THE STORY OF WRITING

Part 1

Writing is easy. All you have to do is pick up your pen, pencil, ball-point or what-have-you, put the point of it down in the left hand corner of your paper and - well write. But now hold your writing implement in your left hand and do it again. Not quite so easy, is it. Now you know how left handed people feel when they come to write. Why, then, is it that early civilisations so often developed systems which were written from right to left or in vertical columns starting from the right. To our eye and hand this seems both unnatural and inconvenient. A right-handed person - and we have to assume that the majority of people throughout human history have been right-handed - must, we feel, inevitably find it easier to pull rather than push a writing implement across the surface, and to reveal what he has written as he writes it rather than obscure it behind his hand. Yet the fact remains that most early scripts, including Egyptian hieroglyphs, were predominantly written from right to left. Why should this be so?

No doubt you have seen, either at the cinema or on the television, pictures of ancient Chinese scribes writing their letters. And not a pen or a pencil in sight. Instead they used a brush. Now, pick up your pen or pencil as if it was a paint-brush that you are going to write with. You will find that your fingers are straight and in a line with your hand, and that all movement is done through the wrist. And when you put pen to paper, your hand is up in the air and you can see everything that appears on the paper whether you move the brush up or down, to left or right. Any way of writing is as easy as any other. So why not write from right to left?

The Egyptian brush-pen was made from bog rush, a thin-stemmed rush plant (Juncus maritime). It was usually cut into pieces of around 9 inches long. When it is chewed or hammered at one end its vascular structure easily frays, and it turns into a brush something like the artists' stencilling brush that we remember from our school days - well, I remember them, even if you don't. It retains enough ink to sustain the writing of a good number of letters, depending on their size, before it needs recharging. It can be cut thin to draw fine lines, or it can be cut square to produce a letter very much like that made by a broad pen nib. The ink used by the Egyptian scribes was made of carbon, usually fine soot, mixed with water and a binding agent such as gum. Red ink was made in the same way, prepared with pigment made from one of the many red oxides which occur naturally in the earth. These inks were so stable that they have retained their dense colours after thousands of years.

These writing implements, naturally enough, formed the basis of the hieroglyphic sign which was used to represent the word "scribe"; and the bag containing the powdered pigment was often clearly depicted tied with thongs between the brush-holder on the left and the palette on the right, which contained two compartments for red and black ink.

The scribes' tools and the way they used them hardly changed over the centuries in Egypt, although in the 5th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom a shell was sometimes used as a vessel in which to make the ink. Later on there is evidence that they had ready-made cakes of ink similar to the water-colour tablets we can buy today, and these were glued to the upper part of the wooden palette. At the bottom of the palette was a slot in which the narrow reeds were stored when not in use. Anybody who takes the bother to reproduce these materials and implements would soon discover why they were so superbly suited to a system of writing that contained a high proportion of linear picture-drawing among its elements.

But they still needed something to write on. In ancient Egypt the tall papyrus plant (Cyperus Papyrus) grew in still waters all over the country, especially in the marshy districts of Lower Egypt. This was carefully harvested, and its strong fibrous stems were processed and put to use in the making of sails, candles, cloth, cords and mats. And papyrus. Unfortunately, nobody thought about writing a handbook on the production of papyrus at the time, but the method can be deduced by a close examination of the finished writing material itself. The long, thick, triangular-sectioned stems had the tough outer rind cut off and then they were chopped into pieces about nine inches long, and these sections were sliced thinly down their length. The resulting wafers were then placed alongside one another with their edges slightly overlapping, and a second layer placed on top of the first at right-angles to it. The two layers were then hammered together until flat and the whole sheet dried under pressure. The sap of the plant is sufficiently adhesive to bind the strips into a strong sheet. When it was dry any unevenness was smoothed and the edges cut straight, and these separate sheets were glued together with starch paste to form rolls. These might be of any length, but about twenty sheets to a roll was usual. The longest roll known to have survived is about 45 yards long.

Papyrus was always an expensive material, partly because its production and sale were a royal monopoly from the earliest times, and the royals were not averse to extracting as much money as they could from their subjects. Palimpsests, once-written papyri which were wiped clean and re-used by the scribes, show that economies sometimes had to be made, especially in schools. Cheaper alternatives were always popular. Limestone fragments and pieces of broken pottery were used as a writing surface for sketches and rough notes and even these were sometimes washed clean and used again. Wooden tablets covered with a thin layer of white plaster formed another writing surface which could be cleaned by replacing the layer of plaster when required. Leather was much more expensive than papyrus and so it was reserved for only the most valuable and important texts, such as royal archives or temple rituals. But how and when did the change of direction of writing take place. That is another story, or maybe Part 2 of the same story. Whichever it is, I am afraid it will have to wait till later.

Bill Hutchings