Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World

Irene Vallejo sought to learn more about the women who were erased from so much of history.

The result became a far wider history, her 2022 book Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World. Her pursuit became an allegory of books themselves: so powerful they make ideas last which means they can be co opted to shape history. As she put it, books resulted in “a fantastical increase in the life expectancy of ideas”

In some sense, they are the original “Google effect,” in which “we tend to remember better where information is kept than the information itself. The book, written in Italian and then translated by Charlotte Whittle, is beautiful and thorough. It’s full of quirks of history and a broad understanding of the project that is our modern set of knowledge.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

My notes:

• Marilynne Robinson (1943) in When I Was a Child I Read Books: “I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent.”
• Italian medievalist Umberto Eco (1932-2016): “The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon.”
• We can read a manuscript from 10 centuries ago but can’t decode the burned CD I made a decade ago.
• Alexander the Great always traveled with a copy of the Iliad
• Library of Alexandria was a translation, collection and preservation process: in Greek
• Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) in his short story The Library of Babel: “Every version of letters is in there including the story of your death.”
• Egyptian papyrus was used to produce the books stored in Alexandria library and then spread
• Alexandrian mathematician Ptolemy (100-170) attracted teachers from Aristotle’s school to come to Alexandria (since Aristotle himself died soon after Alexander the Great) to get some of the magic; one who came was the first ever librarian (Demetrius)
• Translated everything into Greek though Ptolemy: Alexandria library in Egypt because he viewed it as the true high language, this was Hellinism like American English is for globalization
• Lighthouse of Alexandria (about 100 meters or 320 feet tall) was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, for many centuries it was one of the tallest man-made structures in the world.
• No specific accounts of where the library was because perhaps it was just shelves spread across the whole Muasaleum, not a specific room
• From early centuries of writing up to Middle Ages, writing was to be read aloud (not read to oneself)
• In the 4th century, Augustine made mention in his Confessions of the strange sight that Bishop of Ambrose of Milan read quietly to himself
• The Library of Alexandria lasted for the first four Ptolemy pharoah (there were 14)
• “ For him, that steals, or borrows, and returns not, a book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and fend him.” As written in the San Pedro de las Puellas monastery in Barcelona (part of an old tradition of threats because books were so rare). This is quoted by a Alberto Manuel in a History of Reading
• In 13th century BCE, there werealready libraries or archives of written clay tablets in Mesopotamia. Even some literature like religious poems, and medical documents like the poems to ward off impotence found in the excavation of Hattusa in Turkey. None of them were public of course but very elite
• Library of king Ashurbanipal next closest antecedent of the Library of Alexandria but far less universal and still more tactical (the literature was really only myths the king should know about his people)
• Greek traveler Hectaetus visited the House of Books in the temple of Amon at Thebes where he said he saw an inscription that read” the place of the cure of the soul” about this proto library but we don’t know much else about early Egyptian libraries
• In Egyptian text from a rich man named Dua-Khety who writes to his son Pepi loafing around the school for scribes “you must turn your mind to books… I have seen a copper Smith at work at his furnace. His fingers are like the claws of a crocodile… The barber shaves until the end of the evening, and he must go about from Street to Street, seeking out someone to shave… The reed cutter must go to the Delta, and by the time he is toiled more than his arms can stand, the gnats have stung him and the mosquitoes have bitten him to death… See, there is no office free from supervisors, except the scribes. He is the supervisor. If you understand writing, then it will be better for you in the professions of which I’ve spoken. You must join the ranks of the esteemed”
• “We do, however, know the story of the last Egyptian scribes, who witnessed the shipwreck of their civilization. Beginning with the edict of Theodosius I in the year 380, Christianity became the compulsory state religion, and pagan cults were prohibited in the Roman empire. All the temples of the ancient gods were shattered, except in the Temple of Isis on the Orlando of Philae, to the south of the first cataract of the Nile. There, a group of priests took refuge, men who were the repositories of the secrets of their sophisticated writing system, and who had been forbidden from sharing their knowledge. One of them, Esmet-Akhom , engraved on the walls of the temple the last hieroglyphic inscription ever written, which ends with the words “for all time and eternity.” Some years later, the emperor Justinian I resorted to military force to close the temple where the priests of Isis were holding out, taking the rebels prisoners. Egypt buried its old gods, with whom it had lived for thousands of years. And along with its gods, its objects of worship, and the language itself. In just one generation, everything disappeared. It has taken 14 centuries to rediscover the key to that language.”
• The Rosetta project preserving language with a nickel metal of a thousand languages (Rosetta stone found in 1799, is inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BC)
• Library battles: Pergamum in Turkey evaded Ptolymy’s papyrus embargo and perfected using animal skin which is where the Latin word that became parchment came from
• Referencing this poem author writes: “I too have occasionally met people whose faces resemble clay inscribed with sorrow.”
• Heterodotus’s account of the Greek ruler Histiaesus tattooing a revolt message onto a slave’s head, letting his hair grow back and then sending him to deliver the message by shaving his head to avoid suspicion
• Tattoos as living parchments
• Creating vellum from baby animals and other parchment was so expensive; Peter Watson says a 150 page book would cost 10-12 dead animals for their skin. Others estimate 100 skins for a Gutenberg Bible.
• In one 13th century Bible, the scribe, overwhelmed by the scarcity of materials, noted in the margin “oh, that the heavens were made of parchment and the sea of ink.”
• Convent of San Marco had first European library in 1444, after Greek and Roman libraries destroyed
• Copies made by scribes from the Library of Alexandria created consistent and regular transcription errors dude to human error (Taught us about common errors)
• In a society that never had sacred books, the illiad and the odyssey filled that place
• In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a newspaper owner rips up his investigative reporter’s big article; John Ford writes: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
• The Illiad: Achilles goes to war against premonitions
• The Odyssey: Odysseus spends 7 years wirh a nymph goddess on Calypso before deciding he wants to go home. A lifetime of vacation is no life at all.
• The mysterious and timeless Ancient Greek poet Homer referred to speech as “winged words” that would fly away, never to be seen again. Writing, he said, at a time when few could read and fewer could write, would last forever.
• The oldest known story is of Memnon, a black Ethiopian
• Jesus and Buddha were only oral storytellers. But their fame came from their followers writing. (Though the Bible shows Jesus could read and write)
• From pictograms which are limitless to instead approximating sounds which have a limited range. “But letters never left their past as simple diagrams behind. Our “D” at first represented a door,
• “M” the movement of water, “N” was a snake, and “O” an eye. Even today, our texts are landscapes where, unbeknownst to us, we paint the ocean’s waves, where dangerous animals lie in wait and eyes gaze at us without blinking.”
• Writing and reading were so hard for early societies that it was a complex and elite division in Egyptian times ; the alphabet rather than pictograms was an innovation that made writing more accessible
• 1000 BC Phoenician script begins appearing, oldest found on sarcophagus on king of Byblos which gives word origin (biblios, later bible and book)
• In 8th century BC, a Greek first deciphered Phoenician script. (Good for my translation book): “We don’t know his name, or where he lived, or for how long.” Author: I say “him” because I imagine him as a man. Greek women of the era did not have freedom of movement, the independence and initiative needed to do such a thing was forbidden to them.
• He lived in the eighth century BC, twenty-nine centuries ago. He changed my world. As I write these lines, I am grateful to this forgotten stranger whose intelligence made an extraordinary break-through, though he was perhaps unaware of the significance of his discovery. I imagine him as a traveler, perhaps an islander. I’m sure he was a friend to weather-beaten, bronze-faced Phoenician mer-chants. He must have drunk with them in port taverns by night, inhaling the salty air that mingled with steam rising from a plate of cuttlefish on the table as he listened to seafaring tales. Boats tossed on stormy seas, waves towering like mountains, shipwrecks, strange coasts, mysterious women’s voices piercing the night. But what fascinated him most of all was a seemingly humble, unheroic talent. How did these simple merchants write so quickly?
• The Greeks had encountered writing at the height of Cretan civilization and the Mycenaean kingdoms, with their constellations of arcane signs, in service only of palace accounting. These were syllabic systems” of complexity and elite use only for accounting. The Phoenician system used only 22 letters, just consonants and Greeks wanted to learn
• That greek alphabet was the first entirely based on sound. Use Phoenician consonant starts. Aleph, bet and gimel became alpha, beta, gamma . Extended into vowels. Historians believe it wasn’t a gradual process by a single individual who made this explicit discovery and invention but we don’t know him.
• Earliest known surviving Greek alphabet usage is on a vase preserved in a tomb, likely a trophy it reads “Whoever of these dancers now plays the most delicately…” it was from a party! The second oldest is on a cup referencing Homer’s Iliad
• Hesiod: europes first written preserved first person narrator; auto fiction (describes his hometown: “a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer and never good”.
• He writes of a vision of 9 muses coming to him, saying “ we know how to tell lies that sound like truths, and we know how to sing the truth, when we will,” which we think is the earliest known meditation on fiction/nonfiction
• Eric Havelock: writing spread slowly. Old stories were written to preserve them but move like a nursery rhyme musical score. Most people sing them without ever looking at or even knowing how to read music. As this author writes “ The music of words, reached its audience through their ears, and not through their eyes.”
• Prose was born around 6th century BC
• Mycenaean era: itinerant aoidos sang heroic legends as they strolled instruments; they invented. Books and written word brought in rhapsodes with memorized text
• Socrates: written texts were considered a poor substitute for the spoken word but 5th century BCE Athens had early book trade; a century later Aristotle’s time reading wasn’t a strange hobby
• In Phaedrus, Socrates says an Egyptian king turned down the gift of writing . As this author translates: “The king, Thamus, asked what the use of writing was, and Theuth replied, This knowledge will make the Egyptians wiser; it is an elixir of memory and wisdom. Thamus then replied: O most ingenious Theuth, being the parent of writing, you attribute to it qualities which it does not possess. This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners, because they will not use their memories; they will put their trust in books and not remember for themselves. It will not be wisdom but only a semblance of wisdom that writing will give to men; they will hear many things and not truly learn them; they will be tiresome company, believing themselves wise without being so.”
• ….” the written word seems to speak to you, as if it were intelligent, but if you ask, it’s some thing, because you wish to know more, it keeps telling you the same thing over and over. Books cannot defend themselves.”
• Wegner “transaction memory”: we store information in the minds of others whom we can ask, books and now the internet
• In 213 BC, at same time of library Alexandria, Chinese emperor Shihuangdi attempted to have all books destroyed so history could begin with him. In 191 BC, writers began rewriting from memory
• Alexander set fire to Persepolis destroying books of Zoroastrianism but followers rewrote from memory
• Anna Akhmatova’s followers did same for her poems under Stalin Russia
• Beginning of fifth century a story of a small school on remote Greek island Astypalea, letter learning was already becoming more widespread
• Spartan mothers: come home with your shield or upon it
• Arochilochus mercenary who didn’t live yo die I. War, Richard Jenkyns called him europes fest pain in the neck
• Herostratus syndrome
• Aristophanes mocks writers who “ squeeze their works out of other books” (taking other ideas! Sounds like journalism!)
• Aristotle the first book collector
• Parnassus on wheels in 1920s begins in baltimore and is a modern continuation of an old tradition of traveling booksellers
• Inspired by ancient Greeks, Foucault asked: if objects can be art, why can’t a life?
• Author says this Greek belief was a religious one; knowledge and learning (Greek logos which also gets translated as Word) was a pursuit of faith
• Plato’s real name was Aristocles, which was determined by Callimachus the first true librarian
• Alphabetical order came from Musaeum
• Umberto Eco in The Infinity of Lists argued that lists are the beginning of culture
• Greeks had a name for authors named to lists by libraries for preservation: Enkrithentes “those who have passed through the sieve”
• “Reality has turned into a great competition, and we’re dying to know who the winners are.” author Irene Vallejo writers (But it isn’t the internets fault. The Greeks did the same thing (the 7 wonders!) seven sages and the Seven Great Greek Cooks)
• Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides were already a trio of essential Greek writers in the 4th century BCE
• Italo Calvino’s six proposals for next millennium
• Sappho the only Greek woman writer to survive to be celebrated but many others left fragments: “Here is my provisional list of women writers almost erased: Corinna, Telesilla, Myrtis, Praxilla, Cleobulina, Boco, Erinna, Nossis, Moero, Anyte, Moschine, Hedyle, Philinna, Melinno, Caecilia Trebulla, Julia Balbilla, Demo, Theosebeia”
• The first known author in the world to sign a text with her name is a woman: Enheduanna (some are psalms in the Bible); Artemisia was a woman general
• Lyric poem comes from using the lyre
• Aspasia was called a whore for being a heterate or other independent woman but Pericles chose her for love and some speculate she helped write his funeral and other famous speeches
• Greek same sex teachers and love was seen as societal good (Sappho did a woman version)
• Medea: I’d rather fight three wars than give birth once
• Oldest surviving piece of theater is The Persians by Aeschylus, in which he humanizes the Persian army who had killed his brother and he himself had just helped vanquish.
• Milan Kundera The Joke: laughter destabilizes power — which is why so few old comedies survived from Ancient Greek. Aristotles tragedy but not comedy. Aristophanes is only exception. When Sparta conquered Athens, this line of satirical comedy went away
• “Tolerance is conjugated like an irregular verb.” I am outraged, you are sensitive.
• Libri faciunt labra
• Necronomicon, HP Lovecraft’s fictional Book of the Dead,
• Herodotus The Histories was an act of journalism, even though it gave us the modern sense of the word history. First source discovery and he always makes clear what was just conjecture from people he spoke to. Richard Kapuscinski wrote Travels With Herodotus and made the journalist comparison.
• “We like to imagine books as dangerous, deadly and disturbing, but above all, they are fragile.” 199
• Heinrich Heine: “Those who burn books in the end burn people,” he wrote in 1821, proving true for Nazis
• Bakhtin smoked tobacco with the pages of an essay he wrote in Soviet times
• Thiasos: intellectuals working at both Serapaum and Musauem; the libraries and librarians (like priests of this order that worshipped the muses of human creation) were illegal after Theodorakis in 391 enacted series of edicts banning paganism
• Hypatia: (actually single or lesbian?)
• During the bombing of the National Library of Sarajevo in August 1992, nearly 2 million volumes were destroyed, including the only remaining originals of Ottoman-era manuscripts. As the ashes of these rare books scattered to the wind and fell, residents gave them a nickname: “black butterflies.” (Similar to Fahrenheit 451)
• Mein Kempf was so widely available in London it was used as roof cover during the bombing
• Rost: “He who speaks of hunger ends up hungry. And those who speak of death of the first to die.”
• Jacques Perret at Sorbonne advised IBM in 1955 to use French ordinateur (orderer) rather than purely mathematical term “computer”
• Alexander the Great and his library set In motion globalization
• George Steiner recalls that Herodotos once said “Every year, we send our ships at the risk of life and very expensively to Africa to ask: who are you? What are your laws? What is your language? They never sent one ship to ask us.” Hellenism
• Alexandria, a Greek city not in Greece, created “a homeland made of paper for the stateless of every era”
• Roman barbarians were both violent and adaptable, aping the best styles of those they conquered — military tactics from the Samnites, navies from Carthaginians, Hellenistic farming. Overall they praised Greek culture and the language. Horace wrote that Greece, once conquered, had invaded Rome.
• A paradox of globalization dating back to Romans adapting Greek math and plays and culture: what you adapt from others also make you who you are
• Nabokov wrote he felt “as American as April in Arizona,” like Peggy Guggenheim’s art collection they all were Europe culture going to United States after ww2
• In Pompei 79 CE, WV Harris estimates 60% of men were literate and less than 20% of women
• Saint Augustine on the harsh primary school and life for kids in Roman tunes: “Who would not bulk in horror, if given the choice of death or life again as a child? who would not choose to die?”
• Nabokov in Pale Fire: “We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable.”
• First century bc, first people reading for pleasure with no great fortune or social ambition
• Roman writer Martial wasn’t making money on people selling his poetry but we think his product placement instructing people to buy his book at a certain stall was likely a paid advertisement. The anonymous reader (not family or friend) was born
• From 1925 on, Hitler listed his profession on tax forms as a “writer”
• Victor Lapuente Gine: on average new things go away sooner than old things, which have already shown they can survive
• The “page book” is 2000 years old: a happy medium between expensive scrolls and heavy tablets. Codices were the Roman invention that brought about the book (hard wood cover with spine and papyrus in between ; this kept scrolls together to reduce anything being lost
• Roman poet Marital, writing of a suitor who came from a wealthy family: “Paulo wishes to marry me; I don’t want to marry, Paula: she’s old. I changed my mind, if she were older.”
• Apothereta by Marital was a December gift guide in Roman times
• Codex and scrolls existed for centuries alongside like electronic and print books today
• Best preserved early Roman library is the twin libraries built by Trajan in 112; beautiful and open to public
• Honoré de Balzac 1799–1850: “Le secret des drandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait.” The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed. (Behind every great fortune is a crime never found out)
• Of the Roman tyrants who built excessive public baths and libraries to appease their citizenry: “What could be worse than Nero? “Martial wondered, “but what could be better than Nero’s baths?”
• Franz Liszt the sex symbol of Victorian age
• Virgil, Horace and Ovid among the first international stars; Titus Luvius had the first known fan, a Hispanic named Gades
• Censorship backfired. As Tacitus wrote: “They are foolish, those who believe that they can, with the temporary power, extinguish the memory of events in those who come after them. On the contrary, talents that are punished only grow more revered, and those who acts severely achieve nothing but their own dishonor, and the glory of those they punished.” Tacitus knew self censorship is far more effective by scaring anyone from actually writing; he called it “inertiae dulcedo” or “sweet inertia”
• Spaces in writing appear in ninth century around when silent reading bad become commonplace. (I read otherwise)
• Christianity in Roman times used book technology to distinguish from the old scrolls of Judaism
• Rome endlessly copied and admired Greek culture and its own way created that anti chauvinism, to accept another culture
• “Classic” has origins from Roman census and class structure to refer to top tier class, which has same etymology, later a metaphor from 1490s to refer to top class work
• Pindar: “Men are the dreams of a shadow”
• A classic is a work of art that never finishes what it has to say. — my adaption of her words
• Euripides: “the name of this country will be forgotten, as everything is forgotten.” Final Hecuba soliloquy
• Seneca the stoic poet was a banker and ultra rich; teased in his time for the hypocrisy of simple stoicism writing while living in splendor
• Horace, of the development of “canon,” in which teachers and others in Roman times worked to preserve work including living artists for the first for, he wrote: “I will not fully die”
• Romulus’s quiet abdication in 476 begins the slow decline of Roman Empire and descent into Christian attacks on learning and paganism; Greek and Roman culture dispelled. Author writes “The shuttered libraries are kingdoms of dust and worms”
• Ironically it is monasteries that keep learning alive, preserving the best pagan books, later universities like Bologna and Oxford. They are part of a broken chain of knowledge; paper from China
• “The invention of books was perhaps the greatest triumphant of tenacious struggle against destruction. With their help, humanity has undergone an extraordinary celebration of history, development, and progress.”
• We’ve made books of smoke, stone, earth, leaves, reeds, silk, animal, skin, rags, trees, and now light (computers)
• Aristotle: The difference between a wise man and an ignorant one is the same as an alive man and a dead one.
• Walter Benjamin in 1940 while living in Nazi occupied France wrote “there is no document of civilization, which is not at the same time a document of barbarism
• Forgotten men and anonymous women, part of an unbroken and invisible “choral novel” that kept so many lessons alive
• “Humanity defied the absolute sovereignty of destruction by inventing writing and books”
• “A fantastical increase in the life expectancy of ideas”