No doubt the most ancient writing material was stone. This was the substance that most readily presented itself; when men were rather anxious to preserve indestructible records than to multiply copies. Probably the account of altars being built, and of a name being solemnly imposed upon them—as when Laban and Jacob parted in mount Gilead—may refer to the inscriptions then cut on the stone, which was to serve as a memorial. At any rate we have positive information that in the oldest known documents that were intended as books, viz., the commandments received by Moses from Jehovah, were engraved on stone.
No material could have been more durable. But it was at the same time, costly and cumbrous. There are inscriptions in Egypt of a very hoar antiquity indeed, reaching up perhaps to the very dawn of human postdiluvian history; but then they are on the tombs of kings, demanding a royal treasury for their execution, and a royal sepulcher for their place. Where stone was lacking, as in the plains of the Tigris and Euphrates, men were driven to adopt other expedients, and we find at Nineveh and Babylon, no longer inscriptions carved in rock, but impressions stamped in clay.
From a very early period—we cannot say when—leather must have come into use, as making books at least more portable than the stone or the clay. Nothing was more likely to suggest itself; and in all probability the rolls occasionally mentioned in the Bible were made of leather. Bark of trees is said to have served for books; and it is affirmed that the Latin word Liberwhence we derive many words in our own language -was originally this inner bark. Allied to this last was the better-known and more widely-used papyrus, furnished by a kind of reed that is almost peculiar to the Nile, and which certainly came into very early use. For, however fragile the papyrus books may appear, there are some in the British Museum, to which is assigned an age that reaches back to the time of the Exodus.
The export of papyrus seems to have formed a considerable item in the trade of Egypt. And the Ptolemrean dynasty boasted of being at once the patrons of literature, and the owners of the most convenient material for writing. Papyrus was probably cheap and readily obtained. But a new, a more expensive, and a far more valuable material had come to be known a few generations before the Christian era, destined to preserve some of the most precious documents of that era. Without parchment, it may be questioned whether the Scriptures would have come to us in the abundant quantity of copies that we possess. Probably on a less expensive sheet the same pains would not have been taken to make those copies accurate.
About the early half of the second century before Christ, when the Romans were engaged in contesting the empire of Eastern Europe with the kings of Macedonia, there arose out of the ruins of some of the larger fragments of Alexander's dominions, a small kingdom in the north-west of Asia Minor, that owed much of its fortune to the favor of the Romans, and perhaps for that reason incurred the suspicion and dislike of its neighbors. It was called the kingdom of Pergamos, from the city of that name, afterward immortalized as the seat of one of the seven churches which the apostle addressed in the beginning of his apocalypse. A town still stands on or near the ancient site, preserving in the name of Bergamo the recollection of Pergamos.
The kings who ruled there imitated the Ptolemies in patronizing learning, and founding a library. They excited, in consequence, the jealousy of the Egyptian sovereigns; one of whom, Ptolemy Epiphanes, about 190 B.C., in order to arrest the growth of a library that bade fair to rival that of Alexandria, prohibited the exportation of papyrus. Thereupon, the king of Pergamos, driven to his own resources, encouraged the invention of a new writing material. And a peculiar preparation of skins became known, called, from Pergamos, Charta Pergamene, or parchment.
This is the story, which has been sometimes doubted. But at any rate, it was in Pergamos that the parchment attained its greatest celebrity, and from that city it certainly took its name. Parchment, and its finer kind, vellum, have ever since retained the renown of uniting a convenient form and surface with a tolerably imperishable nature. Nothing but the cost, ever prevented this becoming the one material for books. The story of papyrus being no longer exported from Egypt may be true. But if so, the prohibition could only have been temporary; for papyrus was certainly used in Italy, and without doubt, elsewhere also. At a later epoch, as we know from the discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and indeed down to the Arabian occupation of Egypt in the seventh century, papyrus still seems to have been the ordinary substance for writing in most parts of Europe.
The seizure of Egypt, however, by the Mahommedans, is said to have stopped the use of papyrus thenceforward forever. It is not likely that it was known at any time afterward. Soon there came in the dark ages, when almost all records of the ancient civilization seemed about to perish; and only the monasteries still preserved some few valued treasures of literature. Parchment became now the only material for writing, and, little as it was required, it rose in price: so that it was considered a great possession. We are told of a certain Gui, Count of Nevers, presenting to the Chartreux of Paris, a service of plate, and of the monks asking for parchment instead. Now also arose the custom of erasing what was written on old parchment, and of re-writing something on it of more immediate interest. In this way, doubtless, many relics of antiquity have disappeared. While, from the imperfect manner in which the old writing was sometimes effaced, it has occasionally been recovered. A manuscript thus restored, from under the second writing above it, is called a palimpsest, and a codex rescriptus. There is, for instance, in the British Museum, one of the oldest known manuscripts of Homer's poems thus resuscitated. Recently Cardinal Angelo Mai discovered in the Vatican Library of Rome a lost treatise of Cicero de Republica, over which had been written a commentary of St. Augustine on the Psalms. And one of the most precious existing MSS. of the New Testament is now in Paris, over which had been written the works of the Syrian father Ephraim. The want of something cheaper than parchment was soon met by the discovery of paper; which seems to have come gradually, and as it were imperceptibly, into use. There is no evidence that cotton paper was used in Europe earlier than the 9th century; while that made from linen was not known before the 12Th. In this case, as in many other European discoveries, the Chinese are said to have preceded us, though without ever making there inventions very extensively useful. It must be also clearly recollected that the newly-discovered material was supposed to be in the place of the papyrus which was gone: as the name of the ancient reed-made papyrus was quickly applied to the paler made from the cotton or the linen.
The quality of the material upon which any manuscript may be written, goes of course a considerable way in determining its age. The parchment of one century is not the same as that of another. Nothing written on cotton paper can be older than Charlemagne; and nothing on linen paper, than William the Conqueror. Moreover the quality of the material decided most unerringly the kind of characters traced, and so gives us a corroborating testimony to the age of a document.
The characters of every branch of the three great languages, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, were all originally much the same. Many of our own printed capital letters approach most nearly to the oldest known types of the Phoenician and the Greek alphabets. They were generally hard, and composed of straight lines; indicating that they had first been cut upon stone; just as the cuneiform characters of Nineveh and Babylon are precisely such as would be stamped on clay with the blunt end of a style.
From the ancient Phoenician type, two chief branches divided: the ancient Greek and the ancient Hebrew character. The former are represented almost exactly by the capital Greek letters now in use; while the latter have no living representatives, but are known by inscriptions on coins of the Maccaban dynasties, and on the ruins of Palmra: for the Greek small letters, and the Hebrew square characters, are comparatively modern.
All the ancient Greek manuscripts are therefore written only with the capital, or, as they are called, the uncial letters; being those which would naturally be formed by any one writing carefully on a valuable parchment. But with the use of paper, a new letter became known, viz., what we call the small letter, or which is also called the cursive character. This small Greek letter was absolutely unknown before the use of paper was discovered. Therefore every manuscript so written is certainly of a date posterior to the age of Charlemagne.
That age was one of considerable activity, and of vigorous effort to escape from the gloom that was setting about Europe. One sign of that activity was the use of paper for the quicker and cheaper writing then demanded. Whether from the use of a cheaper material, or because of the need of quickness, it is certain that men then began to write more rapidly and carelessly, and could no longer wait to form the careful uncial or capital letter, but, by making them quickly, contracted them into the cursive or small characters, which bore about the same relation to the unicials as our hand-writing now does to our printing. And these small letters were not the well-formed elegant things turned out by our modern type foundries: they were irregular, and ugly, and illegible, differing very much in different manuscripts; so that, even when they came to be printed, it was some time before the printers made them otherwise than had been exhibited in the scrawls of the 13th and 14th centuries. We have begun to make them more regularly and carefully, and have eschewed all those abominable contractions in which the early printers delighted. But still it ought to be borne in mind, as a fact not very generally known, that our small Greek letters, now printed, are really more carefully formed from the bad writing of the manuscripts just anterior to the discovery of printing; and that this bad writing was only a hurried way of dashing through the uncial or capital letters, such as we see on the classical monuments, and in the parchment MSS.
In the case of the Hebrew letters, we have an entirely new mode of proceeding. There are no Hebrew MSS. in existence older than the 10th century, that same age which saw the discovery of paper and the use of small cursive letters. The only ancient monuments of the old Hebrew letter—such as the coins of the Maccabees—a coin of Bar Cochab—and the inscriptions at Palmra—are not the same as the present beautiful square Hebrew character.
We are, therefore, irresistibly driven to the conclusion that these elegant letters come from the schools of Babylon and Tiberias, where the doctors of the post-Christian dispersion so long congregated, and which were broken up about the 10th century—that is, about the time of the oldest document in which these square letters are found. They are precisely of the form which painstaking scrupulous men, like the masoretic doctors of Babylon, would make out of the harder and more irregular letters hitherto used. And, indeed, the rise of these specimens of calligraphy is almost contemporary with the rise of the ecclesiastical or black letter in Europe, in the more valuable MSS. which the hardworking Monks painted, rather than wrote. Formerly there was a current opinion that the Jews at the Babylonish captivity, in Daniel's and Ezra's time, gave up their own letters and adopted those of their masters. And so the square characters came to be called Chaldean. The improbability and the baselessness of the story, never seem to have struck any one. But as soon as it was discovered that the Babylonians never used this letter, the story was given up. So likewise, when it is known that these square characters had no existence before what is also called the Captivity—in that period when the Babylonian Jews were governed, under the Sassanians and the Caliphs, by their ow n Prince of the Captivity—there can be little doubt that this period saw the invention of the square characters; and that the story of the adoption of them in the time of Ezra, really arose from confounding together the first and the second captivities at Babylon. W. H. J.