gloating
scribe:
I am told yo u have aband oned wr i t ing and taken to sport , that you have set your face
t owards
w o r k in the fields and
turned your back upon letters. R e m e m b e r
you no t
th e co ndi tion of the cultivator faced with th e r egistering of the harvest-tax, w hen th e
snake has carried off hal f the corn and the hippopo tamus has devoured the rest? The
mice abound
in the fields. The
locusts descend.
T he
cattle devour.
T he
sparrows bring
disaster upo n the cultivator. Th e re m aind er that is on the threshing floor is at an end, it
falls to the
thieves.
The
value
of the
hired c att le
is
lost.
And now the
scribe lands
on the
r iver bank
and is
about
to
register
th e
harvest tax.
The
janitors carry staves
and
th e N ubians rods o f palm, and they say Hand over th e corn" though there is none.
The cultivator is beaten all over, he is bo und and thro wn into the well, soused and
dipped head downwards. His wife has been bo und in his presence, his children are in
fetters. His neighbours abandon them and are fled. So their corn fl ies away. But the
scribe
is
ahead
o f
everyone.
He who
w o r k s
in
writing
is not
taxed,
he has no
dues
to
pay. M ark i t well .
1
Mesopotamian influences,
as
exemplified
by
artistic mo tifs, styles,
and
artifacts,
ma d e an apparently sudden appearance in Egypt in the late Predynastic Period in
th e f o r m o f
cylinder seals, recessed panels
o f
brick construction
fo r
m o n u me n t al
buildings, scalloped battle-axes,
and
ships.
Three
cylinder seals
o f
M esopotamian
ma nufa c t u r e
have been
found in
Egypt,
one of
them
in a
Predynastic grave;
Egyptians took
up
their
use and
continued
to
make them
fo r the
next
fifteen
hun-
dr ed years. Representations of bizarre creatures, M esop o tamian in concept, also
appeared.
G r o w t h o f royal administrat ion both befo re and after th e un ification o f U p p e r
and
Lower Egypt yielded an inordinate complexity of bureaucratic activities that
required ever more writ ing of records. Numbers of public works and courts of
justice multiplied,