In Mesopotamia, a shepherd counts his cattle. Not to forget the number, he points it on a clay tablet. This happened about 5,000 years ago: that's how the story of the book begins. On soft clay, men write their legends, their knowledge.
From the stone to the clay tablets
It is true among the first manifestations of writing is stone, grottos and monoliths. But naturally, writing about it was too heavy and soon the sharpness of man found other solutions: the clay.
In Mesopotamia, the texts were written on clay tablets, used in front and behind. The wet clay was marked with a small cut cane called a calamus, the equivalent of our pencil. After the table was put to dry in the sun, or, if the book was valuable, it was cooked in the oven to be more solid and thus be better preserved. In any case, cooked or not, the tables were finally placed side by side on the shelves of the temples.
On the other hand, the Egyptians created their own writing materials from the plant called papyrus: leaves cut into long strips and wider than, caked with mud of the Nile, became support roller writing. They are papyrus rolls, soft and light, instead of those heavier and unwieldy clay books.
The papyri were kept in libraries. The largest was that of Alexandria: it was founded in 304 BC and came to contain more than 500,000 scrolls of papyrus. By the fourth century BC the Greeks and Romans also began to use these papyri, which they call volumes.
But in Rome the papyrus was not the only support used. Schoolchildren wrote on light wood tablets, bound together in the form of notebooks and covered with a thin layer of wax, usually dark. This small format is more manageable than papyrus scrolls and cheaper but also more fragile; a good option for students.
In China, about 4,000 years ago there was also the need to write. Asia stands out above all for using nature when it comes to preserving its texts: vegetation facilitates the supports.
Among others, there are for example bamboo sheets joined with strips of leather or silk, easy to find materials in the area.
Easier to read were the texts on silk, a flexible and manageable material with which bands could be created several meters long, rolled into a cane. A curious fact: there were so many of these books that were sometimes confiscated to make tents and candles for cars during the wars.
The paper was also known in Asia, but it was belittled for a long time because it was considered a sign of poverty. Later they took up the paper, first rolled as they did with silk, and then the sheets folded into pages.
In Japan, the first stage of the book goes through the roll of paper. Chinese techniques arrive late to the island: in the 4th century, when in China they have already overcome.
For their part, the Indians used the widest part of the palm leaves to write: first they cooked them with milk, let them dry and polished them with shells to obtain the pothi (the "pages"). The result is rectangular pages that were used in horizontal format.
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