From the earliest incisions and scratchings to the quill pen of the middle ages, how did we come to get the diverse range of tools to produce writing we know today?
Incising and scratching
The earliest material used to write on was clay. It needs little preparation before use, is easy to work and was readily available in Mesopotamia where the first writing developed.
Damp clay could be formed into a tablet in the hand and drawn into with a stylus. The tablets could be reworked and reused or baked to make them permanent. The first stylus was probably a cut reed which was pressed into damp clay. This produced wedge-shaped marks that came to be known as cuneiform.
In ancient China, records of divination rituals are found carved into the surface of animal bones. While the vast majority of these inscriptions are incised, there are a small number that appear to have been written with brush and ink. Could this merely be a matter of survival – the hardest-wearing materials surviving for longest? It may be that writing with ink on more perishable materials than bone might go back much further in Chinese history than we have evidence for.
Chinese oracle bone
Oracle bones were used for divination over 3,000 years ago in ancient China.
Inscribed writing can also be found on wax tablets. Entering Greek and Roman culture via Egypt, wax tablets became one of the most commonly available writing materials throughout the region. The tablets were fashioned from wood (or precious materials like ivory) and carved out to form a recessed surface which was then filled with beeswax.
Tablets were the notebooks of the ancient and medieval worlds, employed for drafting, dictation, accounts, lists and also as exercise books for learning to write.
2,000-year-old homework book
This homework book shows a child in Egypt's efforts to learn Greek.
Ink, pens and brushes
The first evidence of writing with ink comes from Egypt, almost as early as incised hieroglyphs (3200 BC). Essentially there are two forms of ink that have been used since then:
A staining ink that penetrates the writing surface and dyes it, e.g. iron gall inks, indigo, walnut inks, inks based on aniline dyes, many modern fountain pen inks and the inks within fibre-tip pens.
Ink made from a pigment (i.e. coloured particles of material) which merely remains on the writing surface, without staining it. These coloured particles would rub off when dry unless they are mixed with a binding agent (like gum Arabic or egg) that fixes them in place.
Across Asia, in India, China and Japan, ink has often been based on carbon (soot) mixed with a little gum or gelatine. The particles are obtained from burning oil or resinous pinewood. Solid cakes of ink are reconstituted by being ground down with water on a smooth stone.
Inks can also get up close and personal when words and phrases are tattooed into the skin. Ink research for modern pens is on-going, with colour and texture-based pens (think of gels and glitter) being some of today’s varieties. Pen and ink technologies, far from declining, have snowballed in the last few decades.
Burmese tattooing implements
In the 19th century, it was seen as a rite of passage for young Burmese men to endure the painful process of being tattooed with sharp, weighted brass implements such as these.
Pen manufacture has a long history. Reeds have been made into pens for several thousands of years in the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Europe. The most reliable is the common reed, Phragmites australis from Iraq.
For Arabic, Persian, Ottoman and Urdu calligraphy, the reed is cut with a strong, sharp knife and the nib is trimmed left oblique: the precise angle varying according to the script you wish to write (traditional Hebrew scribes also used a similar technique). For Roman and Greek letters which, in contrast to Arabic and Hebrew, are written from left to right, the reed nib is cut in the opposite direction: right oblique.
In Europe from the early middle ages onwards, the quill pen became more widely used than the reed; it was at this same time that the scroll form of the book gave way to the codex. With parchment or vellum becoming more available than papyrus, the quill had a natural synergy with this writing surface: both quill and parchment are made from the same natural substance, collagen.
Metal pens were also used in Europe since Roman times but high volume manufacture had to wait until the Industrial Revolution. James Perry of Manchester began producing metal nibs in 1819. By 1835 Perry’s company was stamping out nearly 5,250,000 nibs a year.
In the East the brush held sway: they were, and still are, made from a variety of animal hair (horse, goat, weasel), each with different properties. Horse is springy and not very absorbent; weasel is the opposite. But brushes can actually be made from many types of fibres, from hammered-out bamboo or even chicken feathers. They encourage a very different relationship to the writing surface than a metal pen. Sensitive touch and precise movement become more critical.
Chinese calligraphy manual
One of the distinctive features of traditional Chinese calligraphy is that the brush is held at a right angle to the page, and the whole arm moves as one writes.
Printing
Printing, the technique of directly transferring an image from one surface onto another, is an ancient art and begins with seal-making. Engraved seals were important in Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and ancient China.
By the 8th century and probably earlier, the Chinese had found a way of cutting calligraphic texts into wooden blocks that could be used to make prints (xylography). A calligrapher wrote the text on paper that was glued to the wooden block; the wood engraver then cut away the background leaving the writing and illustrations standing proud. The block was inked and a print taken from it by rubbing down a thin sheet of paper on to the surface.
The earliest known woodblock printed text was discovered in the 1960s during the excavation of a stupa at the Pulguk-sa Temple in Korea and is believed to date from 704–751 CE. The oldest dated complete printed book of block printing is the Diamond Sutra, found at Dunhuang in China, which bears the date of 11 May 868 CE.
Printed copy of the Diamond Sutra
This copy of the Diamond Sutra is the world's earliest complete and dated, printed book.
By the 11th century, printing using a system of movable moulded characters had been developed in China. In the Yuan period (1279–1368) wooden type was being used, and perhaps as early as the late 13th century printing from movable metal types was happening in Korea.
In Europe, Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith from Mainz, Germany, was the first to print with moveable type. There seems to be no direct connections between his invention and developments in East Asia. While the Gutenberg Bible of 1455 is his masterpiece, he had begun with smaller projects from as early as 1452.
Gutenberg Bible
Johann Gutenberg’s Bible is probably the most famous Bible in the world. It is the earliest full-scale work printed in Europe using moveable type.
By 1480 there were presses all across Europe. The printing press came to Britain in 1476 when William Caxton (1422–1491) printed Geoffrey Chaucer’s (c.1342–1400) The Canterbury Tales.
