История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 63 стр.

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UNIT 9

MAKING PAPER OUT OF PULP

The art of paper making had been known in the Far East since AD 105 when

Chinese court official Tsai Lun, soaked a mixture of rags, hemp and bark in water,

then drained the pulp over a flat sieve. The fibres formed a sheet of wet paper

which dried to form a writing surface. By the early 2

century the Chinese were

making paper from bamboo. They soaked the shoots, then boiled, pounded washed

them to form a pulp. They squeezed out the water in a press, and hung the sheets

on walls to dry. From the 6

century the Japanese were practising a similar method

using bark. In Western Europe, meanwhile, scribes relied on parchment and vellum

– the specially treated skins of sheep and goat. It was not until AD 751 that some

Chinese soldiers revealed the secret of paper making to the Arab captors, who set

them to work making paper in Samarkand, whence it spread throughout the Arab

world and into Europe.

Egypt’s sacred carvings

At about the same time as the Sumerians began to write on clay tablets, in

the third millennium BC, the Egyptians were developing their own distinctive

writing method. Their system, which we call hieroglyphs (from the Greek for

“sacred carvings” ), comprised pictures representing everyday objects: a feather, a

beetle, a bird. Some signs stood for what they portrayed, but other signs had a

phonetic value, representing one or two sounds rather than a whole word. Only the

consonants were written.

Hieroglyphs retained their pictorial character, and so often had a decorative

function. When carved directly onto the stone monuments, inscriptions had to be

drafted carefully in ink on the stone before being finally carved and painted. Other

more everyday writing surfaces were available for scribes, including special

writing boards and old shards of pottery.