8/30/2023 0 Comments Papyrus reed samll bookChina, 100 BCīut around the 1st century AD, Ts’ai Lun invented paper by experimenting with different materials: the bark of the mulberry plant, hemp, old rags, or even fish nets! The finest quality parchments are called vellum. What makes parchment different from leather is that the skins are limed but not tanned, which makes the parchment sensitive to humidity changes and may get spoiled when wet. Roman scholar Varro described the invention of parchment in the ancient city of Pergamum as springing from the shortage of papyrus. The papyrus was easily cracked, which is why we only have fragments of these scrolls for our records today.Īt around this time, the skin of sheep and goats were used to make parchment, a more durable alternative to papyrus. However, the length of rolled papyrus made it really clunky to open and read. The scrolls opened horizontally, with the text occupying one side and the pages divided into columns. For example, a scroll on the history of the reign of Ramses III was measured at more than 40 meters long. They then rolled strips of the papyrus plant into a scroll, the average being between 14 to 52 feet long, though they could be much longer. The first evidence can be found in an account of books belonging to the Fifth Dynasty King Neferirkare Kakai, sometime around 2400 BC. This was found to be the medium for writing as early as the first dynasty. Then, they went through a process in which they humidified, pressed, dried, glued, and cut the material into sheets, with the best reserved for sacred writing. In Egypt, people extracted the marrow from papyrus reed stems. (Photo by Jeremy Zero on Unsplash) Egypt, Early 3000 BC Tablets were in use even up to the 19th century in different parts of the world, including Chile, Germany, the Philippines, and even the Sahara Desert. This made up the library and archive of the kings of Assyria, giving us a glimpse into the system of organization they used for their books. More than 20,000 such tablets were found at Nineveh (modern Iraq), with some dating as far back as the 7th century BC. After etching figures onto the clay, the Mesopotamians used fire to dry the tablets out. These wedge-like writings, created by the calamus in moist clay, are known as cuneiform. The first settlers in Mesopotamia were known for making clay tablets on which they made markings using a triangle-ending instrument called the calamus, which was essentially the stem of the reed plant that had been sharpened to a point. Who First Invented Books?ĭifferent civilizations had their own ways of keeping written documents, starting with the Mesopotamians around 3500 BCE. Those who study the history of books consider trace the origins back to early materials, such as tablets, bamboo, beech bark, and sheets of papyrus. However, throughout history, people have used different materials for writing. Today, the modern book is defined as “a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers.” Did you know that the modern book, as we know it today, had to go through several makeovers to become what it is now? Defining Books But it was not always so easy to get your hands on a book. We probably remember favorite books from our childhood.īooks have indeed been a part of people’s daily lives for many generations. From the youngest age, most of us have had books around us: our parents may have read us bedtime stories, or brought us to the library where we can borrow books.
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