Writing material
Encyclopedia
Writing material refers to the materials that provide the surfaces on which humans use writing instruments to inscribe writings. The same materials can also be used for symbol
ic or representational
drawing
s. Building material
on which writings or drawings are produced are not included. The gross characterization of writing materials is by the material constituting the writing surface (for example, paper
) and the number, size, and usage and storage configuration of multiple surfaces (for example, paper sheets) into a single object (for example, a spiral notebook). Writing materials are often paired with specific types of writing instruments. Other important attributes of a writing material are its reusability, its permanence, and its resistance to fraudulent misuse.
walls of the caves on which the famous images were drawn. Another precursor were tally stick
s used to record the count of objects or the passage of discrete units of time (days). Tally sticks have been found made of wood
and of bone
. Knotted ropes and similar materials were also used for tallies. Such materials did not take a great deal of preparation for their use for drawing or writing. Animal hides
also had potential for use as a material for writing or drawing, although the drawings and writings may have been decorative or to convey status or religious meaning. Among the barks of trees, birch bark
is very well suited for use as a writing material and was so used both in Northern Europe and among native peoples in North America.
Three other classes materials were sometimes used for writing: clay
, wax
, cloth, and metal
. The value of metal for useful implements may have made it less than useful for practical writing and drawing. The very hardness of many metals that made them useful also made it an inconvenient material for many kinds of writing. But foils or sheets of soft metals like lead were usable. Lead sheets were used for curse tablets.
Cloth probably shared its mode of use with animal skins. Clay introduces the useful combination of extreme ease of making the inscription with the potential for rendering it fairly permanent. Unglazed pottery can readily accept inscription even after firing. Wax offers another novel combination of advantage: a reusable surface, easily inscribed and erased, and easy combination with materials like wood that give it durability. Stone tablets, clay and wooden writing tablets, and wax-covered wooden tablets
are some of the first specialized configurations of materials in flat surfaces specifically for writing.
Unglazed pottery shards were used almost as a kind of scratch paper, as ostraka, for tax receipts and, in Athens, to record the individual nominations of Greek leaders for ostracism.
The archaeological record contains either examples of these materials used for drawing or writing or it has indirect indications of their use for writing, drawing, or tallying.
was soon replaced by parchment
made by treating animal hide. A wide variety of parchments from various animal skins, with different texture, quality and hue were widely used for codexes, religious and cultural texts. This was replaced by the advent and increasing access and availability of paper
.
In eastern civilisations such as India
, the principal writing media from the time of Christ were birch bark
or bhurjapatra (Sanskrit) and dried palm leaves
. The use of paper began only after the 10th century AD. However birch bark and palm leaf continue to be used even today on a limited scale in a rural milieu for the use of horoscopes, wedding invitations and other cultural uses.
In China, the early material was animal bones, later silk, bamboo and wooden slips
, until the 2nd century when paper
was invented.
in Egypt. Parchment
, using sheepskins left after the wool was removed for cloth, was sometimes cheaper than papyrus, which had to be imported outside Egypt. With the invention of wood-pulp paper, the cost of writing material began a steady decline.
stimulated dramatic cost reduction efforts. Specialized materials developed for printing have also been made available for writing. The invention of the typewriter
was a major step, making possible reliable production of legible written materials by organizations and individual writers.
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
ic or representational
Representation (arts)
Representation is the use of signs that stand in for and take the place of something else. It is through representation that people organize the world and reality through the act of naming its elements...
drawing
Drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
s. Building material
Building material
Building material is any material which is used for a construction purpose. Many naturally occurring substances, such as clay, sand, wood and rocks, even twigs and leaves have been used to construct buildings. Apart from naturally occurring materials, many man-made products are in use, some more...
on which writings or drawings are produced are not included. The gross characterization of writing materials is by the material constituting the writing surface (for example, paper
Paper
Paper is a thin material mainly used for writing upon, printing upon, drawing or for packaging. It is produced by pressing together moist fibers, typically cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets....
) and the number, size, and usage and storage configuration of multiple surfaces (for example, paper sheets) into a single object (for example, a spiral notebook). Writing materials are often paired with specific types of writing instruments. Other important attributes of a writing material are its reusability, its permanence, and its resistance to fraudulent misuse.
Archaeology
Because drawing preceded writing, the first remains of writing materials are the stoneRock (geology)
In geology, rock or stone is a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals and/or mineraloids.The Earth's outer solid layer, the lithosphere, is made of rock. In general rocks are of three types, namely, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic...
walls of the caves on which the famous images were drawn. Another precursor were tally stick
Tally stick
A tally was an ancient memory aid device to record and document numbers, quantities, or even messages. Tally sticks first appear as notches carved on animal bones, in the Upper Paleolithic. A notable example is the Ishango Bone...
s used to record the count of objects or the passage of discrete units of time (days). Tally sticks have been found made of wood
Wood
Wood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...
and of bone
Bone
Bones are rigid organs that constitute part of the endoskeleton of vertebrates. They support, and protect the various organs of the body, produce red and white blood cells and store minerals. Bone tissue is a type of dense connective tissue...
. Knotted ropes and similar materials were also used for tallies. Such materials did not take a great deal of preparation for their use for drawing or writing. Animal hides
Hides
A hide is an animal skin treated for human use. Hides include leather from cattle and other livestock animals, alligator skins, snake skins for shoes and fashion accessories and furs from wild cats, mink and bears. In some areas, leather is produced on a domestic or small industrial scale, but most...
also had potential for use as a material for writing or drawing, although the drawings and writings may have been decorative or to convey status or religious meaning. Among the barks of trees, birch bark
Birch bark
Birch bark or birchbark is the bark of several Eurasian and North American birch trees of the genus Betula.The strong and water-resistant cardboard-like bark can be easily cut, bent, and sewn, which made it a valuable building, crafting, and writing material, since pre-historic times...
is very well suited for use as a writing material and was so used both in Northern Europe and among native peoples in North America.
Three other classes materials were sometimes used for writing: clay
Clay
Clay is a general term including many combinations of one or more clay minerals with traces of metal oxides and organic matter. Geologic clay deposits are mostly composed of phyllosilicate minerals containing variable amounts of water trapped in the mineral structure.- Formation :Clay minerals...
, wax
Wax
thumb|right|[[Cetyl palmitate]], a typical wax ester.Wax refers to a class of chemical compounds that are plastic near ambient temperatures. Characteristically, they melt above 45 °C to give a low viscosity liquid. Waxes are insoluble in water but soluble in organic, nonpolar solvents...
, cloth, and metal
Metal
A metal , is an element, compound, or alloy that is a good conductor of both electricity and heat. Metals are usually malleable and shiny, that is they reflect most of incident light...
. The value of metal for useful implements may have made it less than useful for practical writing and drawing. The very hardness of many metals that made them useful also made it an inconvenient material for many kinds of writing. But foils or sheets of soft metals like lead were usable. Lead sheets were used for curse tablets.
Cloth probably shared its mode of use with animal skins. Clay introduces the useful combination of extreme ease of making the inscription with the potential for rendering it fairly permanent. Unglazed pottery can readily accept inscription even after firing. Wax offers another novel combination of advantage: a reusable surface, easily inscribed and erased, and easy combination with materials like wood that give it durability. Stone tablets, clay and wooden writing tablets, and wax-covered wooden tablets
Wax tablet
A wax tablet is a tablet made of wood and covered with a layer of wax, often linked loosely to a cover tablet, as a "double-leaved" diptych. It was used as a reusable and portable writing surface in Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages...
are some of the first specialized configurations of materials in flat surfaces specifically for writing.
Unglazed pottery shards were used almost as a kind of scratch paper, as ostraka, for tax receipts and, in Athens, to record the individual nominations of Greek leaders for ostracism.
The archaeological record contains either examples of these materials used for drawing or writing or it has indirect indications of their use for writing, drawing, or tallying.
Common writing materials of the Middle Ages
In western civilisations, early use of papyrusPapyrus
Papyrus is a thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt....
was soon replaced by parchment
Parchment
Parchment is a thin material made from calfskin, sheepskin or goatskin, often split. Its most common use was as a material for writing on, for documents, notes, or the pages of a book, codex or manuscript. It is distinct from leather in that parchment is limed but not tanned; therefore, it is very...
made by treating animal hide. A wide variety of parchments from various animal skins, with different texture, quality and hue were widely used for codexes, religious and cultural texts. This was replaced by the advent and increasing access and availability of paper
Paper
Paper is a thin material mainly used for writing upon, printing upon, drawing or for packaging. It is produced by pressing together moist fibers, typically cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets....
.
In eastern civilisations such as India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, the principal writing media from the time of Christ were birch bark
Birch bark
Birch bark or birchbark is the bark of several Eurasian and North American birch trees of the genus Betula.The strong and water-resistant cardboard-like bark can be easily cut, bent, and sewn, which made it a valuable building, crafting, and writing material, since pre-historic times...
or bhurjapatra (Sanskrit) and dried palm leaves
Palm leaf manuscript
Palm leaf manuscripts are manuscripts made out of dried palm leaves. They served as the paper of the ancient world in parts of Asia as far back as the fifteenth century BCE. and possibly much earlier. They were used to record actual and mythical narratives in South Asia and in South East Asia...
. The use of paper began only after the 10th century AD. However birch bark and palm leaf continue to be used even today on a limited scale in a rural milieu for the use of horoscopes, wedding invitations and other cultural uses.
In China, the early material was animal bones, later silk, bamboo and wooden slips
Bamboo and wooden slips (writing material)
Bamboo and wooden slips were one of the main media for literacy in early China. The long, narrow strips of wood or bamboo typically carry a single column of brush-written text each, with space for several tens of Chinese characters. For longer texts, many slips may be bound together in sequence...
, until the 2nd century when paper
Paper
Paper is a thin material mainly used for writing upon, printing upon, drawing or for packaging. It is produced by pressing together moist fibers, typically cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, and drying them into flexible sheets....
was invented.
History
Writing seems to have become more widespread with the invention of papyrusPapyrus
Papyrus is a thick paper-like material produced from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge that was once abundant in the Nile Delta of Egypt....
in Egypt. Parchment
Parchment
Parchment is a thin material made from calfskin, sheepskin or goatskin, often split. Its most common use was as a material for writing on, for documents, notes, or the pages of a book, codex or manuscript. It is distinct from leather in that parchment is limed but not tanned; therefore, it is very...
, using sheepskins left after the wool was removed for cloth, was sometimes cheaper than papyrus, which had to be imported outside Egypt. With the invention of wood-pulp paper, the cost of writing material began a steady decline.
Printing
The dramatic increase in demand for paper associated with the printing pressPrinting press
A printing press is a device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium , thereby transferring the ink...
stimulated dramatic cost reduction efforts. Specialized materials developed for printing have also been made available for writing. The invention of the typewriter
Typewriter
A typewriter is a mechanical or electromechanical device with keys that, when pressed, cause characters to be printed on a medium, usually paper. Typically one character is printed per keypress, and the machine prints the characters by making ink impressions of type elements similar to the pieces...
was a major step, making possible reliable production of legible written materials by organizations and individual writers.
Electronic media
Electronic media have utilized the keyboard developed for the typewriter, electrical and electronic circuitry and storage devices, and the viewing screen developed for reading electronic signals to separate the medium for writing from the medium for reading.Further reading
- Harris, Roy (1985) The Origin of Writing. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
- Martin, Henri-Jean (1988) The History and Power of Writing, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.