pyrus as the most commonly used writing material. Parchment remained the leading writing material in the west until the introduction of paper fro the Middle East in the AD 1200’s. Paper largely replaced parchment about the time printing was being developed in Europe during the 1400’s. Parchment is still sometimes used for important documents. Ostraca was unglazed pottery popular with the common people as written in our textbook called Evidence. It is also know as potsherd. The forerunners of books were the clay tablets, impressed with a stylus, used by the Sumerians, Babylonians and other peoples of ancient Mesopotamia. More closely related to the modern book were the book rolls, or scrolls, of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. These scrolls consisted of sheets of papyrus, a paper like material made from the pounded pith of reeds growing in the Nile Delta, formed into a continuous strip and rolled around a stick. The strip, with the text written with a reed pen in narrow, closely spaced columns on one side, was unrolled as it was read. Writing instrumentsThere are numerous ways of how the people of he times would write. They had many different tools in which they would use to do so. Major developments in writing tools were the use of the brush and of the mallet and chisel by the Greeks. Writing found on ancient Greek pottery was done with a small round brush, and early Greek letters were carved on stone with a metal chisel driven by a mallet. Neither form of Greek writing shows any difference in the thickness of the lines of individual letters. The Romans, using broad-edged tools, introduced variations in the width of alphabetic marks. By the beginning of the 1st century AD, Roman-writing tools varied according to both the purpose of the writing and the surface used. Ephemeral writing and school exercises were often done with pointed styluses made of metal or bone on small wax-coated wooden tablets. Lett...
