The first known writing was inscribed on stone (for more on the use of stone as a writing surface, see Petroglyphs to Pictographs), but that was soon followed by clay tablets, which originated in Babylonia around 2400 BCE. The move from stone to clay was possibly the impetus for the evolution of writing from pictographs or hieroglyphs into simpler forms. As Edith Diehl puts it in her monumental history Bookbinding, “the complicated picture characters . . . were difficult to impress on clay, and gradually the old picture writing seems to have been transformed into conventional signs of greater simplicity,” and the kind of writing known as cuneiform was born.
One Script, Many Languages
Cuneiform was used by a number of different cultures to write several different languages. Because it could be arranged in a variety of ways, cuneiform could be used to write Akkadian, Old Persian, Elamite and Sumerian, among others. This writing system was impressed into soft clay with a reed implement called a “stylus” and then the clay was baked in the sun to dry, forming hard tablets. Especially important pieces of writing might be baked in a kiln instead, to make them even more durable.
In The Book, Douglas McMurtrie refers to clay tablets as “the earliest true writing material that has survived,” and points out that the cultures who used this material--the peoples who lived in the area referred to today as Mesopotamia--probably used other, more perishable materials, such as papyrus, for everyday writing. However, for writing that was meant to last “there was no stone or other durable material available,” so the cultures of this area used clay.
The types of records that were kept on clay tablet varied greatly. They were probably first used for recording business transactions, but their usefulness soon meant clay tablets were also used for literature, and all types of literature are represented, both poetry and prose. Myths, tales, prayers and hymns were recorded on clay tablets, as were books on divination, law, history, science and just about any topic you might find in a library today. Even IOUs might be recorded on clay tablets.
Covers for Clay Books
To help protect important clay tablets the way a modern book has covers, the Assyrians of the 8th century BCE sometimes enclosed their writing in an outer ”envelope” of clay that was marked with a title. Clay tablets might also be stored in earthenware jars with clay labels attached. Many books were composed of more than one tablet, in which case the tablets were numbered and kept shelved in their proper order.
Though it is easy to see how clay tablets are different from what we think of today as a book, the complete history of books must include them. They may not be direct ancestors of the modern book in the physical sense, but in other ways as David Diringer notes in The Book Before Printing, “Mesopotamian clay tablets were books in the real sense of the word.”
Sources
Brookfield, Karen. Book. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 1993.
Diehl, Edith. Bookbinding: Its Background and Technique. New York and Toronto: Rinehart, 1946.
Diringer, David. The Book Before Printing: Ancient, Medieval and Oriental. 1953. New York: Dover, 1982.
McMurtrie, Douglas. The Book: The Story of Printing & Bookmaking. 1943. New York: Dorset, 1989.
 |
