It was long assumed that the claims of Moses to have written
down the law were groundless, because nobody was supposed to have known anything about the art of writing until a much later period. However, at the end of the 19Western Hills Church of Christ
History of the Bible
From Sumeria to the NIV in 13 Weeks
Knowledge of cuneiform was lost until AD 1835, when Henry Rawlinson, an English army officer, found some inscriptions on a cliff at Behistun in Persia. Carved in the reign of King Darius of Persia (522-486 BC), they consisted of identical texts in three languages: Old Persian, Babylonian and Elamite. After translating the Persian, Rawlinson began to decipher the others. By 1851 he could read 200 Babylonian signs.
How did the Old Testament come together? In Exodus 24:4 we read: "And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord". These were placed "…in the side of the Ark of the Covenant," according to Deuteronomy 31:26. Joshua later added to them; and still later Samuel "told the people the manner of the kingdom, and wrote it in a book, and laid it up before the Lord" (1 Samuel 10:25). Much later "Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of the Lord…". (2 Kings 22:8). These passages show that the records gradually grew, and were protected.
It was long assumed that the claims of Moses to have written
down the law were groundless, because nobody was supposed to have known anything about the art of writing until a much later period. However, at the end of the 19
What she had stumbled upon was the Egyptian Foreign Office archive of that period. We now know that long before the days of Moses, ambassadors had an active postal service, regularly reporting affairs from distant regions of Palestine. Not only could Moses have known how to write, 1,500 years before Christ, but some who study the science of paleography believe that the book of Job perhaps predates Moses by more than 400 years.
Writing Materials. Ancient peoples used a much greater variety of materials upon which to write than we do today. Mesopotamians had clay tablets that were impressed with cuneiform symbols when wet and fired to form a permanent record. Tens of thousands of these durable records have survived to this day and are still found in the deserts of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. The Egyptia ns favored carving their hieroglyphs into stone walls, tombs, and monuments but they also gave us the durable, flexible and lightweight papyrus made from a reed that grows in the Nile River Valley. By the time of the Greeks and Romans, papyrus was being manufactured in workshops in several different grades and qualities, ranging from rough wrapping papyrus to the beautifully smooth product that was used for royal documents and lovely, hand crafted books suitable for presentation and display in wealthy people’s homes. Also available to the Romans were sheep and cow hide. One could write on heavy tanned leather, or the skins of cows and sheep could be shaved very thin to form parchment and vellum. Parchment was very strong and durable, but heavier than papyrus. It was bleached and made pliable by soaking it in lime water and pounding it with rocks. Both papyrus and parchment were very popular among the Romans, but also quite expensive.
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The Romans were very fond of writing and valued an education very highly. Therefore, they found many ways to get around the expense and bulkiness of papyrus and parchment scrolls. For personal use and for short notes that would be erased later, they used small wax tablets. These were usually bound together on a leather thong or arranged to fold together like modern book covers or like an accordion. The individual tablets were made of wood and had a raised edge, forming a shallow box. Into this box, molten wax was poured and allowed to cool with a smooth surface. This wax was usually a deep red or reddish brown in color. A metal or bone stylus
was used to write upon the tablet, the pointed end to make the letters and the flattened
end to smooth over and "erase" writing that was no longer wanted. These folding
tablets and styli were the standard writing materials for Roman schoolchildren. They
went by many names. In Latin they were called
cerae or
codices. In the Greek portion of the
empire, they were called diptycha,
trypticha, and other names
which began with the Greek word for the number of individual tablets in the set. The Romans loved to
have their portrait painted or a mosaic portrait made of themselves holding a rolled book or
a wax tablet and stylus, like the image here. (The woman is holding a wax tablet and
has a stylus pressed against her lip.) They felt that these articles symbolized the
education and cultured background of those who were shown holding them. For letter writing, there
were different grades of papyrus, depending on whether it was an official imperial
dispatch or a personal letter to a friend in a different province. The dry climate of Egypt
was perfectly suited to preserving these ancient papyri as well as the parchment
documents, though these tended to dry out and become brittle. The contents of some of the
surviving documents found in Roman Egypt are much like letters that might be written today
by those of us who found ourselves in similar circumstances. These included a letter
to a legionary commander recommending a man for recruiting into the army, a similar
letter informing that an applicant was rejected because he didn’t pass the eye exam,
and letters from soldiers to their families at home asking for money or whining because
none had been sent them after their last letter home.
Surprisingly, the ink sometimes lasted longer than the parchment. The city of Herculaneum was destroyed by a volcanic mudflow from Mount Vesuvius in A. D. 79. The damp, corrosive ash caused the leather and parchment scrolls to deteriorate so that they became like flaky, black carbon. However, the ink, of another shade of black, survived in very readable condition. If the scrolls could be unrolled with great care and without crumbling to powder, then the darker letters stood out and could be read and transcribed before the scroll disintegrated totally.
Forms of "books". The earliest permanent and portable ‘documents’, dating from around 3000 BC, were the clay tablets used for writing by ancient Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Hittites. However, the scroll or roll format is generally considered to be the first book form, the earliest examples being Egyptian papyrus scrolls dating from around 3000 BC. Examples of the Egyptian Book of the Dead are some of the earliest extant scrolls.
These were texts written to guide the dead safely to the Egyptian underworld and were an essential part of Egyptian burials. The Greek historian Herodotus reported that Egyptian embalmers did a thriving business in copies of the Book of the Dead. They were written in large numbers and kept in stock for personalizing as required.
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The scroll was the dominant form of book until approximately
400 AD, with most being made from papyrus. Papyrus is made from the pith of a
rush like plant. The pith is cut into thin strips laid side by side, slightly overlapped. A second layer is placed
at right angles to the first and the
layers are fused together by pounding with a mallet, with the sap of
the plant acting as a glue. The dimensions of the individual
sheets varied depending on the quality of the papyrus- they ranged
16 - 40 cm in width and up to 50 cm in height. Since papyrus is not flexible enough to fold without cracking individual sheets
were glued together to make a long roll or scroll if a larger
volume was required. The length of a roll varied considerably, with
one roll in the British museum measuring around 40 meters long.
Tall scrolls were used ‘as is’ or cut down to make smaller ones. The text was written in
red and black ink using a reed pen-brush on the side of the papyrus where the strips of
pith ran horizontally. The finished scroll was rolled up with the text on the inside and
had to be unrolled with one hand and rolled up with the other as it was being read. The
text in scrolls was most frequently arranged in columns separated by blank spaces, an
arrangement that carried over into later forms of the book.
Papyrus had the advantage of being relatively cheap and easy to produce, but it was fragile and susceptible to both moisture and excessive dryness. Unless the papyrus was of good quality the writing surface was irregular and the range of media that could be used was also limited - papyrus scrolls were mostly decorated with line drawing and watercolor. As early as 500 BC parchment, made from the skins of animals, was used as an alternative to papyrus to create scrolls. Although it was more durable than papyrus and could be folded without cracking, parchment was heavier, difficult to produce and more expensive and it did not become the dominant writing surface until the widespread adoption of the codex form.
Another book form that was widely used in antiquity was the writing tablet, a precursor of the school student’s slate. Writing tablets were mostly used for letter writing, records of business transactions, drafts of texts, and school work. The most common form was a block of wood that had been hollowed out to create a recess, which was then filled with wax. A sharp stylus was used for writing in the wax - the impression thus created could be smoothed over and the tablet re-used. Two or more individual tablets could be joined by lacing to make a more substantial volume, with up to ten tablets sometimes being combined.
In the western world both of these book forms were eventually replaced by the codex, which consists of regular sized, individual sheets of writing material (papyrus, parchment or, eventually, paper), joined together by stitching and placed within a protective cover. A variety of theories have been put forward to account for the development of the codex form. One theory suggests that the scroll was first folded into an accordion, which was easier to handle when reading and easier to store, and that the accordion book and finally the bound codex followed. Another suggestion is that the codex developed from the Greek and Roman wax tablet. The scroll, the wooden tablet and the codex existed side by side for several centuries, but the coming of Christianity saw the codex become increasingly widespread and by around 400AD the parchment codex was the predominant form of book.
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The codex form has numerous advantages over the scroll.
The size can be increased to contain very long texts, or several shorter texts can be bound together in one volume;·
·
The codex makes more efficient use of materials as both sides of a leaf can be written on;·
The codex is portable, easy to store and easy to read - a codex book can be easily opened to any point in text; varied layouts makes the inclusion of large illustrations possible; Since the writing surface is not rolled thicker pigments can be used, allowing a wider varie ty of techniques to be employed in decorating and illustrating a text.Development of the Alphabet. In early forms of writing such as hieroglyphics,pictorial signs represented whole words of syllables. By about 1500 B.C., the Canaanites, a Semitic-speaking people living in ancient Palestine and Syria, began to use such signs to stand for individual speech sounds, writing them from right to left. A version of this alphabet was adopted by their successor, the Phoenicians, who simplified the forms and added several new ones. Trade with the Phoenicians brought this knowledge to the Greeks, who reassigned some of the Semitic consonant symbols to vowel sounds.
In Italy, a western variant of the Greek alphabet was adopted by the Etruscans. Our modern letters derive from the Romans, who adopted Etruscan script for monumental inscriptions and wrote from left to right. Because Etruscan writing did not distinguish between
c and g, the Romans created the letter G by adding a stroke to C. The classical Greek Y and Z were added to denote two other sounds in words borrowed from Greek. The English alphabet reached its total of 26 letters only after medieval scribes added the w (originally written uv). During the middle ages, Roman capitals evolved into uncials and then to Carolingian (Charlemagne) miniscules and Italian cursive script, which are the prototypes of many modern printed and handwritten letters.The chart at the beginning of the next page is included for illustration. It will show the flow of alphabets over a period of 3000 years and serve as a fitting finish to our discussion of the history of writing.
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