Reign of the
Manuscript
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Studies in Literature
EXUBRIS UNIVERSITY OFCMJFORNIA
JOHN HENPY NASH LIBRARY
<$> SAN FRANCISCO <8>
PRESENTED TO THE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
ROBERT GORDON SPROUL, PRESIDENT
BY"
MR.ANDMRS.M1LTON S.RAY
CECILY, VIRGINIA ANDROSALYN RAY
RAY OIL BURNER COMPANY
THE REIGN OF THE
MANUSCRIPT
BY
PERRY WAYLAND SINKS, S.T.D.
Author of
"Popular Amusements and the Christian Life,"
"Jesus and the Children," "About Money"
"Whittlers of the Word of God,"
"In the Refiner's Fire"
And the books, especially the parchments.
II. Timothy 4:13
BOSTON: RICHARD G. BADGER
TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK co., LIMITED
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY RICHARD G. BADGER
All Rights Reserved
Made in the United States of America
The Gorham Press, Boston, U.S.A.
TO OUR BELOVED SONS AND DAUGHTERS
OUR EARNEST CARE AND CROWN OF JOY
AN APPRECIATION
I have examined the manuscript of your book with care.
The conception seems to me to be admirable, and new in
form of presentation. There is a great deal of valuable
material for which one would search a long time and then
not find it in the orderly and compact form which you have
given it. It seems to me that Sunday school teachers would
welcome it especially, and leaders of teacher-training classes
would desire to use it as an auxiliary text book. I trust it
will be widely read.
ERNEST BOURNER ALLEN
The Washington Street Congregational Church.
1917
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE EPOCHAL INVENTION OF PRINTING . . .11
II THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PRINTING PRESS . . 16
III THE PERIOD OF MANUSCRIPT LITERATURE . . 19
IV THE AMPLITUDE OF THE BIBLE IN MANUSCRIPT . 33
V THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE ... 40
VI MATERIALS EMBODYING LITERATURE .... 46
VII VARIETIES AND CHANCES IN THE MATERIALS OF
BOOKS 55
VIII PARCHMENT AND VELLUM 59
IX PAPYRUS 66
X PAPER AND ITS MANUFACTURE 72
XI OTHER MATERIALS OF LITERATURE .... 78
XII INKS 83
XIII IMPLEMENTS OF WRITING 87
XIV THE ART AND SCIENCE OF PALAEOGRAPHY . . 89
1 THE HIEROGLYPHIC WRITING 92
2 THE CUNEIFORM WRITING 99
3 THE ALPHABETIC WRITING 104
4 THE CLASSIC WRITING 112
5 THE Two GREAT STAGES OF CLASSIC WRITING 1 13
6 THE ANGLO-SAXON WRITING . . . :> . 115
7 PALAEOGRAPHY AND THE DATE OF LITERARY
PRODUCTIONS 117
8 CONTENTS
CHAPTU FACE
XV MECHANICAL AND ARTIFICIAL DEVICES OF LITERA-
TURE 120
XVI SOURCES OF THE BOOK-MAKING INDUSTRY . .127
XVII THE LITERARY PREEMINENCE OF ALEXANDRIA . 133
XVIII VARYING FORTUNES OF THE ALEXANDRIAN
LIBRARY 143
XIX CONSTANTINOPLE THE LATER CENTER OF LITERA-
TURE 146
XX MONASTERIES AND THE MONASTIC INSTITUTION . 154
INDEX. 172
THE REIGN OF THE
MANUSCRIPT
THE REIGN OF THE
MANUSCRIPT
THE EPOCHAL INVENTION OF PRINTING
THE invention of printing at about the middle
of the fifteenth century marks an epoch in the
world's literature and in the history of the human
race. Previous to this invention were spread out
the events, the scenes, and the achievements of
ancient and medieval times; after it came the
marvelous unfoldings of the modern age.
The introduction of typography or the art of
printing by means of movable types set in opera-
tion an instrumentality which, for multiplying the
effectiveness of all literary productions, is far beyond
all adequate conception; and this all apart from
the time of its origin and the person of its
originator.
Printing as an invention and an art for it is
both has been ascribed to the Chinese, and is
said to have been known from, or from before,
the dawn of the Christian Era. Mr. George H.
ii
12 The Reign of the Manuscript
Putnam states it as a fact that "Printing from solid
blocks was done in China as early as the first cen-
tury A. D.," and credits the art of printing from
movable types to a blacksmith who turned out books
in China toward the close of the tenth century,
A. D., or early in the eleventh. And a writer in
the Encylopedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition) as-
serts that printed books were common in China in
the tenth century, and that examples of xylographic
or block printing in Japan date from the period
of 754 to 770 A. D. However this may be, it re-
mains true that, in relation to the spread of litera-
ture and the development of civilization, typography
is occidental rather than oriental. Furthermore, we
need to distinguish between the block printing of
China and the great invention at the middle of the
fifteenth century. Comparing impressions from en-
graved blocks of wood with the type-printing of
Gutenberg, Professor Dobschiitz says: "People had
used woodcuts before his time. Engraving large
blocks of wood with pictures and letters, they printed
the so-called block-books as a cheap substitute for
illuminated manuscripts. Gutenberg's great idea
was that instead of using a woodcut block for the
page one might compose a page by using separate
movable letters, putting them together according to
the present need, then separating them again." *
It is generally conceded that the invention of print-
ing from movable types, as an epoch of human his-
'The Influence of the Bible on Civilisation, p. 119.
The Epochal Invention of Printing 13
tory, had its real beginning in Germany, dates from
the middle of the fifteenth century, and is associated
with one named Johannes Gutenberg.
Gutenberg was of patrician parentage and was
born at Mainz (the modern Mayence), Germany,
about 1400 A. D. His life was a prolonged strug-
gle with adverse circumstances. He died in 1468,
poor, childless, and almost friendless scarcely
dreaming that he had laid the foundations of a
benefaction which chronicled the turning-point of
universal history, set a permanent guide-post in the
world's progress, and proclaimed a new era in civili-
zation. But so it was.
While we are without definite information as to
how the first copies were printed, yet it is obvious
from Gutenberg's famous forty-two line Bible that
they used a mechanical press. The earliest picture
of a printing-press shows an upright wooden frame
with a screw post attachment by means of which the
required pressure for impression was obtained and
then reversed to release and remove the printed
sheet. This screw post was operated by a movable
bar. This kind of press continued to be used for a
hundred and fifty years. The first types were cut
from wood, but the ink used had a softening effect
thereupon and lead was substituted. Lead, in turn,
was found to be too soft a metal to resist the pres-
sure requisite for printing. After experimentation,
an alloy of antimony and lead proved to have the
adaptable strength and softness ; it was also capable
14 The Reign of the Manuscript
of delicate and clear-cut manipulation. These
metal types were first cast in sand and, later, in clay
molds. The ink used for printing with the Guten-
berg press was a mixture of linseed oil and lamp-
hlack and was applied to the type-form by means of
a "dabber" made of skin and stuffed with wool.
It is stated that the first types as used in China were
made of plastic clay; later, of copper; and then of
lead, inasmuch as copper had come to be utilized as
coin. (Putnam.)
It is worthy of our note in this connection that
the first important product of the printing-press was
the Bible; was devoted, as has been said, "to the
service of heaven." This first "production" was on
641 leaves of vellum, two columns to a page, and
forty-two lines to each column. "Probably," says
Professor Dobschiitz, "not more than 100 copies of
the Bible were printed, a third of these on parch-
ment. Out of thirty-one copies which have been
preserved, or, to speak more accurately, are known
as such, ten are luxuriously printed on parchment and
illuminated, each in a different way, but all very fine
and costly." 2 (One copy of Gutenberg's first
printed Bible was sold for $20,000.) The first
copy of this edition known to scholars the Latin
Vulgate was discovered long after (in 1760) in
the library of Cardinal Mazarin, whence its designa-
tion, "the Mazarin Bible." Nine other copies
which were upon vellum and a score that were
"The Influence of the Bible on Civilisation, p. 121.
The Epochal Invention of Printing 15
printed on paper (two of which are in New York
City) are all that are known to the bibliographers
of the first "edition" of the printed Bible. While
engaged in the production of this first book (which
required four years, 1453-1456, to complete)
Gutenberg printed smaller works school books and
the like for immediate financial returns. In this
first edition of the printed Bible the initial letters
were not struck off by press but were left, together
with the marginal decorations, for after illumina-
tion by hand. A Bible printed at Mainz in 1462 is
the first printed book that bears the date of its pro-
duction.
II
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PRINTING PRESS
THE printing-press, in many essential respects,
is the most significant invention of all human
history. It has touched and vitalized civilizations,
countries, nations, languages, and dialects. As an
invention it has contributed immeasurably to the
currency and the perpetuity of all literature. It also
sounded the doom of the written book. Hallam,
the Historian of the Middle Ages, says: "Since
the invention of printing the absolute extinction of
any considerable work seems a danger too improb-
able for apprehension. The press pours forth in
a few days a thousand volumes, which, scattered
like seeds in the air over the Republic of Europe,
could hardly be destroyed without the extirpation
of its inhabitants." And, concerning the exposure
to which the manuscript production of all previous
history was subjected, he says: "In the times of
antiquity manuscripts were copied with cost, labor,
and delay; and if the diffusion of knowledge be
measured by the multiplication of books (no unfair
standard) the most golden ages of ancient learning
could never bear the least comparison with the last
three centuries. The destruction of a few libraries
16
The Importance of the Printing Press 17
by accidental fire, the desolation of a few provinces
by unsparing and illiterate barbarians, might anni-
hilate every vestige of an author, or leave a few
scattered copies, which, from the public indifference
there was no inducement to multiply, exposed to
similar casualties in succeeding times." 1 In a word,
printing has the double advantage over writing of a
more rapid multiplication of copies and their in-
creased accuracy. But even with the increased ac-
curacy of printing, few books of considerable size
are issued in which errors are not to be found. It
is said to be the fact that, after incredible care on
the part of editors and professional proofreaders,
the offered reward of a guinea for each detected
error in the Oxford Revised Version of the Bible
brought several errors to light. (International
Stand. Bib. Encyclopedia.)
The invention of printing, through its associated
process of proof corrections, has virtually exempted
books from the mundane laws of decay and has
greatly aided as well in their preservation and their
widest circulation. This invention has made defi-
nite and immutable the records of the world since
then and it has contributed also to the purification
and renewal of the more ancient literary produc-
tions. Printing as an invention has given to an
edition of a particular work a measure of impor-
tance hundreds or thousands of times greater in
every respect save one, viz., the labor of transcrip-
1 Middle Ages, vol. i, p. 7.
1 8 The Reign of the Manuscript
tion, than that which had previously attached to the
production of a single book. The invention has
therefore involved and necessitated a proportion-
ately larger consideration in the making of a printed
book, lest defects and errors in the type-plates from
which the book is printed should become permanently
fixed in a thousand or ten thousand impressions
therefrom. (Isaac Taylor.) And it was printing
that made uniformity of text possible. Guizot esti-
mates the importance of this invention thus: "From
1436 to 1452, printing was invented: printing, the
theme of so much declamation, and so many common-
places, but the merit and the effect of which no com-
monplace nor any declamation can ever exhaust."
The invention of printing has peculiar significance
within the realm of religious life and knowledge;
for, in relation to the scripture text, to the spread
of religious intelligence and the progress of Chris-
tianity, and to the growth and stabilization of the
individual character, in a word, in relation to Re-
demption itself, who can apprehend, much less meas-
ure, the significance of this invention? Truly, the
Bible which ^wfolds the basis of our faith as the
bud does the blossom and the fruit, as well as un-
folds the way of life as the guide-post directs the
traveler on his journey, has come into the world for
man, and has come to stay. For the great discov-
eries and inventions, in wide areas of human investi-
gation, but brighten its pages and multiply its ca-
pacity to fulfill the purposes of God on the earth.
Ill
THE PERIOD OF MANUSCRIPT LITERATURE
THE age in which literature was disseminated
and preserved extended from the time of the
earliest intellectual compositions designed for com-
munication as the papyri hieroglyphics of ancient
Egypt and the leather and parchment rolls of the
early Persian and Jewish peoples; and included also
those compositions which had a limited circulating
character, like the tablets and cylinders of ancient
Assyria down to the time when the printing-press
was invented. This, inclusively, is the period of the
manuscript literature. Throughout this entire
period of the world's ongoing, for many hundreds
or some thousands of years, each and every kind
of production, whether in hieroglyph, cuneiform, or
alphabetic characters, was made by itself the pro-
ducer inscribing, painting, or printing (letter by let-
ter or character by character) through hundreds ahd
thousands of pages. u To the time of the invention
of printing, and until the printed book had driven
it out of the field, the manuscript was the vehicle
for the conservation and dissemination of literature
and discharges the function of a printed book."
A book has been defined as "any record of thought
19
20 The Reign of the Manuscript
in words." This may be a correct definition as far
as it relates to literature but not as it relates to the
"record of thought." There is a "record of
thought" independent of words and, perhaps, long
antedating the record in words of any language. A
word has been defined as "the sign of an idea."
But were there not "ideas" long before they were
communicated by words? If there are "songs
without words" may there not be, or, at least may
there not have been, "ideas without words"? An
affirmative answer is admirably illustrated and
the illustration is confirmatory by a group of six
great mural paintings by Mr. John W. Alexander,
in the Library of Congress at Washington. These
pictures illustrate historically the probable genesis
and evolution of the "book." The first painting is
of the rude Cairn or heap of stones piled up on the
seashore or elsewhere by prehistoric man in order
to commemorate some event or achievement, and
thus to stand as a "record" or landmark of a fact or
truth. The second picture is illustrative of Oral
Tradition, and represents the "narration" of facts
or doings by the word of mouth. The third is
called the Pictograph which consists in delineations
of events or experiences as drawn by some imple-
ment upon the surface of skins, or on the leaves or
bark of trees or plants, and by means of which there
was created a kind of permanent "record" of past
"happenings" or doings. The fourth is the Hiero-
glyphics which brings us to the historic period
The Period of Manuscript Literature 2 1
in which there were carved on the face of cliffs, on
the walls of structures of any kind, or on wood, the
pictured and, may be, progressive delineations of
events or ideas. The fifth is the Manuscripts or
the record contained in written language and which
was phonetic, syllabic, or alphabetic, the end to-
ward which all earlier stages of "record" tended.
The sixth and last picture is the Printing Press, the
embodiment and consummation of all the earlier
phases and stages in the "records of the past." It
is the obvious lesson from these great paintings that
a "record of thought" by means of "words" was
not fully achieved until the manuscript entered upon
its world-wide and enduring career, or, in which
"words" became the embodiment and depository of
permanent and communicable "ideas." The words
of Mr. E. C. Richardson are quoted as bearing
upon the period of manuscript literature: "Some of
the pictures on the cave walls of the neolithic age
seem to have the essential characteristics of books
and certainly the earliest clay tablets and inscrip-
tions do. These seem to carry back with certainty
to at least 4,200 B. C. By a thousand years later,
tablet books and inscriptions were common and
papyrus books seem to have been well begun. An-
other thousand years, or some time before Ham-
murabi, books of many sorts were numerous. At
the time of Abraham, books were common all over
Egypt, Babylonia, Palestine, and the eastern Medi-
terranean as far at least as Crete and Asia Minor.
22 The Reign of the Manuscript
In the time of Moses, whenever that may have been,
the alphabet had perhaps been invented, books were
common among all priestly and official classes, not
only in Babylonia, Asyria, and Egypt, but at least in
two or three scores of places in Palestine, north of
Syria and Cyprus." 1
The earliest literature of the ancient Greeks was
first preserved in oral traditions, folk-lore, and leg-
endary minstrelsy, and not in written language. It
is possible, nay, probable, that in Greece, Egypt,
China, Japan, and Persia also, folk-lore and folk-
tales were perpetuated through memory by means of
recitations, as in the instances of the rhapsodists
the class of professional reciters who publicly de-
claimed the Homeric literature and the folk-lore of
the ages with more or less artistic inflection or in-
tonation of the voice. The proclamations of rulers,
the compositions of poets and historians, and the
oracles of religion were anciently published orally,
often, by heralds, minstrels, and prophets. The
great Hebrew Lawgiver embodied a wide-spread
principle and practice in his final injunction to the
Hebrew nation : "Now therefore write ye this song
for you and teach it to the children of Israel; put it
in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for
me against the children of Israel/' (Deut. 31 119.)
Aside from narrower applications of this practice,
the great achievements and deliverences of the Is-
raelitish people were celebrated and perpetually
1 International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, art. "Books."
The Period of Manuscript Literature 23
memorialized in song and psalm. On the shores
of the Red Sea, Moses and his people sang their
song of deliverance from the hand of their enemy.
And when, at a later age, the Ark of the Covenant
was borne to its resting place within the Sacred City,
it was amidst the antiphonal chanting of the psalm
which David, himself, had composed for the oc-
casion. The psalms in themselves as one of the
purposes of their composition were a partial wit-
ness to the place and prominence of song and chant
in teaching religious truth and thus in keeping faith
alive on the earth. Plato states that the first laws
of all nations were composed in verse and sung.
There is a remembrancer in Plato's statement con-
cerning the first laws of nations of our own primi-
tive pedagogical methods within certain departments
of learning. And so, by tradition, recitative, min-
strelsy, and psalmody of wide application in the
early ages both a wider currency and a more
tenacious hold was taken by these laws, proclama-
tions, and truths upon the popular mind. Especially
so as the popular mind was deficient in the art of
reading, even when literature had been embodied in
writing. And this was true in both sacred and pro-
fane history. Thus, minstrelsy, chant, and tradi-
tion have performed an important function in
the beginnings of many ancient peoples. And,
strange as it may seem to us, Plato, notwithstanding
his voluminous writings and his place in the literary
world for nearly three thousand years, put a low
24 The Reign of the Manuscript
estimate on the importance of written as compared
with oral teaching.
The Greek classics the matchless monuments of
ancient literature as represented in the Iliad, the
Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns were preserved,
perpetuated, and disseminated for generations if not
for centuries, not by written records as later litera-
ture has been handed down by the written or printed
page but through ballads, minstrelsy, and recita-
tion. u The ^Eolic emigrants who settled in the
north-west of Asia-Minor brought with them the
warlike legends of their chiefs the Archaean
princes of old. These legends lived in the ballads
of the /Eolic minstrels, and from them passed south-
ward into Ionia, where the Ionian poets gradually
shaped them into higher artistic form." 2 "Ma-
haffy and Jevons are in accord," says Mr. Putnam,
u in pointing out that the effort of memory required
for the composition and transmission of long poems
without the aid of writing, while implying a power
never manifested among people possessing printed
books, is not in itself at all incredible. Memory
was equal to the task, and the earlier Greeks poems,
memorized by the authors as composed, were pre-
served by successive generations of bards." And
again he says, "It is to be borne in mind that the
(to us) extraordinary extent to which the Greeks
were able to develop their power of memorizing en-
abled them often to trust their memory where mod-
1 Encyclopedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition).
The Period of Manuscript Literature 25
ern students would be helpless without the written
(or printed) word. . . . The boys in school were
given as their daily task the memorizing of the
works of the poets, and what was begun under com-
pulsion appears to have been continued in later life
as a pleasure." 3 And in the preface of the book
from which the foregoing statements are quoted, the
author says, "It is evident that there were literary
productions in advance, and probably very far in
advance, of the discovery or evolution of literary
characters, and also long after the use of script by
authors, the greater portion of the public in all
ancient lands received their literature, not through
their eyes, but through their ears, not by reading
the text, but by listening to reciters, story-tellers, and
'rhapsodists.' ' (P. xiv.) We quote the follow-
ing from Mr. E. C. Richardson: "The Vedas
were, it is alleged, handed down for centuries by
a rigidly trained body of memorizers. The memor-
izing of Confucian books by Chinese students and
of the Koran by Moslem students is very exact." 4
"The office of reading," says Professor Dobschiitz,
"was esteemed so highly that it was regarded as
based on a special spiritual gift. . . . The reader had
to know his text almost entirely by heart to do it
well. From the 'Shepherd of Hermes/ a very in-
teresting book written by a Roman layman about 140
A. D., we learn that some people gathered often,
3 Authors and Their Public, pp. 63, 106.
4 International Standard Bible Ency., art. "Books."
26 The Reign of the Manuscript
probably daily, for the special purpose of common
reading and learning. But even granted that the
memory of these men was not spoiled by too much
reading, as is ours, so that by hearing they were
able to learn by heart (it is said of some rabbis that
they did not lose one word of all their master had
told them, and, in fact, the Talmudic literature was
transmitted orally for centuries), nevertheless, we
must assume that these Christians had their private
copies of the Bible at home." 5 Prescott says of the
pre-historic Mexico: "Besides the hieroglyphic maps,
the traditions of the country were embodied in songs
and hymns. . . . These were various, embracing the
mystic legends of a heroic age, the warlike achieve-
ments of their own, or the softer tales of love and
pleasure." 6 Of the early times of English litera-
ture, D'Israeli states that "before the people had
national books they had national songs," and that
"these songs and these fables, these proverbs and
these tales, all these were a library without
books." 7 And an anonymous author, recently trav-
eling in a remote portion of northern Albania, re-
cords it that "the wild, inaccessible country is un-
der various independent tribes, ruled by a chieftain
according to unwritten laws handed down orally
from remote ages." He also states that "the coun-
try has no written language and no literature." 8
8 The Influence of Bible on Civilisation, pp. 13, 14.
'The Conquest of Mexico, Vol. i, p. in.
7 Amenities of Literature.
'The Near East, p. 40.
The Period of Manuscript Literature 27
Thus, from very early if not from pre-historic
times, down to the present moment there have been
repeated if not continuous examples, and widespread
on the earth if not universal, of the place and im-
portance of oral tradition as a datum of history and
source of literature. Says Professor Sayce : "Ar-
chaeological research is constantly demonstrating how
dangerous it is to question or deny the veracity of
tradition or of an ancient record until we know all
the facts." 9 This much must be conceded, in hold-
ing that oral tradition is secondary to written
records. The reason for their secondary value is
obvious from the fact that u ear impressions tend
to be less exact than eye impressions because they
depend on a brief sense impression, while in reading
the eye lingers until the matter is understood.
Memory copy tends to fade away rapidly. This is
shown by the great variety in the related legends of
closely related tribes." 10
But from very early times just how early can-
not be determined, inasmuch as historiographers and
chronologists differ as to the beginning-times of writ-
ten literature in the respective civilizations literary
compositions of every sort, both sacred and pro-
fane, were recorded and disseminated, so far as they
were recorded and disseminated, by the tedious and
laborious process of writing or carving or impress-
ing by hand. Literature, almost entirely, through-
* Monument Facts, p. 60.
" International Standard Bible Ency., art "Books."
28 The Reign of the Manuscript
out this long period was contained in and continued
by the manuscripts. The cuneiform writing on tab-
lets and cylinders, though so voluminous in quantity,
seems to have been lost sight of and disregarded
for millenniums of years while they were a sealed lit-
erature; and the hieroglyphic writing of Egypt re-
mained undeciphered for, perhaps, an equal period of
time, down to the close of the eighteenth century.
It is the obvious fact, then, that, in an age of the
world's history when the printing-press with its al-
most limitless capacity for extending and preserving
literature was yet unknown, all literary productions
of all kinds including the Bible must have been
meager in the extreme as compared with the present
rapid increase of the printed page when steam and
heat and electricity are motive powers. A present-
generation occurrence will fitly and forcefully illus-
trate this proposition: It will be recalled to mind
that the Revised New Testament was issued simul-
taneously by the Oxford Press in both London and
Nc\v York on a designated day of 1881 ; it may not
be remembered, however, that an enterprising
Chicago daily had the entire New Testament tele-
graphed from New York, immediately at its issue
in that City, in order that it might be secured and
printed in Chicago in an enormous edition a few
hours in advance of the mails and express, put into
circulation and sold to the financial advantage of
that newspaper. Compare that achievement of
printing hundreds of thousands of the New Testa-
The Period of Manuscript Literature 29
ment, accomplished within a few hours' time, with
the transcription of a single copy of a book, and you
must have a new sense of the importance of the
printing-press in relation to all literature. And
contrast, if you will, the slow and inadequate com-
position and dissemination of intelligence by the la-
borious process of handwriting with the present-day
marvelous facilities for publication when the lino-
type is mostly employed in setting the type-plates for
periodicals and books, and when a single press will
print and fold about thirty thousand copies of a
metropolitan journal in one hour's time, and, from
both comparison and contrast, you must have a
higher appreciation for the printing-press as an in-
strumentality for the spreading of intelligence and
the progress of civilization.
Consider, too, the all but prohibitive cost of
books, when made by hand and estimated by the
labor of their making, and you must have a new
and a truer basis of valuation for manuscript litera-
ture. A few facts and incidents will illustrate and
enforce the foregoing observation: It required
nearly three years in the time of Wycliffe (who
died in 1384) for a copyist to transcribe the entire
Bible, and this labor cost the equivalent of $1,500.
Even tracts of Wycliffe, containing isolated texts of
scripture, were sold for forty or fifty dollars as the
money of that day would be estimated in our cur-
rency. (Christ in the Gospels.) It is credibly
stated that, in the century before Wycliffe's time,
30 The Reign of the Manuscript
"an ordinary folio volume probably cost 400 to 500
franks," or the sum of eighty to a hundred dollars
in present values. Very few books could be bought
at all, at some periods of time, for less than the
equivalent of one hundred dollars; and illuminated
or illustrated and embellished books, of which there
then were and there yet remain exquisite examples,
cost much more than this amount. And yet books
never seem to have been a "drug" upon the market.
And while it required four years for Gutenberg to
print his first edition of the Bible (consisting of a
hundred copies) yet the time employed in its mak-
ing, if compared with the time and labor requisite
for the transcription of a hundred copies of the
Bible by hand, would represent a net gain or saving,
in time, of nearly seventy-five years and, in money,
of more than a hundred thousand dollars. It would
represent other values: as uniformity of text,
economy of material, and larger aggregate immunity
from error. It is stated that the common price of
a Bible in the thirteenth century ran as high as $300,
and that in the fourteenth century Bibles were sold
for as much as $2,000. It is said that Bibles were
left as precious bequests to relatives and friends and
that they were even given as security for large debts.
The cost of materials and of the transcription of
books added immensely to their appraised valuation
in the different ages. We quote from a volume by
Mr. Geo. H. Putnam concerning books and their
making in pre-Christian times: "It appears from
The Period of Manuscript Literature 3 1
such references as we find to the prices paid that, as
compared with other luxuries, books remained very
costly up to the time of the Roman occupation of
Greece, or about 150 B. C. . . . Plato is reported
to have paid for three books of Philolaus, which
Dion bought for him in Sicily, three Attic talents,
equal in our currency to $3,240, and the equiva-
lent, of course, of a much larger sum, estimated in
its purchasing power for food. . . . The cost of
books depended, of course, largely upon the cost of
papyrus, for which Greece was dependent upon
Egypt. An inscription of the year 407 B. C., quoted
by Rangabe, gives the price of a sheet of papyrus
at one drachma and two oboli, the equivalent of
about twenty-five cents." 11 Ptolemy Philadelphus
is said to have authorized the giving of fifteen
talents of silver, the equivalent of about $16,200, in
addition to a shipment of corn, to the famishing
Athenians for certain authenticated copies of the
tragedies of ^Ischylus, Sophocles, and Euripides for
the Alexandrian Library. (Putnam.) And, later,
in the early part of the Christian Era, the price of
copying books was estimated by the number of lines
they contained. Diocletian, it is said, fixed the wage
of the copyers of his time at forty denarii or at about
twenty-five cents per one hundred lines. Late in the
thirteenth century, the price of transcribing a Bible
containing a commentary thereon, written in a fair
hand, ranged from one hundred and fifty to two
11 Authors and Their Public, pp. 93, 94.
32 The Reign of the Manuscript
hundred and fifty dollars, though earlier in that cen-
tury the purchasing power of money was so great
and labor so cheap that two arches of London
Bridge were built for the equivalent of a hundred
and twenty-five dollars, or less than the cost of
transcribing a Bible with a commentary. In 1272
the wages of a laboring-man were less than four
cents a day, while the price of a Bible at that time
was about one hundred and eighty dollars. (The
Book Record.) In other words, a common laborer
must then have toiled for thirteen years, according
to the current labor values of the time, in order to
secure the purchase-price of a Bible; though in an
age when few could read, this was not so large a
deprivation. Now, the American Bible Society can
furnish the entire Christian scriptures, creditably
bound in cloth with fair and readable type, for less
than twenty-five cents. A common laborer, who
generally has a rudimentary education at least, can
now secure the Bible at the purchase-price of two
hours' toil, or the New Testament for less than a
half-hour's toil; and, what is more, the common
laborer can, in most instances, not only read the
Bible but has the respite from excessive labor to do
so.
IV
THE AMPLITUDE OF THE BIBLE IN MANUSCRIPT
K TOTWITHSTANDING the more limited and
JJ% the less reliable sources of literature (includ-
ing the Bible) there was, nevertheless, substantial
and even abundant material of a historical character
from which to construct a bridge of the-continuous-
history-of-literature over and beyond the gulf of the
Dark Ages. The preservation and circulation of
literature, not only sacred but profane as well, by
means of written symbols, is not limited to one lan-
guage, nor to mediaeval times, nor to the Christian
Era but reaches back into a remote age. Consid-
ering the slow and laborious process of book-making
and the generally low stage of interest in literature
throughout wide areas of the earth and for lengthy
periods of time, the amplitude of the manuscript
productions of the world, as evidenced in the ancient
libraries and religious "houses" with their various
utilities, is one of the marvels of history a veritable
wonder of the world.
Note an incident of the New Testament record
which, within the realm of sacred literature, illus-
trates the process by which literature in general has
been disseminated: We are informed in one of the
33
34 The Reign of the Manuscript
books of the New Testament that, early in the
fourth decade of the first century (on the first Pente-
cost after the crucifixion of Jesus), "there were
dwelling at Jerusalem, Jews, devout men out of
every nation under heaven." And in the effusion of
the Holy Spirit which came upon them then and
there, they exclaimed amazed and bewildered
"How hear we every man, in our own tongue,
wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and
Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and
in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia,
Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts
of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome,
Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do
hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works
of God." (The Acts 2:8-11.) As many as fifteen
distinct nationalities and races were represented in
this assemblage. It was, indeed, a cosmopolitan
congregation and was composed of inhabitants from
the then known world ; and nothing is more probable
than that representatives of those gathered at Jeru-
salem were among the "three thousand" added to
that primitive company of believers on that occasion
and that, when many of them went back to their
native lands, they returned instinct with devotion to
their new-found Master, and that, in their own re-
spective and widely separated countries under the
impact of this new and inspiring hope which had
been begotten within them at Jerusalem they
sowed the seed which bore the precious fruitage of
The Amplitude of the Bible in Manuscript 35
evangelism in many lands throughout the early cen-
turies of our Era. Indeed, the wide dispersion of
the first Apostles and disciples of Jesus to the East,
to the West, and to the South into eastern Asia,
into Europe, and into northern Africa in the face
of efforts to repress, and over obstacles and against
contending forces everywhere, can best or only be
accounted for on some such historical presupposition
as is brought to our notice in the book of The Acts.
The first Apostles, in accordance with the terms
of the Great Commission, were supernaturally en-
dowed with "the gift of tongues" in order to be the
message-bearers of the truth unto the nations. But
this special endowment of Apostles did not extend
to the peoples unto whom the revealed truth was
sent nor, indeed, to their successors in commission.
The recipients of the gospel message wrote and
spoke in many languages and dialects, and thus there
was created a need and demand for the word of
God in the vernacular of many peoples. The many
versions made, soon afterwards, into the different
languages and dialects were the evidences of this
demand and of its urgency and pertinency when the
Apostles with their supernatural endowments were
no longer accessible or available. In evidence of
this fact we cite the career of the Apostle Paul. It
is an established fact of history that the propa-
gandistic labors of Paul, within a little more than a
quarter of a century, extended from Jerusalem, the
capital of the religious world, to Rome, the seat of
36 The Reign of the Manuscript
world-empire. This fact witnessed, indubitably, to
the westward growth of the Christian Church. And
we have traditions, literary, historical, and archas-
logical evidences which indicate, conclusively, that
others of the Apostles and early Christian teachers
went eastward and southward from that common
center at Jerusalem to Kgypt and the shores of the
Mediterranean and the Euxine; toward, if not unto,
Babylon, Armenia, 1 lindustan, and the coasts of
Ceylon. And in all these sections, over what may
be called "the known world" of the time, these
Christian propagandists Apostles and disciples of
Jesus planted churches which, many of them for
long after, became centers of evangelizing power.
The Apostles spoke and wrote in Greek, save as
they were moved by the Holy Spirit and prompted
by the needs of the people at Pentecost. But in
every place whither the Apostles were sent and
where converts to the Christian faith were gathered
through their preaching, there remained the oppor-
tunity for and the need of the scriptures which had
been the burden of the apostolic message, when
these first propagandists of Christianity had passed
on to other needy places. The after decline of the
Greek language as the spoken tongue and the de-
velopment or adoption of other tongues facilitated
in consequence the multiplication of the scriptures
or parts thereof, or communications from leaders
and teachers, in the vernacular of different races or
families of mankind. It is an interesting fact that,
The Amplitude of the Bible in Manuscript 37
during the first three centuries of the Christian Era,
and even when the Bible was interdicted, every
Christian who could possess it tried to own at least
some one book of the New Testament.
Furthermore, it is the fact sustained by scholar-
ship and history that numerous versions of the
scriptures were made, in the early Christian cen-
turies, into other languages and dialects; the Sla-
vonic, Arabic, Persic, and Armenian tongues; earlier
still into the Gothic tongue and the Ethiopic dialects
of Abyssinia; and still earlier into the Coptic, Latin,
and Syriac dialects. [It was the estimate of Gibbon,
the historian of the Roman Empire, that there were
probably six millions of avowed Christians when
Constantine began to patronize Christianity in 313
A. D. And, allowing that there was one copy of
the scriptures (of the New Testament or one of its
books) to each three hundred Christians not an
extravagant supposition, considering what the sacred
writings were to the early believers there were
probably not fewer than twenty thousand copies of
the New Testament or individual books or their
parts scattered throughout the world when Chris-
tianity came into royal favor in the Roman Empire.]
These unnumbered copies in Greek which long
continued to be the spoken language for a large part
of the world's population together with the vast
number of versions made from the original Greek
into the languages and dialects of adjacent and con-
temporaneous peoples in order to meet the need of
38 The Reign of the Manuscript
the first Christian Churches in wide areas of the
Roman Empire, down to and after its fall, suggests
the amplitude of the sacred writings in manuscript
during the early centuries of our Era. This is pro-
claimed as from the house-top in the large and con-
stantly increasing number of manuscripts, in differ-
ent languages, which have been rescued as relics
from an otherwise chaotic era. It is the estimate of
Dr. Marvin R. Vincent that no fewer than 3,829
manuscripts have been discovered and catalogued.
These have been gathered from many lands Tur-
key, Egypt, the ^gean region, Cyprus, Greece,
Italy, ancient Macedonia, Palestine, Africa, Spain,
the Sinaitic Peninsula, Asia Minor, and in fact, from
all Bible lands, and are preserved in the world's
greatest libraries.
Professor Dobschiitz summarizes the history of
the v ersions and translations of the Bible, through-
out the centuries to the invention of printing, as
follows: "In the first period we found the Bible
translated from the Greek into Latin, Syriac, Coptic;
in the next period Gothic, Armenian, Georgian,
Libyan, and Ethiopic were added, not to mention
several revisions of former translations. About 600
A. D. the Bible was known in eight languages; in
each of these there had been several attempts at
translating. There were different dialects, too; in
Coptic no less than five. The spread of Christianity
in the next period is shown by the fact that the Bible
is translated and this again several times into
The Amplitude of the Bible in Manuscript 39
Arabic and Slavonic from the Greek, and into the
German, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, and French from the
Latin rather should I say, parts of the Bible, for
it was only parts which people at this period tried
to translate." 1 And he shows us how this move-
ment to give the Bible to the people in their own
vernacular spread from the thirteenth century on
until the invention of printing into south-eastern
France, over Italy and Germany, into England and
Bohemia, and, possibly, into Scandinavia; and de-
clares, truly, "it is like a net thrown all over
Europe."
l The Influence of the Bible, Etc., pp. 124, 125.
Till. HUMAN ELEMI NT IN UT1.RATURE
Till Bible even as literature and both in its
origin and history is a human as well as a
divine book. It is human in that it is to man and for
man, and not to and for supernatural intelligences
or the conceived populations of other planets; it is
divine in that it is of God and from God. There is
a real sense in which the definition of the Bible as
given by Frederick W. Robertson is correct, "The
Bible is the thoughts of God in the words of men."
And we would hold that the Bible must be studied,
if in a scientific, intelligent, and reverent spirit,
under the two-fold conception that it is both a human
and a divine book. And we believe also that noth-
ing can ever be gained for the Bible, considering it
a supernatural book, by setting up any erroneous or
untenable hypotheses concerning its origin, char-
acter, or history on its behalf. And, moreover, the
Bible nowhere and never makes any such an appeal
on its own behalf, or pleads for exemption from the
accepted principles of historical" criticism. ''The
written word of God, like the Word which became
flesh," says Professor G. F. Wright, "must be
human in its manward aspect; for the written word
40
The Hitman Element in Literature 41
is divine thought manifest in human language as
Christ was God manifest in human flesh. As the
compound personality of Christ was conditioned by
the flesh, so the compound character of a written
revelation is conditioned by the nature of language.
As God in becoming incarnate did not take upon
Himself the form of angels but the seed of Abra-
ham, so a written revelation is not sent in a form
adapted to heavenly beings but in a form suited to
men." * And if the Bible, while it is from God, is
for man then it must be adapted to man's receptive
condition. If the Bible is truly a "revelation" then
it must "reveal"; which is only to say that it must
be given in terms or modes of expression adapted
or accessible to the human capacity; it must meet
man's condition at the time when the revelation is
given as well as his condition a thousand or ten
thousand years later; or, in other words, "revela-
tion" must "reveal." Revelation has thus been
progressive up to the period of its fulness or up to
the cycle of its completion, with an expansive ca-
pacity for all future time. Progressive capacity is
essential to the conception of a revelation that is
universal and final. Borrowing the fine expression
of Professor A. E. Bruce, revelation "must take the
recipients of benefits along with it, and move at a
pace with which they can keep up." Thus, revela-
tion in its methods accords with nature in that it
took the form of an historical movement and was
1 Divine Authority of the Bible, p. 103.
42 The Reign of the Manuscript
subject to the laws of periodic development. "The
redemptive purpose of God," declares Professor
Bruce, "was not ushered into the world a full-grown
fact; it evolved itself by a regular process of growth,
and the process was marked by three salient fea-
tures: slow movement, partial action, and advance
from the more or less imperfect, not only in knowl-
edge, but also in morality." And he says, further,
"God had to teach Israel to walk in the paths of
righteousness like a nurse taking a child by the arms,
and had to exercise a nurse-like condescension and
patience in connection with the self-imposed task of
Israel's moral education, and to become as a child
Himself, speaking in broken language and giving
laws of a very rude and primitive character adapted
to the condition of the pupil." ~
The Bible is, truly, a supernatural book. One
once confessed to an abounding confidence in the
plenary inspiration of the scriptures in that he
"accepted the Bible from 'lid' to 'lid' and includ-
ing the 'lid.' ' But the supernaturalism which we
believe belongs to or inheres in the Bible does not
attach to the "lids" to the materials by means of
which the scriptures, as literature, have been com-
municated and preserved from age to age. (The
fact which is here suggested is all apart from the
question of inspiration.) God wastes no energies
in a miraculous preservation of the materials of
books, not even of the materials of the "good
1 The- Chief End jp$ Revelation, pp. 99, $34.
The Human Element in Literature 43
Book." God does not violate, we think, the great
law of "parsimony" by exerting either superfluous
or supernatural energies for the accomplishment of
His purposes. It was only when King Jehoiakim
in his blind rage and folly cut the "roll" in pieces
and burnt its mutilated fragments, that the super-
natural energies were called into requisition to
restore the "words of the book, which Jehoiakim,
king of Judah, had burned with fire." (Jeremiah
36:32.) God has, however, guarded, preserved,
and treasured and in a marvelous, not to say
supernatural manner the "revelation" contained in
the "good Book" so that no age has been left with-
out its ample and unimpeachable witness. And this
is all that we may reasonably demand for a revela-
tion that is intended and destined to be authoritative,
universal, and final. The destruction of the ma-
terials of books does not weigh if the contents are
preserved. The impious King of Judah did not
destroy the holy law of God when he utterly de-
stroyed the parchment upon which it was inscribed.
What mattered it if the "roll" was consumed since
God had His faithful prophet and his scribe to pro-
duce another and ampler roll? And what matters
it if a given copy, or any number of copies of a book,
or of the Bible, be lost or destroyed so long as other
unnumbered copies of the same are preserved be-
yond the reach of bad men or the destructive forces
of corroding and destroying time? It does not mat-
ter, supremely, since it is the contents and not the
44 The Reign of the Manuscript
materials of a book that claims the supreme con-
sideration.
The materials which embody the divine revela-
tion have ever been subject to precisely the same
exposures and vicissitudes of alternating fortune and
misfortune as those to which all other literary pro-
ductions have been subjected. And, furthermore,
it is the well-known fact that the "autograph" copies
or the first writings of the New Testament are all
lost, and, probably, without the remotest hope of
recovery. They are not even mentioned by the
authors and writers who succeeded the Apostles as
having ever been seen by them. The conclusion is
forced upon us that these first copies of the New
Testament writings probably all perished before the
close of the first century. [The "paper" then in
common use was that made from the Egyptian
papyrus plant, and this all perished except that which
had been fortuitously (but not miraculously) pre-
served in Egyptian tombs and mummy-cases or
under lava-beds at Pompeii and Herculaneum. The
oldest of the existing copies of the scriptures are the
Sinaitic and the Vatican Manuscripts which were
written in the Greek language on vellum parchment
at about the middle of the fourth century, and are
thus above fifteen and a half centuries old.] In
view of this destruction and loss of the originals of
the New Testament writings, we may "restore" the
"autographs" of our scriptures only by the methods
which apply equally to all literature, and which are
The Human Element in Literature 45
adequate to the approximate "restoration" of the
scripture text, viz., by the translation or counter-
translation of later copies and the versions, back to
the earlier sources; and thus come, substantially, to
the original writings.
VI
MATERIALS EMBODYING LITERATURE
THE substances upon which literature has been
embodied and by means of which has been pre-
served and disseminated are matters of far more
importance than would be supposed at a superficial
reflection. They call for a larger consideration than
the modern state and stage of the book-making in-
dustry might seem to warrant. Now, if a book is
worn out, accidentally destroyed, or "borrowed" by
some "good book-keeper" and not returned, it is
usually an easy and simple matter to secure another.
Not so, previous to the invention of printing. For
then, the cost and time required to make a book "by
hand" gave to each single copy a distinct individu-
ality and also a correspondingly increased impor-
tance.
The two chief desiderata of a manuscript book
of a written production which was intended to give
currency to a writer's thoughts and at the same time
to sexve as a more or less permanent depository of
them are legibility and durability. He who writes
for the publicity of his ideas will not write on stone
nor on clay; and he who writes for the preservation
of his ideas will not write on ice or dust. And he
46
Materials Embodying Literature 47
who writes that his thoughts may be read and under-
stood will not write with a scrawl nor in an illegible
"hand. 11
The foregoing observations prompt to the sug-
gestion that not only the materials upon which a
literary production is impressed or imprinted must
be capable of easy conveyance or circulation but also
that the writing itself must be legible, and that the
materials employed must be proof to the utmost at-
tainable extent against the obliterations of use and
time. Necessarily, therefore, an achievement so
laborious as the transcription of a written volume
of whatever form (and especially of the Bible by
reason of its size, character, and importance) called
for a correspondingly larger concern and care as to
the materials employed (including both the ink and
the substance written upon) than would be required
in the making of a printed book wherein each sep-
arate volume but duplicates hundreds and thousands
of other volumes made from the same plates. This
requirement partly explains the care with which the
ancient manuscripts were made or copied. It was
this fact that made every copyist's work distinc-
tively individualistic.
The permanency and durability of books is largely
a matter of relativity and fortuity. We quote from
Mr. E. C. Richardson concerning the factors affect-
ing the survival of books: "The average chance of
an individual book for long life depends ( i ) on the
intrinsic durability of its material, or its ability to
48 The Reign of the Manuscript
resist hostile environment, (2) on isolation." He
says, further: "The enemies to which books are
exposed are various: wind, fire, moisture, mold,
human negligence, vandalism, and human use. Some
materials are naturally more durable than others.
Stone and metal inscriptions survive better than
wood or clay, vellum than papyrus or paper. On
the other hand, however, if isolated or protected
from hostile environment, very fragile material may
outlast more substantial. Papyrus has survived in
the mounds of Egypt, and unbaked clay tablets in
the mounds of Babylonia, while millions of stone
and metal inscriptions written thousands of years
later have already perished. Here the factor of
isolation comes in. Fire and pillage, moth and rust,
and the bookworm destroy for the most part with-
out respect of persons. . . . An unbaked tablet
which has survived 5,000 years under rubbish may
crumble to dust in five years after it has been dug
up and exposed to air. The general law is that
value tends to preserve, and it has been remarked
that all the oldest codices which have survived in
free environment are sumptuous copies. Literary
value on the other hand is, on the whole, a factor
of destruction for the individual rather than for
survival. The better a book is the more it is read,
and the more it is read, the faster it wears out. The
worthless book on the top shelf outlasts all the
rest." 1
1 International Standard Bible Ency., art. "Books."
Materials Embodying Literature 49
There is a department connected with some of
the libraries of this or other countries devoted to
the specific mission of repairing dilapidated or time-
worn manuscripts or documents which, for one rea-
son or another, it is desirable to preserve. The
following is reported to be the method followed at
the Wisconsin Historical Library: The first thing
done is to place the document between wet news-
papers under weight and leave them for several
hours. This removes the creases and the dirt.
They are then put between wood pulp boards and
left for a day and then between blotters to com-
plete the drying process. The next step is to repair
the paper. The paper in some of these documents
is so old and fragile that rough handling will de-
stroy. Therefore it is strengthened by a sort of
transparent cloth on both sides of the paper. With
some, letters need to be mended along the edges with
parchment paper. To cover holes a piece of paper
is glued over the edges and is left larger than the
holes until dry. It is then cut down to the proper
size, and the edges sandpapered until it is smooth.
It is then ready for mounting or filing for a con-
tinued lease of existence.
The world is greatly indebted to the early Jewish
teachers for the survival of ancient written docu-
ments. The ancient Jew brought a religious devo-
tion to the production of his sacred books a devo-
tion bordering on veneration, as is shown conclu-
sively by the "rules" which governed him in their
50 The Reign of the Manuscript
transcription. These are indicated in the following
"directions'* to copyists, quoted from an old vol-
ume: "A book of the law wanting but one letter,
with one letter too much, or, with an error in one
single letter; written with anything but ink; or made
from the skin of an unclean animal; or on parch-
ment not purposely prepared for that use, or pre-
pared by any but an Israelite; or on parchment tied
together by 'unclean' strings, shall be holden to be
corrupt. It was the rule that no word should be
written without a line first drawn on the parchment;
no word to be written 'by heart,' or without having
been first orally pronounced by the writer; that no
letter should be joined to another letter; and that,
if the blank space cannot be seen all round each let-
ter, the roll shall be 'corrupt.' There were settled
rules as to the space to be left between each letter,
and word, and section." 2 In addition to these rules
we learn from another and authentic source that
there were special regulations for the margins, and
for the number of lines to the page, or to the col-
umn of the roll; that the sheet of the book must be
sewed together with threads made of the dried ten-
dons of clean beasts; that every sheet of the roll
must be sewed to the next that even one loose sheet
makes a roll "unfit"; and that care must be taken
that the needle does not pierce the letters. It is a
requirement that when a scribe has begun to write
the name of God he must not be interrupted till he
2 Prideau's Connections.
Materials Embodying Literature 51
has finished it; that a writing, when set aside to dry,
should be covered with a cloth to protect it from
dust; and that to turn a writing downward is shame-
ful. It was the emphatic injunction that scrupulous
care must be taken in writing the Names of God:
before writing every name of the Deity, the scribe
must say, "I intend to write the Holy frame" ; other-
wise the roll would be unfit. 8
Scarcely less of concern was displayed by the
early Christians in copying their sacred books and
even the classic literature. In certain periods of the
Middle Ages the value and sanctity attributed to the
transcription of a book is set forth in the fact that
in many abbeys every Novice' "was expected to
bring on the day of his profession as a 'religious' a
volume of considerable size which he had carefully
copied by his own hands," somewhat as a "the/is"
is a requirement for graduation by some modern
institutions of learning.
This deep concern which a copyist felt for his
work for he had a solicitude that his copy might
endure both time and use and long remain..,as a
monument to himself lent an artistic taste) and,
often, a religious devotion to the creditable tran-
scription of a book, especially to the copying of the
Bible or a part of the Bible. This devotion and
concern (often witnessed unto in annotations in the
margin or at the close of the transcribed portion of
the Bible) made a copyist scrupulously honest and
3 The Jewish Encyclopedia.
52 The Reign of the Manuscript
painstaking in his task, and was often disclosed in
beautiful ornamentation and artistic embellishments.
As a "royal" example, the Codex Rossancnsis, a
manuscript containing the gospels of Matthew and
Mark, made, possibly, in the sixth century, though
discovered in Calabria only in 1879, is written in
silver characters on purple-colored vellum and has
twelve miniatures of great interest in the history of
Byzantine art. Another manuscript of the gospels
(Codex "N"), the leaves of which are scattered in
London, Rome, Vienna, Petrograd, and its native
home (Patmos), is also written on purple-dyed vel-
lum in silver and gold. There are fragmentary
remains of a sumptuous volume of the Eusebian
Canons which are written on gilt vellum and beauti-
fully ornamented. In Trinity college, Dublin, there
is a famous volume the Book of Kells. This is
conceded to be in some respects the finest ancient
manuscript in Europe, having no equal as a speci-
men of Irish illumination and writing. It is a copy
of the Gospels, written, it is believed, about the
sixth century and was the possession of the Church
of Kells until it came into the custody of Trinity
college in 1 66 1. A space of this book measuring
three-quarters of an inch by one-half an inch, ex-
amined under a powerful microscope, was found to
contain no fewer than one hundred and fifty-eight
interlacements of a slender ribbon pattern formed
with white lines edged by black. Professor George
F. Wright refers to a remarkable Spanish manu-
Materials Embodying Literature 53
script for which the late Mr. J. P. Morgan paid the
sum of $30,000 in 1910. It is an Old Latin manu-
script of the New Testament, the work of a Spanish
Presbyter named Beatus, and by whose name the
codex is known, written in the latter part of the
eighth century. "What attracted Mr. Morgan was
the size and beauty of the work. It was a large
folio containing 184 leaves of thick vellum, each
leaf measuring 21 by 14 inches; its binding was
elabox ne; and it contained 1 10 richly colored minia-
tures. 4
Various factors religious, artistic, and commer-
cial contributed to this movement toward embel-
lishment. The growing wealth, at times, and the
higher standards of civilization at certain stages of
the Middle Ages created new demands for illumi-
nated and embellished manuscripts. There were
manuscripts with representations in water-colors in
the lower margin; little pictures were inserted into
the text of books; and initial letters of books or of
their chapters not only reflected the writer's artistic
accomplishments but also served as expository teach-
ing upon the text itself. Of early achievements in
this direction, Professor Dobschiitz tells us that
there were examples of sumptuous books of finest
parchment in which the text was not only written in
gold and silver letters but with margins covered
with beautiful paintings, as in the "Beatus" manu-
script, and cites as a conspicuous example, "A copy
4 Story of My Life and Work, pp. 403, 404.
54 The Reign of the Manuscript
of Genesis in Greek at the Vienna library has forty-
eight water-colors, one at the bottom of each page,
telling the same story as the text. . . . And this
manuscript does not stand alone; it is but one of a
large group of illuminated manuscripts. This
sumptuous appearance may be taken as a sign of the
value attached to the Bible. Persecuted hitherto, it
became the ruler of the Christian empire, invested
with all the glory of royalty." 5 It has been said
concerning manuscript books that "the missals and
office books, and the prayer books made for royal
personages at this time" (during the thirteenth cen-
tury) u are yet counted among the best examples of
book-making the world has ever seen." Of a rare
and very valuable collection of books and manu-
scripts assembled by the late Mr. J. P. Morgan
under the discriminating and painstaking direction
of a Columbia University professor, a writer in a
New York daily says: "Massive jeweled manu-
script covers, a thousand and more years old, are
there, and marvelous hand-illuminated manuscripts,
their gorgeous colorings and exquisite workman-
ship, the result of years of toil by ancient monks
and mediaeval artists. Many of them were once the
dearest pride and delight of kings and emperors and
popes. Only potentates such as these could com-
mand the services of the men who produced most of
the collection."
'The Influence of the Bible, Etc, pp. 30, 31.
VII
VARIETIES AND CHANGES IN THE MATERIALS OF
BOOKS
THE materials upon which literature has been
embodied, and the changes and improvements
which these materials have undergone from age to
age, opens up one of the most interesting chapters
of bibliographical science and of the world's history.
A knowledge of the materials successively used in
the book-making industry, and of the improvements
through which these have continually passed, to-
gether with the various kinds of the completed
products, the style of writing (there is a "gait" of
hand as well as of foot) , and certain distinguishable
characteristics of the literature of the different
periods, all assist in fixing with approximate cer-
tainty the date at which a manuscript was produced.
In considering the materials of books it needs to
be held in mind that the time of a manuscript's pro-
duction was seldom affixed to it until a late date;
that must be determined or inferred from collateral
data. We would instance the "water marks" of
manufactured paper as an example of these col-
lateral data helping to determine the age of a manu-
script. It is a well known fact that every paper
55
56 The Reign of the Manuscript
manufactory has its own individual mark of identi-
fication for its output. This is its protective "water
mark" and is impressed in the texture or fiber of
every sheet made, and at regular intervals in the
sheet. This is by no means an exclusively modern
device of authentication, for these were known as
early as the thirteenth century. In the fifteenth cen-
tury, when the quality of the paper was improved,
the "water marks" became more elaborate and, as
early as the sixteenth century, the name of the maker
of the paper was inserted. These marks of identi-
fication greatly aid the antiquarian student in fixing
the date of any writing. They are often, too, of
legal significance, inasmuch as important cases in
courts of law in our times and earlier times have
been known to turn upon such facts of evidence as
the "water marks" of the paper used in documents,
as other cases have turned upon the kind or quality
of the ink or the "hand" in which the documents at
issue were written. An incident narrated in a book
by Dr. N. D. Hillis may not be historical though it
does illustrate what has often actually occurred:
"In looking at the thick white paper, upon a sheet
of which the guide said that the deed had been writ-
ten, John noticed that it was the usual parchment
paper of the time a paper strong, and made of
linen, so that it might survive the rough usage of
the settler's cabin. Holding it up between his eyes
and the sun he noticed this water-mark and stamp
'C. Saur, Philadelphia, 1787.' The purported deed
Varieties and Changes in Materials of Books 57
was dated 1740." l The press dispatches some time
ago reported a case before the Senate in one of our
states in which the conviction or the acquittal of the
defendant turned, largely, upon the quality of the
ink which had been used in signing a certain check,
given in payment of a claim. It was admitted by
experts on both sides that the ink employed in sign-
ing the check was of a different quality than that
upon which the stub of the check had been filled out,
and that the writing on stub and check, respectively,
had not been made at the same time.
It is evident then that the materials themselves
and the changes through which they passed in the
process of their improvement, the ink and its con-
stituents, the u hand" of the writer and, as well, the
peculiarities of the author's style of thought and
expression as evidenced by his other and well-known
composition (there is a u gait" of mind as well as
of walk) all become, so to speak, the "water
marks" which determine or help to determine, ap-
proximately, the time at which a book or writing
was made or produced. To illustrate: If the anti-
quarian should "unearth" a manuscript having evi-
dences of great antiquity and should ascertain that
it was written upon "cotton paper" that fact would
assure him, without any additional evidence what-
ever, that the document could not be much, if any,
earlier than the ninth century, for it was then that
cotton paper began to displace the Egyptian papyrus.
1 The Quest of John Chapman.
5 6 The Reign of the Manuscript
Or, if the writing was upon a linen paper" then he
would be assured by the same kind of evidence that,
probably, it was not made before the fourteenth
century when paper made from linen rags first came
into more common use.
VIII
PARCHMENT AND VELLUM
skins of animals sheep, lambs, and
and, sometimes, of antelopes, goats,
asses, and swine have served, and from the earliest
pse of written language, as the favored and the best
material upon which to write. By different modes
of treatment the skins of animals were converted
into "leather," "parchment," and Vellum," respec-
tively, as the finished product. Leather, tanned
soft, and usually dyexi red or yellow, was the ma-
terial earliest used by the Hebrews. Upon this they
wrote their statutes and religious history, and espe-
cially the Scroll of the Law. The Yemanite Rolls
(Pentateuch and other writings) are all of red skin;
and the Pentateuch rolls for the Jews of a certain
section of China are of white leather. 1 According
to Ctesias and Herodotus, the royal archives of
ancient Persia were written on leather. Extant
leather rolls are ascribed to the date of about 2,000
B. C. And there are treasured skin-rolls, in the
British Museum arfd elsewhere, which are believed
to have been prepared and inscribed as early as
1,500 B. C.
x The Jewish Encyclopedia.
59
60 The Reign of the Manuscript
Parchment, also made from skins, was prepared
by a different process than the tanning of leather.
The word "parchment" comes from the name of the
city of ancient Mysia Pergamos or Pergamum
where its manufacture was originated and was car-
ried on for centuries. Parchment, though known
for centuries before the Christian Era, was used by
the Greek and Roman writers to only a limited ex-
tent for a period of some centuries, owing to their
continued preference for the papyrus production.
The more general use of parchment was finally ac-
celerated by necessity, and on this wise : Ptolemy
Philadelphus (prompted perhaps by envy for the
growing literary achievements of the kings of Per-
gamos and by jealousy for the supremacy of Alex-
andria) laid an embargo upon the exportation of
the papyrus, then exclusively produced in Egypt.
This restriction necessitated and accelerated the
manufacture of parchment and thus stimulated its
use, though papyrus continued to be, until after the
beginning of the Christian Era, the more common
and the cheaper though less durable material for
receiving and perpetuating literature.
Parchment is not only one of the earliest and
the very best but next to the baked tablets, the
most durable material for all written productions.
The employment of parchment to record and pre-
serve literature spread from Pergamos throughout
Europe and, because of its superior quality and its
greater durability, came into the preeminence which
Parchment and Vellum 61
it held until the invention of paper. Most of the
existing manuscripts of a greater age than the sixth
century are written on parchment. Indeed, its use
for important and valuable documents, as embossed
records and resolutions of respect, and diplomas and
the like, has survived unto the present time.
Vellum is the designation for a finer quality of
writing material made from calf skins or skins of
antelopes. Some of the oldest, best, and clearest of
the existing copies of the Bible notably, the Vati-
can and the Sinaitic manuscripts are written on
vellum.
The skins of animals, however prepared to re-
ceive writing, were cut into strips and, at the
first, were fastened together in a continuous roll
sometimes to the extent of a hundred feet or more
in length. The last strip of the manuscript was
attached to a reed or stick, called the umbilicus,
around which, somewhat as a mounted map or a
window-shade, the whole length was rolled. It is
to be remembered that the first books, whether of
parchment or papyrus, were not made up of leaves
and pages but of rolls were, literally, 'Volumes."
These rolls were written usually on but one side of
the material, in narrow, cross-wise columns. A vol-
ume was unrolled and re-rolled, as read; was
"closed" by rolling it up around the umbilicus; and
was "fastened" by tieing it with a string was often
"sealed" with wax. [In the book of Revelation
(5:7-9) there is portrayed the breaking of the
62 The Reign of the Manuscript
"seals" in order to read the contents of the book.]
The Hebrew scriptures, used in the synagogue wor-
ship, were "books" of this form, as likewise was
the "book" referred to in the fortieth psalm, "In
the volume of the 'book' it is written of me."
It is not determinable, either at what time or for
what reasons, the change was made in the form of
the manuscript from the continuous roll to the book
of separate leaves. As we have noted, it is the fact
that "necessity is the mother of invention," the
world over and throughout history. It is also the
fact that the improvements of inventions have ever
been the order of development, inasmuch as few
inventions, if any, in any age or realm, have ever
come into existence full-grown are other than
improvements, and sometimes after long and patient
and untiring persistence, upon earlier and it may be
crude and imperfect originals. Thus the improve-
ments in the preparation of skins and papyrus, mak-
ing it possible to use both sides of the materials,
doubtless facilitated the transition to the book of
leaves and pages. This change was gradual and
was furthered or even occasioned it may be by utili-
tarian demands, or was prompted by economy in
the use of book-making materials which were con-
stantly enhancing in value. Professor Dobschiitz
has this to say concerning the change from the
papyrus roll to the parchment book: "The use of
this latter form seems to originate in the law schools;
the codex, or parchment book, is at first the desig-
Parchment and Vellum 63
nation of a Roman law-book. But at an early date
the Christian Church adopted this form as the more
convenient one and gave it its circulation." 2 The
fact that parchment and vellum increased in cost
and became less and less available as writing ma-
terial led to the custom, during periods of the Mid-
dle Ages, of transcribing one work over another,
and after the earlier had been obliterated. This
"composite" writing was a "palimpsest," called,
technically, a codex rescriptus, and many times ob-
scured or destroyed an ancient and valuable pro-
duction. Some of these "palimpsests," though frag-
ments of ancient literature, both sacred and classic,
are valuable and have been "recovered" or restored
by the use of chemical re-agents coupled with the
all but infinite patience of the decipherers. A com-
mentary of the Psalms by Augustine, written over
Cicero's "De Republica," and a treatise of little
value by a Syrian monk, Ephraem, superimposing a
valuable fifth century manuscript of the New Testa-
ment, are examples of palimpsests in classic and
Biblical literature. Some of the writings of Livy
and certain books of Pliny the Younger have been
recovered from superimposed writings of little or no
historical value. Two facts concerning the change
in the form of manuscript books are demonstrable :
( i ) That the first books were "rolls" or "volumes" ;
and (2) that, early in the Christian Era, books of
"leaves" had come into relatively common use.
*The Influence of the Bible, Etc., p. 29.
64 The Reign of the Manuscript
It is not an insignificant fact that the earliest
manuscripts in the form of books with leaves show
the largest number of columns to a page approxi-
mating thus more nearly the continuous columns of
the earlier "roll" book. In other words, the earliest
and best known of the Greek manuscripts of the
Bible the manuscripts which are most relied upon
by the scholars for all critical, scriptural study
the codices known, respectively, as the " x ," or the
Sinaitic, treasured at Petrograd; the "B," or the
Vatican, kept at Rome; the "A," or the Alexandrian,
deposited in the Manuscript Room of the British
Museum; and the "C," or the Ephraem, the famous
''palimpsest" preserved in the National Library at
Paris (all of them written in the fourth and fifth
centuries) are "books" of leaves the one most
similar to the ancient "roll" book in form and
arrangement of the pages being, presumably, the
oldest.
It has relation to our discussion and is of illustra-
tive interest and value while considering ancient
literature to note, in this connection, some char-
acteristics of these preeminent manuscripts of the
Bible to which we have just alluded. The Sinaitic
Manuscript one of the most valuable copies of the
scriptures in the Greek tongue was unearthed by
Professor Tischendorf in the convent of St. Cath-
arine, Mt. Sinai, in 1859, and dates, in the judg-
ment of the critics, from the middle of the fourth
century A. D. This Manuscript is transcribed on
Parchment and Vellum 65
346^ leaves of vellum, each leaf being 131/2 inches
in width and 14^ inches in height and contains four
columns of 48 lines each to a page, or eight columns
to the open book. The Vatican Manuscript, written
at about the same time, has three columns to a page,
or six columns to the open book. The Alexandrian
Manuscript, written in the fifth century, has two
columns to a page. The Ephraem Manuscript, also
written in the fifth century, has but a single column
to a page. The Sinaitic Manuscript, because of its
distinction in having the largest number of columns
to a page, has been given, by some of the Biblical
scholars, the first rank among the oldest extant
copies of the Christian scriptures. The basis for
this estimate is, largely, its nearer approach to the
ancient rolls with their cross-wise columns.
IX
PAPYRUS
THE commonest material upon which to write
the records of history and all literature for
some centuries, both before and after the time of
Christ, was that manufactured from the papyrus
plant, or reed, which grew in great abundance in the
stagnant pools occasioned by the annual overflow
of the Nile; it grew also in the marshes of the Eu-
phrates, and elsewhere, though for centuries the only
source of the papyrus for literature was in Egypt.
Papyrus as a material upon which to write was
both cheaper and more plentiful than parchment,
and for these reasons it was more commonly utilized
than any other prior to the invention of paper. The
papyrus, while more plentiful and less expensive
than parchment, was not inexpensive as a finished
commodity; indeed, it was so expensive that the
poor were often denied this material for writing.
It is recorded that, in the list of expenses relating
to the rebuilding of the Erechtheum at Athens
(B. C. 407), two sheets of papyri cost at the rate
of a drachma and two obols each, or a little over a
shilling of our money. 1 The author of an old work
1 Greek Papyri, Prof. Geo. Milligan, D.D., p. xxiii.
66
Papyrus 67
gives a quaint description of the plant and of its
preparation for use: "It runs up in a triangular
stalk to the height of about fifteen feet and is usually
about a foot and a half in circumference, sometimes
more. When the outer skin is taken off there are
several films, or inner skins, one within another and
naturally partakable from each other. These, when
separated from the stalk and flaked, made the paper
which the ancients used, and which, from the name
of the tree, they called Papyrus."
Concerning the process of its preparation, as we
learn from various sources: The inner skins or
fibrous rinds of the plant were peeled off, somewhat
as the outer bark of a birch tree may be detached,
and then these strips of the papyrus were placed one
upon another so that the "grain," or fiber, of each
strip would extend crosswise to the other some-
times three layers, even, were superimposed one
upon another after the manner of the modern two
or three-ply wood veneering. The purpose of this
process was to give greater strength and durability
to the writing material made therefrom. The glu-
tinous juice in these strips, (or, perhaps they were
moistened by the waters of the Nile) on being sub-
jected to pressure were glued together in one intact
sheet. These larger sheets were afterwards
smoothed and polished, bleached in the sun, and
then cut up into strips to the dimensions of eight,
twelve, or even fifteen inches in width as desired,
2 Prideau's Connections, Vol. 2, p. 510.
68 The Reign of the Manuscript
for the rolls, or, as at a later time, into short,
rectangular sections for the leaves of books.
The writing on these rolls, as on those made of
parchment, was in columns, crosswise at convenient
intervals, with a margin at the top and the bottom
of the columns. The length of the column lines of
writing was governed by the writer's taste or in-
clination, or the character of the composition if
poetical, by the metre. The size of the rolls, how-
ever, was determined by the amount of writing to
be recorded one of the longer books of the New
Testament; c. g., would constitute an ordinary roll,
while it would require thirty or forty or even more
rolls on which to transcribe the entire Bible. Ac-
cording to BIRT, the average length of the papyrus
roll slightly exceeded forty feet, but instances are
cited of rolls reaching the length of one hundred
and fifty feet. This writer is authority for the state-
ment that a Homeric papyrus roll one hundred and
twenty feet in length was burned in Byzantium in
the fifth century. Mr. Putnam observes in connec-
tion with the size of the papyrus rolls: "It is pos-
sible the writer of the Apocalypse may have had
one of these enormous scrolls in his vision when he
beheld the record of the sins of Babylon reaching
to the heavens." 3 The larger papyrus books were
thus, literally, "weighty tomes," and, because they
were too heavy and cumbrous to hold in the hand,
were read from a table or desk. The cumbrous
'Authors and Their Public, p. 142.
Papyrus 69
character of these large volumes was the basis for
the dictum of the Alexandrian grammarian, "A big
book is a big nuisance."
At a later period, not determinable, the papyrus
writing material was no longer made up into roll
form but was cut into rectangular sheets of various
dimensions, according to the taste of the writer or
the special need, and was then bound together some-
what as a modern book. Sometimes, when greater
durability was sought, the writer or copyist would
insert a leaf of parchment at every five or six leaves
of the papyrus. This added greatly to the durability
of the book. There are examples of books thus
"reinforced" which have resisted the destructive in-
fluences of time fcnd use for twelve centuries to-
gether. The fragile and extremely perishable char-
acter of the papyrus makes it most remarkable that
any writing thereon should have survived for cen-
turies; indeed, according to Pliny, a volume two
centuries old was considered so exceptional as to be
almost incredible. It was the perishable character
of this material that made the frequent renewal of
manuscripts handled a constant necessity, and hence
the occupation of the copyists and the department
of reproduction in the libraries were logical. The
fragile character of the papyrus led, also, to the fre-
quent use of a wooden case, called a capsa, to protect
and preserve the roll. It was under very exceptional
conditions only, as in mummy-cases of Egyptian
tombs where they escaped the touch of man and,
70 The Reign of the Manuscript
almost, the touch of time as well, and, as hermeti-
cally sealed under lava beds at Pompeii and Hercu-
laneum, that the fragile papyrus was sometimes
preserved for centuries.
The earliest known papyrus manuscripts date
from the time of the twelfth dynasty of Egypt, or
from a period of more than two thousand years
before the Christian Era began. These oldest
existing papyrus documents yet discovered are writ-
ten in Egyptian in three characters in hiero-
glyphics, the most ancient or the picture-writing of
the earliest times (translatable by the decipherment
of the Rosetta Stone), in the hieratic, or the writ-
ing of the priests of Egypt from the period of the
fourth or fifth dynasty (3124-2744 B. C., Lepsius)
on to the third or fourth century of the Christian
Era, and in the demotic, or the later and popular
form of the priestly writing. In general, however,
the papyrus period of the Egyptian literature ex-
tended from the fourth century B. C. to the fourth
century A. D.
The extensive use of the papyrus as writing ma-
terial is evidenced in the fact that an important
commerce therein extended over a large part of the
civilized world as early as the third century B. C.,
and continued to be a source of wealth to the Egyp-
tians for centuries after the Christian Era had
begun. In fact the use of papyrus continued, al-
though interrupted greatly by the Saracen conquest
and the embargo laid upon its importation into
Papyrus 7 1
Pergamum by the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, until it
was superseded by the manufactured paper as it
progressively came into use. (Isaac Taylor.)
PAPER AND ITS MANUFACTURE
IT is the conclusion now accepted generally that
the Chinese made and used paper for writing
purposes from a remote period of the past from
before the beginning of the Christian Era. "The
Chinese are credited with the discovery of the art of
paper-making by the use of fibers reduced in water to
a pulp. Their raw materials were the inner bark of
the mulberry tree, bamboo, rice straw, rags, etc." l
Paper was distinguished from the papyrus in that
the substances from which it was made were not used
in their natural state, as the papyrus was, but were
manufactured from the raw material which was first
reduced to a pulp, then disposed in sheets, and sub-
sequently finished for use. In lapse of time many
different kinds of substances were employed as raw
material or the basis of the finished product. At
the Paris Exhibition in 1889, a paper-maker showed
more than sixty webs, or rolls, of paper, each made
from a different vegetable fibre: and sample-books
have been published which were composed of several
hundred leaves, all of different fibre. 2
1 Applcton's New Practical Encyclopedia.
* Chambers' Encyclopedia.
72
Paper and Its Manufacture 73
It is somewhat the "irony of fate" that no account
of the origin of paper has been reliably recorded.
Much of the reputed history of the art, or the in-
vention, is only conjectural. The fact is that, how-
ever remote the time and place of its beginning,
paper first became available to the world of letters
in the eighth century. The Arabs, having acquired
the art of making it from China (through Chinese
prisoners, it is said) brought its manufacture into
Arabia in the eighth century and, later, carried it
into Europe by way of northern Africa. The com-
paratively large number of Arab manuscripts, pre-
served from the ninth century, is evidence of the
extent to which paper was adopted and used for
their literary, scientific, and religious records.
The Moors by their conquest of Spain in the
eighth century brought their civilization and its
benefits into western Europe and, at a later time
at about the twelfth century introduced the manu-
facture of paper therein. The industry spread,
later, from Spain into Italy and Sicily, and came
eventually into the hands of the Christians, under
whose less skillful manipulations it suffered deteri-
oration in quality. At a still later date, its manu-
facture extended into southern and western Ger-
many and into the Netherlands, England, and
France.
Cotton paper was first manufactured from the
natural product; but later, as the industry was ex-
tended to regions where cotton was not grown and
74 The Reign of the Manuscript
into which it was not imported, other substances
were used instead of the raw cotton. "In Spain,"
it is said, u flax was the first material used, then
cotton." The practice of mixing rags first woolen,
then cotton, and later linen gradually came into
use. Near the close of the eleventh century ( 1085)
is designated as the date when rags were first used
for paper in Spain; linen paper appeared in iioo.
"From the time rags began to be used in Europe
they rapidly displaced other materials on account of
the double use of the fibre composing them (used
first for clothing or domestic purposes). Rags held
sway in the paper industry for many centuries, but
not entirely to the exclusion of numerous other
materials." 3
Linen paper, though known much earlier, came
into general use in the fourteenth century. It was
manufactured not only in response to the demand
for improvement which characterizes all inventions
but because linen was then less expensive than cotton.
The earliest existing document on paper is a deed
of King Roger of Sicily, 1102 A. D. There are
other documentary records of Sicilian kings during
the twelfth century. u The manufacture of paper
from linen rags," says Thalheimer, "was a humble
but essential antecedent to the art of printing, for
the costliness of parchment or vellum was as effec-
tual a barrier to the multiplication of books as the
labor of transcribing them." Even before the
3 The Americana.
Paper and Its Manufacture 75
Christian Era, the cost of books was largely the
cost of the material papyrus upon which they
were mostly written. Mr. Putnam suggests that
"if printing had come into Europe in the first cen-
tury, the world might to-day be buried under the
accumulated mass of its literature" no, not unless
the invention of paper had been coterminous or had
preceded.
All other and earlier materials for the embodi-
ment and preservation of literature were eventually
superseded by the manufacture of paper. Concern-
ing the displacement of other materials, there is
good authority for the claim that "in the second
half of the fourteenth century the use of paper for
all literary purposes had become well established in
all western Europe ; and in the course of the fifteenth
century it had gradually superseded vellum. In
manuscripts of this latter period it is not unusual to
find a mixture of vellum and paper, a vellum sheet
forming the outer and inner leaves of a quire while
the rest are of paper.'* 4
And thus the invention of paper and the succes-
sive improvements in its quality consequent upon the
improved methods of its making, prepared the way
for the printing-press an invention the importance
of which is beyond estimate and the relation of
which to literature baffles comparison. But the
manufacture of paper, notwithstanding the fact that
it has shared in many and important improvements,
* Encyclopedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition).
76 The Reign of the Manuscript
continued to be made laboriously by hand up to the
beginning of the nineteenth century.
The manufacture of paper has now reached a
stage, it would almost seem, of unimprovable ex-
cellence. In what is known as the "India" paper
there is combined, to a superlative degree, the paper-
maker's science with the artist's skill. It is called
''India" paper "owing to the prevailing tendency to
describe as 'Indian' everything coming from the Far
East," whence it was brought to England as early
as 1841. This paper is not only thin and light but
also tough and strong and has an opacity which
makes it ideal for the printing of books (especially
the Bible) where it is desirable to reduce the weight
and bulk without diminishing the size of type or
sacrificing beauty of typography and serviceability.
It combines maximum durability and capacity with
minimum dimensions and weight. Two facts will
illustrate the foregoing observation: (i) There is
an edition of the Bible, containing the Authorized
Version complete in every particular, reduced within
the dimensions of one and a-quarter, seven-eighths,
and one-half an inch or a little less than fifty-five
one-hundredths of one cubic inch. It is hardly nec-
essary to say that it can be read only by the aid of a
magnifying lens. (2) And in an advertising book-
let setting forth the excellencies of an edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica there is given a remarkable
test of the capacity of the India paper to endure
severe usage. A sheet from a volume was folded
Paper and Its Manufacture 77
in strips and tied in knots, drawn through a lady's
finger ring, crumpled into a tight ball, then opened
out and ironed to its original state of finish.
The tests to which the "India" paper was sub-
jected at the Paris Exposition in 1900 also show its
most remarkable capacity. In those tests a volume
of 1,500 pages was suspended for several months
by a single leaf as thin as tissue and, at the close of
the exhibition, it was found that the leaf had not
started, the paper had not stretched, and the volume
closed as well as ever. A strip of this paper, three
inches wide, sustained a weight of twenty-eight
pounds before yielding. This indicates its extreme
tensile capacity. By the use of this paper a book of
a thousand pages may be brought within the limits
of three-quarters of an inch in thickness the paper
being of such degree of opaqueness as to make possi-
ble a beautiful typography on both sides of the sheet
and of such strength and durability as to sustain
long continued use. The following is a publisher's
advertisement of a teacher's Bible: "Printed on
genuine India paper, which measures only five-
eighths of an inch to 1,000 sheets, making a beauti-
ful, light-weight, convenient book." The fine edi-
tions of the Bible (for use and not as a curiosity of
the printer's art) and the great Encyclopedia Bri-
tannica, printed on India paper are conspicuous
examples and embody both the paper maker's science
and the printer's art.
XI
OTHER MATERIALS OF LITERATURE
BESIDES the materials already mentioned, other
substances were utilized upon which to impress
or embody literature or any historical data. Thus,
sections of the bamboo; the leaves and bark of trees
and plants as the linden, birch, and the palm; tab-
lets of wood, ivory, gold, bronze, tin, lead, and wax;
sheets of silk and linen; sun-dried and fire-burnt
bricks; tablets and cylinders of clay; and slabs and
stelai of stone, were each and all used in variable
proportions, according to taste or necessitous con-
ditions. Of the materials used in picture writing of
the ancient Aztecs of Mexico, Prescott says : "The
manuscripts were made of different materials, cotton
cloth or skins nicely prepared; a composition of silk
and gum; but for the most part a kind of paper from
the leaves of the maguey." 1
Some of these materials were used transiently and
in small areas; others of them were widely used and
for a long period of time. Mr. G. H. Putnam in-
stances the case of wax tablets which were known
to Homer as being still in use among the Romans
1 Conquest of Mexico, Vol. i, p. 102.
78
Other Materials of Literature 79
twelve hundred years later. In Palestine and
Phoenicia and, indeed, in many places if not every-
where, the earliest writing was on stone, of which
the famous Rosetta and the Moabite stones and the
inscriptions cut on temple walls, gates, stone cliffs,
and monuments, as in Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and
Crete, and in the western hemisphere also, are ex-
amples from the remote past. In Assyria and
Babylonia clay was all but universally employed as
the material upon which to write, and because it was
everywhere available. Clay was the material at
hand and was used for vari-sized tablets and for
hollow hexagonal or octagonal cylinders.
[In this connection it will be of interest to note
two important "finds" of the cuneiform writing
which have recently been brought to light in Upper
Egypt and in Babylon, respectively. There was dis-
covered in 1891-92, by Professor Petrie, at Tel-el-
Amarna, above the city of Cairo on the east bank
of the Nile, a body of tablets over three hundred
in number written in cuneiform or Babylonian
characters. The scholars were astonished at finding
this collection in Egypt, so remote from the home
of the cuneiform writing. The inscriptions on them
increased their surprise, for these tablets were writ-
ten in Jerusalem, Tyre, Gezer, and other cities of
Palestine and Syria and sent by these subject peoples
to their Egyptian masters and rulers. They show,
as Professor Sayce holds, that writing on tablets
was, at least in the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty
8o The Reign of the Manuscript
of Egypt (1,000 B. C), the normal form of official
correspondence between Egypt and her foreign
provinces. 2 The greater part of these tablets were
purchased for the Berlin Museum, though quite a
number of them were secured for the British Mu-
seum. (Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition.)
The other important "find" an elaborate monu-
ment of early civilization and embodying, perhaps,
the most ancient of all codes was that discovered
on the acropolis of ancient Susa in Persia during the
winter of 1901-02 by the French Expedition. This
discovery consisted of three fragments of black
diorite stone and constituted, when fitted together, a
monument nearly eight feet in height. This monu-
ment embodies a bas-relief of King Hammurabi re-
ceiving the Laws from the sun-god, and an inscrip-
tion of about four thousand lines (the longest in-
scription yet discovered) arranged in forty-four
columns, engraven on the stele in cuneiform char-
acters as were the Tel-el-Amarna tablets. It is be-
lieved by the scholars that this Code was set up in
the principal cities of the realm and was designed to
be read and observed by the King's subjects. This
Hammurabi (identified by most Assyriologists as the
Amraphel of the Old Testament, Genesis 14:1) was
the sixth king of the First Dynasty of Babylon and
reigned for fifty-five years, about 2250 B. C. He
was a great scholar and a pious and god-fearing
King who codified existing laws and had them widely
1 Monument Facts, Etc., pp. 37-40.
Other Materials of Literature 81
promulgated. 3 ]
Wood was used in some countries as the material
upon which to write or carve records and laws. The
mummy-cases were both written upon and carved
with Egyptian characters and the laws of Solon were
inscribed on tablets of wood. The word codex
which has come to have different significations
meant, originally, the trunk of a tree but came to be
the designation for a wooden tablet coated with
wax for writing purposes. Pliny is authority for the
statement that the bark of trees was used for writing
upon before the papyrus was adopted for this pur-
pose. It is held that in China writing was very
early made permanent on sections of the bamboo,
being burned therein by a heated metal stylus some-
what after the fashion of the modern pyrography;
this material was displaced, however, in the third
century B. C. by silk or cloth, and these, in turn,
were superseded by a kind of paper made from the
inner bark of the mulberry tree, bamboo fibre, and
other substances which came into extensive use
during the Han Dynasty (206 B. .-25 A. D.) and,
under the incentive of which, as we are told, an ex-
tensive imperial library of the reigning house was
collected. And, to the present day, palm leaves are
used for writing material in parts of India.
Besides the simpler arrangements of the ma-
terials, as in the roll, tablet, or leaf, there were
arrangements of the material more resembling the
'The Code of Hammurabi, R. F. Harper, Ph.D.
82 The Reign of the Manuscript
book form of to-day, as in the diptych and the
triptych. The diptych was made of two tablets of
wood or of other material and resembled our
double slates, having the tablets for the writing
sunken below the protecting edges. These were
hinged together and covered on their protected sides
with a coating of wax. On this wax surface the
Greeks and Romans wrote with a stylus. The writ-
ing could easily be obliterated by simply melting the
wax, when it became a prepared plate for another
inscription. The triptych and the polyptych, as the
respective words suggest, consisted of three or four
or more leaves hinged together and made available
for literary or other inscriptions, after the manner
of the diptych.
XII
INKS
ANY reference to the literary productions of the
past and to the materials preserving and per-
petuating written records, including the Bible and
sacred history, would be deficient were the qualities
of the early inks disregarded. The very ink in
which the ancient literature, sacred and classic, was
embodied had an importance scarcely, if any, less
than the materials upon which the writing was im-
pressed or recorded. The task of transcribing a
book, e. g. t the Gallic Wars, the Epic of Virgil,
or the Bible, was an undertaking of so great magni-
tude that the conservation of energy, if nothing else,
taught the importance of securing and using an ink
that had "staying" qualities. No sensible person,
no matter when or where he might live, would be
apt to spend the time required to copy the Bible in
its entirety (a task necessitating the labor of a skill-
ful calligraphist for nearly three years) when all
his work would soon be wasted by reason of an
impermanent ink.
The makers of the inks used in the early ages had
a skill and knowledge in the mixing of pigments or
in compounding the ingredients of their inks undis-
83
84 The Reign of the Manuscript
covered, as yet, and unequaled in modern times.
The superiority of the inks known to the ancients
has long been the object of surprise and admiration.
The inscriptions on mummy cases, made at a time
long antedating the Christian Era, and the writing
on manuscripts made in the early centuries of Chris-
tian history, in addition to the beauty of the form
and finish of the writing, have a freshness of appear-
ance as though they were only of years' instead of
centuries' duration. u The survival of papyrus rolls
containing the text of the Egyptian ritual known as
'The Book of the Dead,' dating back fifteen cen-
turies B. C., and accompanied with numerous scenes
painted in brilliant colors, proves how ancient was
this very natural method of elucidating a written
text by means of pictures." * And among the ancient
archaelogical treasures recently discovered in Crete
are stucco designs, the colors of which are almost as
brilliant as when laid on, over three thousand years
ago.
The composition of the earliest inks has not yet
been obtained and, likely, is unascertainable. The
first inks are supposed to have been made from
sepia the secretion of the cuttle fish or was com-
posed of a mixture of soot and gum. Later, inks
were prepared from the apples of the gall-oak, and
from other materials vegetable and mineral.
Inks of various colors and kinds red, purple,
green, and blue, and, occasionally, of gold and silver
'Encyclopedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition).
Inks 85
were often employed. The different colored inks
were used, respectively, for the in-filling of char-
acters and letters cut in stone and the like; for the
ornamentation and embellishment of mummy-cases
and manuscripts; for titles and initial letters (espe-
cially in the later centuries) ; for the purpose of em-
phasis by contrast with other inks; for marginal
notes by a later hand (guarding thus against acci-
dental alterations or interpolations of the original
writing) ; and to agree with the esthetic taste of the
copyist or his own notion of the value or the impor-
tance of the production, as is seen in some beautiful
copies of the Bible or portions thereof and in other
literary productions of the manuscript age. (See
pages 51-54.) The ink used on the early papyrus
such as u The Book of the Dead/' was usually of a
deep, glossy black color though occasionally other
colors are also found.
Concerning the picture-writing of the ancient
Egyptians, Mr. Wallace Budge of the British Mu-
seum says, "Where it was possible the scribe repre-
sented an object in its natural colour; he made the
moon yellow, the sun red, trees, plants and all vege-
tables, green; but objects requiring out of the way
colours were not so well done, owing to the com-
paratively limited supply of colours at the disposal
of the scribe." 2 In China, during the third century
B. C., a dark varnish was employed to paint on silk
and bamboo, a brush being used in its application.
'The Dwellers on the Nile, p. 41.
86 The Reign of the Manuscript
India ink came into use in China in the seventh
century A. D. The beautiful black ink, known to
the ancients, greatly deteriorated in quality in the
Byzantine period, which may have occasioned the
restriction of the red ink to the emperor's exclusive
use, as at a later date the purple became the royal
color.
Attempts made by chemical analysis and the use of
reagents to discover the ingredients of the inks used
by the ancients have not yielded very definite re-
sults. Beyond some general conclusions as to the
components of the first inks, there is little more
than conjecture, and it now seems that their manu-
facture must be classed as one of the lost arts.
XIII
IMPLEMENTS OF WRITING
THE implements used for writing necessarily
varied in the different ages and diverse civiliza-
tions according to the character of the materials
successively used and the nature and stage of the
civilization. When inscriptions were made in stone
of any sort sand-stone, marble, granite, basalt, or
other stone or in wood, a chisel was the tool.
When the material used was lead, ivory, wax, or
plastic clay, bricks, tablets or cylinders a stylus
was used. The stylus was made of bone, ivory, or
metal, according to the requirements or tastes in the
case. When the writing was with ink, upon leather,
parchment, papyrus, paper, and kindred substances,
a pen of silver or from a reed or quill was em-
ployed as in modern times. Pens of bronze have
been found in tombs. Brushes, too, as in China,
were used in recording literature. The "pcn-kmfc"
for fashioning pens from reeds or quills ; the pumice
stone, for erasures and smoothing the material to
be written upon; the ruler and compasses, for in-
dicating the lines of writing; scissors, sponge, and
ink-stand (the "writer's ink horn," Ezekiel 9:2, 3),
sometimes double for different colored inks ; and the
87
88 The Reign of the Manuscript
palette, containing small hollows for the various
kinds and colors of inks used, were all parapherna-
lia of the copyist's profession.
XIV
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF PALEOGRAPHY
T^AL^EOGRAPHY is defined as "that depart-
^/rnent of historical science which treats of an-
cient writing." "In the study of handwriting/' it
has been said, "it is difficult to exaggerate the great
and enduring influence which the character of the
material employed for receiving script has had upon
the formation of the letters." Whether the ma-
terial was clay, waxen surface, or papyrus, largely
determined the formation of the letters. In the
broad sense in which it is used in our discussion the
term applies, not only to all written records whether
upon rolls or codices and without regard to the ma-
terial, or their form and content, but also includes
epigraphy which has to do with inscriptions on
monuments or seals, and numismatics which, spe-
cifically, designates the inscriptions of coins.
Palaeography is both an art and a science. Mod-
ern penmanship, while commonly regarded as more
of an art than a science, is, in reality, less an art than
a science. Indeed, in a broad and a not unwar-
ranted generalization, present-day handwriting is
seldom either an art or a science, but rather a desul-
tory and questionable though necessary accomplish-
89
9O The Reign of the Manuscript
ment. The invention of the typewriter has not
added, in general, to the achievements of penman-
ship. Penmanship is one of the almost universally
neglected sciences of modern times. Unquestion-
ably, if there were more of the "science" of pen-
manship taught and practiced, and more time and
attention devoted to its study and its cultivation, we
would have more of the art of handwriting to de-
light our esthetic sensibilities.
The science of palaeography, being related fun-
damentally to language, links us with prehistoric
times. Writing is crystallized speech in visible rec-
ord, as the phonographic "record" is speech in au-
dible perpetuity. (The author once had the great
privilege of hearing the voice of Mr. Gladstone in
a thrilling address before the House of Lords; it
was a phonographic "record.") Speech is the most
distinguishing of all man's characteristics; long
held to be such. Mr. Huxley once likened human
speech to the "Alps or Andes high over everything
else in animal life." Intelligent speech is the broad-
est line of cleavage to a tenable evolutionary hy-
pothesis of man's origin and development. The ca-
pacity of speech at once and forever differentiates
man from, and elevates him to, a plane above all
other of the manifold creations of God. While
speech must be recognized as the most distinguish-
ing faculty of man, writing may be considered the
noblest achievement of man. Handwriting may
also be regarded the vehicle of expressing and
The Art and Science of Paleography 9 1
the mode of treasuring and communicating to dis-
tant times and places the conceptions of the mind
by means of symbols symbols representing ob-
jects or sounds and thus ideas in all their wide
applications.
Concerning the genesis and the development of
handwriting (and handwriting is a development a
development from very rudimentary beginnings)
Professor Edward Clodd, F.R.A.S., says: 'The
use of writing is to put something before the eye
in such a way that its meaning may be known at a
glance, and the earliest way of doing this was by a
picture. Picture-writing was thus used for many
ages, and is still found among savage races in all
parts of the globe. On rocks, stone, slabs, trees,
and tombs, pictures were employed to record an
event or tell some message. In course of time, in-
stead of this tedious mode, men learned to write
signs for certain words or sounds. Then the next
step was to separate the words into letters; and so
arose alphabets. The shape of the letters of the
alphabet is thought by some to bear traces of the
early picture writing." 1 The late Wm. Frost
Bishop, D.D., affirms with more of positiveness :
"Every letter was at first a picture and perhaps it is
but a return to first principles when the children are
taught to say, 'O was an Orange, S was a Swan, B
was a Butterfly'; or when the alphabet invokes the
aid of both pictures and poetry,
"Childhood of the World, p. 13.
92 The Reign of the Manuscript
'A was an Archer, who shot at a frog;
B was a Butcher, who had a great dog.' '
And the eminent Egyptologist, M. Emmanuel De
Roget, has shown from sources antedating the
Shepherd Kings in Egypt that the letters of the
mother alphabet were but modifications of the
earliest Hieratic or priestly script as these were
modifications of the picture-writing upon the oldest
monuments of Egypt. The alphabets of all lan-
guages are thus traced back, step by step, to the
pictured hieroglyphs from which they have all come.
The alphabets of the world are akin, as they all had
one common parentage in the picture-writing of the
Egyptians.
There have been developed in the long course of
time how long can only be approximately deter-
mined three somewhat independent though not un-
related sources of literature whence all written
language has been evolved. These three sources
emerge in history, whatever the genesis and how-
ever the process, respectively, in the hieroglyphic,
the cuneiform, and the alphabetic writings.
(/) The hieroglyphic writing. In Egypt, and
probably in Accadia, the hieroglyphic or picture-writ-
ing was the earliest mode of expressing ideas. The
new world, also, presents a similar phenomenon, as
some of the tribes of the ancient Toltecs of Mexico
developed a system of picture-writing resembling
somewhat that of North American Indians and akin
The Art and Science of Paleography 93
to the ancient hieroglyphs. With Egyptians this
term means, literally, the "sacred" writings. The
late Amelia B. Edwards, an Egyptologist of recent
years, defines the hieroglyphic or "ideographic"
writing as "pictures of objects arranged for the pur-
pose of conveying sequences of ideas, but without
any of the connecting links which language sup-
plies." And of picture-writing in recognition of
the universal limitations of this earliest form of writ-
ten records one connected with the British Museum
says, further: "Picture-writing, moreover, could
only place images and symbols side by side, and leave
the connection between them to be guessed at or
imagined; it could neither show the distinction be-
tween the different parts of speech, nor note the flec-
tions and tenses of the verbs and the number and
case of the nouns, nor fill up the gaps of thought with
adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, etc." 2 The earli-
est literature of Egypt was recorded in this picture-
writing wherein symbols and delineations were cut
into or written on stone, as on the obelisks; or in
wood, as in the mummy-cases; or were written or
painted on papyrus, as in "The Book of the Dead,"
deposited with the mummies of royal personages in
their entombment. Some of these papyri are of
very great age. One of these, The Prisse Papyrus,
so named from its procurer, is held to be the oldest
papyrus in existence. It was found near the middle
of the last century in a Theban tomb of the eleventh
"Assyrian Life and History, p. 40.
94 The Reign of the Manuscript
dynasty and is thus older by centuries than the time
of Moses and perhaps antedates the time of Abra-
ham. This Papyrus consists of eighteen pages of
beautiful hieratic (priestly) writing and is treas-
ured in the National Library at Paris.
The last century of our Era witnessed two of the
most important achievements of human ingenuity in
relation to literature: the decipherment of the hiero-
glyphics of Egypt and the cuneiform script of Assy-
ria and Babylonia. Both these remarkable achieve-
ments are credited to the last century and have
added immeasurably to our knowledge of early
historical times, corroborated and confirmed much
that was obscure and uncertain of the Bible nar-
rative and its teaching, and opened up to the gaze
of all men for all time to come the most valuable
records of a vast period of human history which
otherwise would have remained in unrelieved ob-
scurity. These achievements were the decipherment
of the Rosetta Stone and the cuneiform writing.
The hieroglyphic writing was of two classes;
called ideographic in which ideas were denoted by
signs or pictures and phonetic wherein sounds repre-
sented ideas. In the ideographic hieroglyphs
which were the older this being the parent writ-
ing the picture of an object expressed the idea of
or represented the object itself. A fish, e. g. y was
denoted by the outline drawing of a fish; an obelisk
by the picture of that object; a vulture by the de-
lineation of that bird, and so on. Sometimes, how-
The Art and Science of Paleography 95
ever, the cause was put for the effect, and vice versa :
thus a palette and reed would commonly represent
"writing"; it might also represent a "scribe." Dis-
hevelled hair might represent "grieving," because
in the time of trouble the hair of the head would be
apt to be disturbed and uncared for. At a later
date these ideographic hieroglyphics or pictures
representing ideas, by a process of development
from the basis of pure primitive picture writing, or
by the association and suggestion which one thing
gave to another or to other things, or by a species
of conventionalization, came to represent sounds;
not letters but words or parts of words. Thus
came into existence the other class of hieroglyph-
writing the "phonetic" hieroglyphics.
In the phonetic hieroglyphics pictures were used
to express the sound of the objects which they re-
spectively represented; and, in time, certain of the
hieroglyphics both expressed and stood for other ob-
jects; and certain of the phonetics came to have syl-
labic value. Afterwards, in the order of develop-
ment, ideas were communicated, not by pictures but
by symbols for pictures, or by characters that repre-
sented and stood for definite ideas : A star, thus,
came to express the idea of God, and a succession
of herons in a row the idea of "glorified souls." 3
Similar is the archaeological witness from ancient
Mexico. Prescott says: "A Mexican manuscript
looks like a collection of pictures, each one forming
'The Dwellers of the Nile, pp. 42-44.
96 The Reign of the Manuscript
the subject of a special study. The Aztecs had
various emblems for expressing such things as from
their nature could not be directly represented by the
painter. A 'tongue,' for example, denoted speak-
ing; a 'footprint,' traveling; a 'man on the
ground,' an earthquake. These symbols were often
very arbitrary, varying with the caprice of the
writer; and it required wise discrimination to in-
terpret them, as a slight change in the form or posi-
tion of the figure intimated a very different meaning.
They also employed phonetic signs, though these
were chiefly confined to the names of persons and
places. Lastly, the pictures were colored in gaudy
contrasts, so as to produce the most vivid impres-
sion, for even colors speak in the Aztec hiero-
glyphics." 4
Both the ideographic and the phonetic hiero-
glyphics are referred to in the following from Pro-
fessor Hutson : "The ideographs were first pic-
tures pure and simple of actual objects. A large
number of them became ultimately symbolic, repre-
senting any one of a large group of ideas, and need-
ing its nearest group of phonetics to give it definite-
ness. The phonetics expressed the sounds of syl-
lables, not of letters, as in the case with our alpha-
bets. Some of these phonetics even came to be used
eventually as representatives of letters." 5 Thus
in the phonetic writing the scribe finally expressed
4 The Conquest of Mexico, Vol. I ; p. 98.
" The Beginnings of Civilization, pp. 39, 40.
The Art and Science of Paleography 97
sounds independent of pictures or symbols and so
created "words" through which ideas were recorded,
perpetuated, and disseminated. There were about
two thousand of the hieroglyphic signs.
At best, the picture-writing, while intelligible
enough to its originators, was an incomplete and
clumsy method of treasuring and transmitting knowl-
edge. It was very liable to misinterpretation and
misapplication. It was always exposed to the pos-
sibility of being misunderstood, inasmuch as every
picture might have a variety of applications or signi-
fications, and thus might represent a number of dif-
ferent though kindred things or conceptions.
"Thus in Egyptian we find two legs might repre-
sent simply the legs of a man, but they might de-
note 'walking,' 'going,' 'running,' 'standing,' 'sup-
port,' and even 'growth,' and their significance had
to be divined without further explanation or assist-
ance." 6 The exposure to error involved in the
decipherment of the ancient picture-writing may be
illustrated by what is said to have been an actual
occurrence of modern times. It is related of an il-
literate though not necessarily ignorant grocer who,
being unable to write, kept his accounts by picturing
the various articles bought and sold at his little
store. Usually there was no occasion for any one
to dispute the accuracy of his "charges" though they
were recorded in a species of hieroglyphics his own
invention. On one occasion, however, the grocer
'Assyrian Life and History, pp. 39, 40.
98 The Reign of the Manuscript
was taken to task by a customer who "questioned"
the "account" of a cheese which had been "charged
up" against him. The customer protested that he
had never bought a whole cheese, but acknowledged
that he had bought what resembled a whole cheese
in shape a grindstone. This admission supplied a
clue to the error in the grocer's "charges," for, in
his picture-record he had inadvertently omitted the
square hole in the center of his picture which would
have transformed the "charge" of a cheese into that
of a grindstone. In like manner, there was always
an imminent and special exposure to error in the
"record" with the ideographic hieroglyphic writing.
And in addition to the inherent disabilities of the
picture-writing and its exposure to a mistaken deci-
pherment, these hieroglyphics gradually lost some-
what of their purely representative and symbolical
value and thus, by being conventionalized, came into
a more universal and a permanent use. Out of this
fact grew the larger significance of the demotic
writing as contrasted with the hieratic or priestly
writing.
These ancient Egyptian writings, both the hiero-
glyphic and the demotic, were, alike, a sealed litera-
ture until the discovery (in 1799) of the Rosetta
Stone and its subsequent decipherment by Cham-
pollion and Young. The inscription of this most
important "find" is cut into a basalt slab, three feet
two inches long and two feet five inches wide. On
this slab is carved a tri-lingual decree of Ptolemy
The Art and Science of Paleography 99
Epiphanes in hieroglyphic or the earliest form of
picture-writing, in demotic or the later writing of
the people as distinguished from that of the priests,
and in Greek or the language resulting from Alex-
ander's domination of the world the common
tongue at the beginning of the Christian Era. The
former two inscriptions, though in forms of the
Egyptian language long "dead" and undecipherable,
were given a material resurrection through their
Greek consort. The Greek language, therefore,
was the key to unlock, not the inscription of the
Rosetta Stone alone but also the vast treasure house
of the ancient Egyptian literature. By means of the
"golden guess" or the hypothesis of Dr. Young that
each part of the tri-lingual inscription on the Ro-
setta Stone referred to or contained the same sub-
ject-matter though in different writings; through the
ascertainable meaning of the Greek part of the in-
scription (including the proper names of Ptolemy
and Cleopatra) ; and through the untiring patience
of these early Egyptologists, the hitherto unknown
meaning, not only of the Rosetta Stone but of the
entire Egyptian hieroglyphs, has been opened up
to the world's view.
(2) The cuneiform writing. Scarcely second in
time or importance to the .hieroglyphs of Egypt
was the cuneiform or wedge-shaped writing of the
primitive Accadians of Mesopotamia, and communi-
cated by them to the after Assyrians and Babylonians.
The cuneiform writing was probably derived from an
ioo The Reign of the Manuscript
earlier hieroglyphic language among the most
primitive people of Accad. This is evidenced by
the pictured monuments and inscribed temple walls
and gates of Assyria and Babylonia. Writing, both
in Egypt and in Assyro-Babylonia, and also in the
(as yet) undeciphered language of the Cretans, be-
gan with pictures. The cuneiform system of writ-
ing, it is held, must have taken centuries to have
reached the stage at which it is first found. "It be-
gan, no doubt," says Mr. James Baikie, "with pure
picture-writing, as the Egyptian hieroglyphic sys-
tem began; but while the Egyptians maintained the
pictorial element of their system to the end, develop-
ing alongside of it the hieratic and demotic systems
of writing for ordinary purposes, the race in ques-
tion had already, when we first meet with their writ-
ing, got away from any trace of the picture stage.
Their writing is already the arrow-headed or cunei-
form script which persisted right down to the fall
of the great empires of the ancient East." 7 "Not
unlike other script," says Professor Albert T. Clay,
"the cuneiform was originally pictorial; but, as in
Egypt, the hieroglyphs became more and more
simplified and conventionalized. But, unlike the
Egyptians, the Babylonian or Sumerian became con-
ventionalized at a time prior to the known history of
the land; and the hieroglyphs were not continued in
use even for monumental purposes, but were prac-
7 National Geographic Magazine, Vol. XXIX, p. 135.
The Art and Science of Paleography 101
tically lost sight of." 8 This conclusion is shared by
no less a distinguished scholar than Professor Sayce.
He held that "the pictures were first painted on the
leaves of the papyrus which grew in the marshes of
the Euphrates, but as time went on a new and more
plentiful writing material came to be employed in the
shape of clay." This clay which was found under
foot everywhere, when prepared, was employed by
different peoples of western Asia and for a large va-
riety of specific uses: for literary and historical rec-
ords; for mathematical tables; for correspondence;
for legal documents which were often enclosed in
protecting envelopes of clay; for business transac-
tions, contracts being witnessed unto, in the absence
of seals, by each party pressing his thumb-nail into
the plastic clay, thus insuring the preservation of his
signature for ages; in short, for all literary, histori-
cal, mathematical, commercial, and social purposes.
The cuneiform writing, whether derived from the
earlier hieroglyphs or developed independently by
the Accadians, was employed with all but unlimited
fertility by the Assyro-Babylonian civilization. The
writing was distinguished from the hieroglyphic in
that it was made up, in its entirety, of a single, wedge-
shaped or arrow-headed-like character, formed with
a metal stylus having a triangular end. By pressing
this stylus in the plastic clay of the prepared tablet
or cylinder a sharply defined and angular shaped
8 National Geographic Magazine, Vol. XXIX, p. 166.
"Assyria: Its Princes, Priests, and People, p. 93.
IO2 The Reign of the Manuscript
indentation was impressed and, afterward, the clay
with its writing was hardened by exposure to the
sun or baked by fire into an almost imperishable
"record." The all but indestructible character of
this material accounts for the large proportion of
the Assyrian literature which has been preserved
through tens of centuries.
Professor Albert T. Clay describes the prepara-
tion and use of this material as follows : "The well-
kneeded clay, which had been washed to free it from
grit and sand, while in a plastic condition was
shaped into the form and size desired. . . . The
stylus, which was made of metal or wood, was a very
simple affair. In the early periods it was triangular
and in the later quadrangular. ... By pressing a
corner of it into the soft clay, the impression made
will be that of a wedge; hence the term cuneiform
(from the Latin cunues) writing." 10
The single simple character ( ^ ) from which
the cuneiform writing was entirely constructed was
used in multitudinous combinations and in various
positions (somewhat as the Chinese ideographic
characters are still used) to record the thoughts and
deeds of the primitive Accadians. Great libraries,
written in cuneiform, were accumulated in different
centers of population; these were transmitted to the
succeeding Assyrians and Babylonians. The cunei-
form writing was read in the prevailing direction
which the characters pointed.
* National Geographic Magazine, Vol. XXIX, p. 166.
The Art and Science of Paleography 103
The "key" to the decipherment of the cuneiform
writing as that employed in the decipherment of
the Egyptian hieroglyphs was a "lucky guess" by
Dr. Grotefend, a German scholar. Following the
clue of a few known names on the monuments, veri-
fying by these the conjectural values of six cuneiform
combinations, he reached basal conclusions from
which, finally, the Assyro-Babylonian scholars have
been enabled to read these ancient cuneiform texts
and inscriptions with as much assurance as the pages
of the Old Testament Hebrew; and so he opened up
to view a vast body of the otherwise un-read records
of the past. Thus the writings of the great li-
braries written in this character, as at Assur, Calah,
and Nineveh, though buried from sight for multi-
plied centuries, are now accessible through the la-
bors of the Assyriologists.
The cuneiform literature has one preeminent
distinction its comparative incorruptibility. Manu-
scripts of parchment or papyrus can be easily
tampered with; their contents altered or erased;
additions inserted, and parts cut out bodily. They
are destructible by fire and water; by time and men.
Of the exposure of the papyrus literature, in par-
ticular, Mr. George H. Putnam says : "Papyrus was
an extremely perishable substance. Damp, worms,
moth, mice, were all deadly enemies to the papyrus
rolls, but even if, through persistent watchfulness,
these were guarded against, the mere handling of
the rolls, even by the most careful readers, brought
IO4 The Reign of the Manuscript
them rapidly to destruction." n This statement
would apply as well though not to the same extent
to the literature embodied on parchment and vellum.
The writing on tablets, to the contrary, was measur-
ably proof against the obliterations of time and use
and accident. The immense number of the tablets
which remain after millenniums of years is proof
positive that the cuneiform literature is almost un-
affected by the "hand of slowly destroying Time."
The British Museum contains the largest collection
of cuneiform tablets in the world, Sir Henry Lay-
ard, over half a century ago, contributed thereto
more than twenty thousand tablets, part results of
his explorations on the site of ancient Nineveh.
(3) The alphabetic writing. The alphabet, to-
gether with the printing-press, is to be regarded as
among the most important associated inventions of
all time. With due respect for tradition and oral
teaching, no great permanent progress in civilization
could have come about without some mode of writ-
ing. It has been said that "till one generation of
men could transmit to the next the knowledge which
they had acquired, and leave behind them a record
of their experiments and observations, the arts and
sciences must have remained forever in a very rudi-
mentary state, and civilization, after reaching a cer-
tain early stage of development, would have re-
mained almost stationary." Canon Taylor affirms
that "every system of non-alphabetic (/. e., hiero-
" Authors and Their Public, p. 270.
The Art and Science of Paleography 105
glyphic or syllabic) writing would have been either
so limited in its power of expression as to be of
small practical value, or, on the other hand, so dif-
ficult and complicated, as to be unsuited to general
use."
A concensus of present opinion among scholars
ascribes the parentage of the alphabetic literature
at least as related to the development of civiliza-
tion to the ancient Phoenicians. The alphabetic
writing may have descended from Crete to the
Phoenicians, who, in turn, mediated it to all the after
ages. (The Chinese literature, while it is conceded
to have had a remote origin and a prolific develop-
ment, cannot be regarded as an alphabetic literature.
It has more of kinship with the cuneiform than
either the hieroglyphic or the alphabetic writing.)
Testimony as to the source of the alphabetic writ-
ing is available: "The vast majority of alphabets
are descended from the so-called Phoenician which
is the earliest known, and was in existence near a
thousand years B. C., although it was probably in-
fluenced by the still more ancient syllabary script of
the Assyrians, Babylonians, and the Sumerians on
the one hand and the Egyptian pictographs on the
other." 12 "The Phoenicians were certainly using
it" (the alphabet) u with freedom in the ninth century
B. C. According to the view accepted till recently,
the alphabet was borrowed by the Phoenicians from
the cursive (hieratic) form of the ancient Egyptian
11 Nelson's Encyclopedia.
106 The Reign of the Manuscript
hieroglyphs. . . . The more recent view is that of
Dr. A. J. Evans who argues ingeniously that the
alphabet was taken over from Crete by the 'Chereth-
ites 1 and Telethites' or Philistines, who established
for themselves settlements on the coasts of Palestine.
From them it passed to the Phoenicians, who were
their near neighbors, if not their kinsfolk." 13 Of the
alphabetic writing Professor Sayce says: "The his-
tory of our alphabet is a record of slow stages of
growth, through which the idea of jo/W-writing has
been evolved. The first effort to record an event, so
as to make it widely known, would naturally be to
draw a picture of it. A written word, let us remem-
ber, is the picture of a sound." And in the same con-
nection, he says that the ancient Phoenicians (because
they were the great traders and settlers of the early
world) were most in need of a clear, precise, and
communicable method of writing. The alphabetic
writing was such a method.
The desire and necessity for a medium of thought-
exchange that might serve as the means of com-
municating ideas to persons at a distance, and by
means of which information and desires might be
exchanged independent of personal contact, probably
led to the invention or expedited the development of
the alphabetic writing, which differed from both the
hieroglyphic and the cuneiform writings. This
seems to have been the genesis of the alphabet; and
the Phoenicians are commonly regarded as the first
"Encyclopedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition).
The Art and Science of Paleography 107
to have employed it for this purpose. At any rate
an alphabetic form of writing by means of what has
been designated an "ideographic alphabet," an alpha-
bet expressing ideas by means of letters (whether
original or an inheritance) was in use by the Phoeni-
cians as early as about 1,000 B. C. In the estimate
of scholars, all our alphabets (varying in the num-
ber of letters, respectively, from twenty-two in the
Hebrew to forty-nine in the Sanscrit) have come
down to our times, however circuitous may have
been the route, by way of the old Phoenicians.
[Explorations recently made in Crete, in which
Dr. A. J. Evans has borne a conspicuous part, have
revealed a high state of civilization existing there,
long anterior to that of Egypt or Assyria, and dis-
closed "The existence of a highly advanced civiliza-
tion, going back far behind the historic period."
Among other interesting "finds," more than a thou-
sand clay tablets were unearthed in the ancient pal-
ace of Cnossos. The great conflagration which
long, long ago destroyed the palace served, by baking
these tablets, to make them more permanent.
These tablets vary in size and shape and the charac-
ter of their writing, being inscribed "both in picto-
graphic and linear forms of the Minoan script."
As based on the results of these explorations, a claim
is made for the ante-Phoenician origin of the alpha-
betic writing there discovered. In accordance with
this hypothesis it is held that the Phoenicians only
appropriated and developed what had come to them
io8 The Reign of the Manuscript
from Crete what had existed in Crete for centuries
previously. But it was no less an important service
which the Phoenicians contributed though it be here-
after shown conclusively that they merely appropri-
ated what had descended to them from the earlier
Cretan civilization.
These Cretan tablets are, as yet, undecipherable.
They are written in an unknown tongue and await
the discovery of some bi-lingual text or inscription
which shall prove, as in the case of the Rosetta
Stone, the line of cleavage to the interpretation of
what is, possibly, the earliest of all written languages.
The characters of these tablets are varied, consist-
ing of linear writing and of hieroglyphics. Dr.
Evans thus sums up the present evidence of the
earlier Minoan or pre-Cretan origin of this alpha-
betic writing: "When we examine in detail the
linear script of these Mycenaean documents, it is
impossible not to recognize that we have here a
system of writing, syllabic and perhaps purely al-
phabetic, which stands on a distinctly higher level of
development than the hieroglyphs of Egypt or the
cuneiform script of contemporary Syria and Baby-
lon." ]
The earliest alphabetic document, in a language
that is decipherable, and the date of which is ap-
proximately determinable, is the famous Moabite
Stone. This relic of the remote past was discovered
14 Encyclopedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition) "Crete." National
Geographic Magazine, January, 1912.
The Art and Science of Paleography 109
in 1868 among the ruins of Dibon by Dr. Klein, a
missionary of the Church of England while touring
in the region once known as the land of Moab, and
whence its designation. The Moabite Stone is a
slab of black basalt, nearly four feet high and two
feet wide, rounded at the top, and contains an in-
scription of thirty-four lines cut in Phoenician charac-
ters. It is ascribed to the first half of the ninth
century B. C. The Stone was intact when discov-
ered though it suffered an attempted destruction by
Arabs before it could be removed to a place of safety.
The preserved fragments contain six hundred and
sixty-nine characters, and many additional charac-
ters have been restored from the surviving portions.
The inscription on the Stone contains the account of
Mesha's breaking away from the rule of Israel and
gives striking corroboration of the scripture record
(II Kings 3: 4-27) and recounts that the king
Mesha, after Ahab's death, "rebelled against the
king of Israel." "The whole inscription," says
Professor Sayce, "reads like a chapter from one
of the historical books of the Old Testament. Not
only are the phrases the same, but the words and
the grammatical forms are, with one or two excep-
tions, all found in scriptural Hebrew." He adds,
further, "The Moabite Stone shows us what were
the forms of the Phoenician letters used on the east-
ern side of the Jordan in the time of Ahab. The
forms employed in Israel and Judah on the western
side could not have differed much; and we may there-
iio The Reign of the Manuscript
fore see in these venerable characters the precise
mode of writing employed by the earlier prophets
of the Old Testament." 15
But the surpassing interest which the Moabite
Stone possesses for the antiquarian is not its cor-
roboration of remote Israelitish history or the sub-
stantial identity of its letters with the Hebrew forms,
but, rather, its contribution to all alphabetic liter-
ature of all the past. This will appear in a quota-
tion from the late Wm. Frost Bishop, D.D. : u The
essential features in the outline of each of our own
letters may be detected easily in the characters of
the Moabite Stone, written 2,900 years ago. . . .
The primitive Semitic inscription of this stone con-
tains the alphabet from which all existing alphabets
have been derived. It exhibits the embryo forms
of all the letters 2,000 or 3,000 in number in
every one of the alphabets which are now in use
throughout the world. It might thus be termed the
great mother alphabet of the world." 16 The
Moabite Stone in itself would seem to indicate a
more or less general as well as an understanding use
of the alphabet in which it is inscribed throughout
that region at an early date perhaps at a much
earlier date than that of the inscription as the
Code of Hammurabi, set up at Susa in Persia, indi-
cates a more or less general acquaintance with the
cuneiform characters in which the laws of that an-
u Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments, pp. 79, 82.
" Article on "The World's One Alphabet"
The Art and Science of Palaography in
cient monarch were promulgated. Supporting this
conclusion, Mr. E. C. Richardson holds that there
is "growing evidence of the prevailing use of hand-
writing all over Palestine, by not later than the ninth
century." 1T Professor Sayce, referring to the criti-
cism that would deny the pre-exilic origin of the
larger part of the Old Testament literature on the
ground that the early Israelites could not read or
write, says: "This supposed late use of writing for
literary purposes was merely an assumption, with
nothing more solid to rest upon than the critic's own
theories and prepossessions. And as soon as it
could be tested by solid fact it crumbled into dust." 18
Closely identified with the Moabite Stone, both in
the time of its supposed production and in its alpha-
betic characteristics, is the Siloam Inscription at
Jerusalem, laid bare to the world's gaze in 1881.
The discovery of this valuable treasure of Palestin-
ian records was due to fortuitous circumstances, as
has been many another important "find." [A boy
wading in the channel cut in the rock leading to the
Pool first discovered the writing, partly concealed
by water, on the southern wall of the channel. 19 ]
The Siloam Inscription, though brief containing
only six lines, with the writing partly destroyed has
great philological and historical value. According
to the judgment of scholars this inscription was
17 International Standard Bible Ency., art. "Books."
18 Monument Facts, Etc., pp. 28, 29.
19 Fresh Light from the Ancient Monuments, pp. 83, 84.
112 The Reign of the Manuscript
executed in the reign of King Hezekiah and may
have been designed to celebrate and memorialize his
distinguished achievement, recorded in scripture (II
Chronicles 32:30). Its complete translation has
been accomplished. The letters of this writing are
held by some archaeologists and philologists to ex-
hibit, possibly, even older forms than those con-
tained in the inscription of the Moabite Stone. The
inscriptions are closely related. Of the Moabite
Stone a Jewish writer holds that "the language,
with slight deviation, is Hebrew, and reads almost
like a chapter from the Book of Kings"; and, of the
Siloam Inscription, that "it is pure Hebrew." 20
(4) Classic writing. Each country and people
has had a palaeography, in some respects, of its own,
and developed by its own individual history, al-
though modified, often, by the adjacent countries and
contemporaneous peoples. The palaeography of a
civilization is sometimes taken up by other civiliza-
tions and, in turn, may be transmitted as an in-
heritance to other generations. Almost every cen-
tury has had its own specific "hand," and the "hand"
throughout human history has constantly undergone
change. Sometimes the change has been for the
better; at other times the change has been for the
worse; the change in handwriting going on at the
present time can hardly be accredited for the worse,
and for the reason that, speaking inclusively, it now
seems to have attained unto the superlatively bad.
**The Jewish Encyclopedia.
The Art and Science of Paleography 113
"Handwriting, like every other art, has its different
phases of growth, perfection, and decay. A par-
ticular form of writing is gradually developed, then
takes the finished or caligraphic style and becomes
the 'hand' of the period; then deteriorates, breaks
up, and disappears, or drags out only an artificial
existence being superceded, meanwhile, by another
'hand' which, either developed from an older hand
or introduced independently, runs the same course
and, in its turn, is displaced by a younger rival." - 1
The "Spencerian" and the "vertical" hands are well-
known and present-day applications of this law of
change or development in the form of written
language.
(5) The two great stages of classic writing.
Another fact concerning palaeography merits more
than a passing notice it is the two great stages of
the classical writing. The Greek handwriting, in
which much of the best classic literature was written
(in which the New Testament, with the possible ex-
ception of Matthew's gospel, and the Old Testament
of the Septuagint Version were written ; and in which,
furthermore, a large proportion of the writings by
the early Christian teachers and apologists and also
those of the heathen and heretical controversialists
of the early centuries were written), passed through
two clearly defined and distinctly separated stages,
known, respectively, as the uncial and the minuscule
"hands." The "uncial" was the large letter hand,
"Encyclopedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition).
H4 The Reign of the Manuscript
and the dominant style from the time of the earliest
written productions in Greek down to the ninth
century. The "minuscule" (called also the "cur-
sive") was the small letter or the "running" hand
and continued in use, comprehensively, from the
ninth century A. D. (though known earlier), when
it largely displaced the "uncial" style, on, until the
invention of printing superceded handwriting as the
treasuring and disseminating medium of literary
productions.
The difference in size and style of the letters
was not the only nor, perhaps, the chief demarcation
between these "hands"; there was a broad distinc-
tion also in the relation of the letters to one an-
other. In the uncial hand each letter was separated
from the other letters as in printing; but in the
minuscule style the letters of words were joined to-
gether in a "running" hand as in modern writing,
thus facilitating rapidity in the use of the pen.
Capitalization was little regarded in the early cen-
turies; and punctuation as a system was not known.
These two distinctions of the uncial and the minuscule
hands were applied also to the productions written
in Latin, though the uncial characters gave place to
the small letter or "current" hand at an earlier date
among the Roman than among the Greek copyists.
This was probably owing to the decadence of the
Greek language and the consequent ascendency of
the Latin.
The most important systems of writing, for many
The Art and Science of Paleography 115
centuries from a time long previous to the Chris-
tian Era and on throughout the Middle Ages
were those which employed the classic Greek and
Latin alphabets, and in which the great body of the
world's best literature was written. At least this
was true within the bounds of Europe. With the
declining literary importance of Alexandria came
the growing prominence of the region north of the
Mediterranean. The Greek alphabet and language
held preeminence for centuries, beginning with Alex-
ander's conquest and extending into the early Chris-
tian centuries when they were displaced, early in the
Middle Ages, under the Latin ascendency. Dur-
ing the increasing domination of the Latin alphabet
and literature, national and provincial "hands" were
developed and came into active competition in the
centuries previous to the invention of printing. The
handwriting which was of specifically Roman lineage
was gradually modified by environing conditions in
the different sections of Europe and resulted in
various "hands," as the "Lombardic" hand of Italy,
the "Visigothic" hand of Spain, and the "Meroving-
ian" and (later) the "Carolingian" hand of the
Prankish Empire.
(6) The Anglo-Saxon writing. The Anglo-Sax-
on handwriting is an inheritance from the Latin
national hand. In this "descent" (or, is it "as-
cent"?) of our modern English "hand," in the long
process of its genealogy, the Latin displaced the
earlier Greek, as the Greek had won its way over the
n6 The Reign of the Manuscript
still earlier Phoenician and Hebrew. In our modern
English literature we employ the Roman alphabet
(as other nationalities are coming more and more
to do). The Roman characters, being descended
immediately from the Latin, though modified more
or less by the Norman domination and other fac-
tors, constitute what may be called the cosmopolitan
alphabet of modern times. The characters used in
our Anglo-Saxon writing have come to their present
ascendency and increasing supremacy from two
reasons in particular: First, because the Latin on
which it was based was the language of the educated
classes of all nations during the Middle Ages; and
second and probably chiefly because the Roman
characters are better adapted for rapid writing than
were the severe though elegant letters of the Greek
language. The shape of the Roman characters
greatly facilitated the adoption of the "running"
hand in the Latin literature.
Many changes other than those already alluded
to have come about in the transmission of literature
from age to age : Men at first wrote from right to
left as the orientals still do. The peoples of early
Greece first wrote, as the Chinese still do, perpendic-
ularly to the page, and then from right to left;
later, backward and forward from right to left and
left to right as in case of furrows made by a side-
hill plow; and lastly, from left to right as moderns
do. We look for the beginning of the Hebrew
Bible where our English Bible ends; and we read it
The Art and Science of Paleography 117
from right to left and turn its pages from left to
right. It is much the same with the Chinese books,
except that the columns of reading matter extend
downwards on the page from top to bottom and not
crosswise to the page as in other languages.
(7) Paleography and the date of literary produc-
tions. The style and character of the handwriting
is of great practical importance to literary criticism
and has large historical value. A knowledge as to
the history of the individual letters (and each in-
dividual letter of the alphabet has a history of its
own, as to its genesis and development) and of the
arrangement and the appearance of literary produc-
tions is of the utmost significance in ascertaining the
age, meaning, and value of ancient documents. The
style of handwriting, also, has a large place in de-
termining the time or period when a manuscript
was written, even when the date is not affixed, just
as the spelling of words in our English tongue and
the fashion of our typography ever fluctuating at
the demand of artistic taste or attractive appear-
ance helps to determine, in absence of the date of
publication, the approximate time when a book was
printed. Illustrative of this, the author once placed
on his library shelves an attractive set of books
which were represented at the time of purchase as
"just from the press" but which he knew at the time
were printed from plates made more than a dozen
years before although they may have been "fresh
from the press"; he knew it from the kind of type
n8 The Reign of the Manuscript
employed in their printing, or, more accurately
speaking, he knew it from the peculiar quotation-
marks used with that particular type, inasmuch as
the style of quotation-marks used in those volumes
had passed out of current use by printers and pub-
lishers some years previously, having had but a
feeble tenure of existence. To realize at a glance
the ever-changing style of type in modern printing,
one needs but to turn the pages of type-manufactur-
ing catalogues. In like manner, the style of hand-
writing in any language constitutes a kind of verisim-
ilitude for the age of the written literature. Dr.
Isaac Taylor has said, "The architecture of different
periods is not more characteristic of the age to
which it belongs, than is the style of writing in
manuscripts, nor is there less of certainty in de-
termining questions of antiquity in the one case than
in the other." 22 As the periods of the "Doric,"
"Ionic," and "Corinthian" architectures are de-
terminable approximately by their respective charac-
teristics so the time of a literary production is
largely determined by the characteristics of the hand-
writing in which it is written. We quote the words
of Professor Mahaffy: "The task of palaeography
is now changed. We have ample evidence of an-
tiquity; we rather seek to distinguish the small pe-
culiarities of ancient handwriting as to tell their age
approximately when the writer has affixed no note
of his own time. And this we do with wonderful
* History of the Transmission of Ancient Books.
The Art and Science of Paleography 119
certainty, because almost every century has its own
hand so distinctly that even the man who attempts
to copy older fashions can easily be detected by his
want of freedom. Years ago I was shown, in the
great library at Naples, a manuscript of this kind,
apparently of the tenth century. After a few min-
utes' examination, though I had never before seen
such a thing, I told the librarian that it seemed to me
a careful copy of an old hand by a laborious scribe
of later date. He was surprised, but then showed
me, what he had intended to conceal, a note at the
end dated 1450, showing that my guess was correct.
This anecdote is quoted to show that the freedom
of the hand, as well as the shape of the letters, must
be carefully estimated and considered by the pa-
laeographer. By using a good microscope, un-steadi-
ness of lines which escape the naked eye will be-
come apparent; and this is now well known to those
who have studied the detection of forgeries in crimi-
nal cases." 23
'"Recent Research in Bible Lands, pp. 194, 195.
XV
MECHANICAL AND ARTIFICIAL DEVICES OF
LITERATURE
THE universal divisions, of modern literary
productions into books, chapters, sections,
paragraphs, sentences, and members of sentences,
together with capitalization and the system of
punctuation, are so important and so enthralled with
modern composition and rhetoric that we could
hardly appreciate or understand literature apart
from them. Apropos to this observation, Professor
Dobschiitz says: "If we look at the earliest manu-
scripts of the Bible which have come down to us,
we shall almost think that supernatural assistance
was necessary for reading them; no punctuation, no
accent, no space between the words, no breaking off
at the end of a sentence. The reader has to know
his text almost entirely by heart to do it well." l
These distinctions of literature are mechanical
and artificial devices for clarifying and making em-
phatic a writer's thoughts as expressed in written or
printed language and they are comparatively mod-
ern devices. Punctuation marks are indispensable
in legal documents and in all the commercial opera-
Influence of the Bible on Civilisation, p. 13.
120
Mechanical and Artificial Devices of Literature 121
tions of the times. The altered position of a
comma gives a changed meaning to scripture texts
and to legal documents. (As an illustration of the
changed position of a comma, note the varying
punctuation of Hebrews 10: 12 as contained in dif-
ferent editions of our Authorized Version. In all
pulpit Bibles which we have examined, the comma
is.placed after the word "sins," while in the various
teachers' Bibles the comma follows the word "for-
ever." By the former punctuation an important New
Testament doctrine is negatived.)
Imagine yourself trying to read a philosophical
treatise, a technical or abstruse discussion, a schol-
arly or scientific essay, a thrilling romance, or a
legal document, in which there were no distinctions
of paragraphs, sentences, phrases, or even indi-
vidual words no capitalization and no punctuation-
marks of any kind to assist in determining a writer's
thoughts or the exact meaning of his composition
and you must recognize the obstacles which confront
the researchers of ancient literary documents. The
difficulties encountered in the literature of the Bible
are in no wise diminished when we recall the fact
that the originals of our sacred writings, both He-
brew and Greek, were written, for the most part,
in solid blocks of letters analogous to our capitals,
without any of the distinguishing limits or relief
which come from chapters, verses, pause-marks, or
words. It was only by degrees and at slow stages
that individual words were separated from one an-
122 The Reign of the Manuscript
other by a spacing between them; then, later, came
the grouping of words into sentences by means
of pause-marks and other mechanical devices of
literature.
The division of the books of the Bible into chap-
ters and verses is of comparatively modern origin.
The chapters of the Bible are associated with the
name of Cardinal Hugo who, at about the middle
of the thirteenth century, divided the Latin Bible
into chapters in order to facilitate reference, for
comparison of scripture with scripture, and to make
available a commentary which he had prepared.
The system of verses, so useful for reference in
Bible study, is associated with the work of Robert
Stephens, a printer of Geneva who divided the chap-
ters of Cardinal Hugo's Latin Bible into verses
and affixed a numerical notation to them. This num-
bering of the verses first appeared in a Greek New
Testament which Stephens printed at Geneva in
1531. The same volume contained also the Vulgate
and a Latin version by Erasmus.
The importance of punctuation-marks as an ar-
tificial aid for conveying a writer's thoughts and in
giving emphasis to written or printed language can
scarcely be appreciated by the present generation,
for it has always been accustomed to their use. In
the Greek manuscripts there was, at the first, noth-
ing corresponding to "stops" or pause-marks as in
modern literature. In the modern Hebrew litera-
ture there are vowels or vowel "pointings" to
Mechanical and Artificial Devices of Literature 1 23
facilitate reading; but these were not expressed in
the ancient Hebrew writing, inasmuch as the Hebrew
written language was made up exclusively of con-
sonant letters (commonly three letters to a word)
without vowels or vowel "pointings." The idiomatic
use of the respective languages occasioned a further
difficulty: In English composition, e. g. } the logical
order is subject, predicate, object with their modi-
fiers in order; and emphasis is indicated by italic
and CAPITAL letters, and by pause-marks without
varying the order of composition; but with the Greek
and Latin literatures emphasis was denoted by the
position of words in the sentence, by the relation of
a word to other words, or in the use of words with
reference to their modifiers.
The development of a system of "pointings" in
order to bring out more clearly the meaning of a
writer and so facilitate the reading of manuscript
literature, began at Alexandria, being first employed
in poetical writing. A slight open space at the left
of a line, analogous to modern indentation in the
margin at the beginning of a paragraph, made its ap-
pearance first on the papyri at Alexandria. In the
manuscripts of the New Testament the earliest at-
tempts in the direction of punctuation go back to the
fourth century A. D., and consisted of an occasional
simple point or a small blank space in the writing,
which, to that extent, broke up somewhat the other-
wise monotonous lines of letters. Stichometry, in-
troduced in the fifth century by a scholar named
124 The Reign of the Manuscript
Euthalius, was an arrangement of the Gospels, the
Acts, and the epistles of Paul in lines regulated
according to the sense each line terminating where
some pause should be made in the reading; and so
had the force of a system of punctuation, but, owing
to the waste of costly parchment, it was not gener-
ally or extensively adopted.
Concerning the history of punctuation marks it is
claimed that Jerome, the celebrated scholar of the
fourth and fifth centuries (died 420 A. D.) used
points similar to our "comma" and "colon." These
points, while not in universal use by the writers, were
inserted in many old manuscripts. In the ninth cen-
tury, the stroke called the "comma" came into more
common use, and a dot above the line indicated a
pause equivalent to the "colon" or the "semicolon,"
while a full stop was denoted by a large dot or
"period" or a double dot, and by a space. The in-
terrogation point, identical in form with our semi-
colon, occasionally appears. The "breathings" and
"accents" with which the Greek literature has come
down to us, while traces of them appear in the early
centuries, were not common at the end of the seventh
century A. D., those found in the Vatican manu-
script of the fourth century and in the Alexandrian
manuscript of the fifth were supplied by a later hand
than the writers of these copies. The Latins, in
the wake of the Greeks, adopted their system of
punctuation, meager as it was, and continued its use
in the transcription of the Latin literature through-
Mechanical and Artificial Devices of Literature 125
out the Middle Ages.
The system of punctuation employed in all mod-
ern literature, and which is so essential a part of
the finished rhetoric, is of recent development as
compared with the course of literature, and dates
from the time of a Venetian printer, Aldus Manu-
tius, late in the fifteenth century. It was largely
consequent upon the invention of printing, though
some of the punctuation-marks of the modern sys-
tem were used before the division of the sacred lit-
erature into chapters and verses. It is to be noted
that the present tendency by the best writers is to
simplify punctuation as much as possible.
The system of notation as with many of the good
things of life and much of our wisdom like the
wise men in the days of Herod, came from the
East, from India by way of Arabia. The origin
of the completed system of notation as now in uni-
versal use, at once simple and complete, is com-
paratively recent and obscure. Its origin and de-
velopment had both a practical and a philosophical
side. Its beginnings antedate the earliest art, lit-
erature, and science. It began in counting and in
some sort of tally of separate units, perhaps upon
the fingers. Probably the ten digits of the two hands
suggested the widely-extended and ever-available
scale of ten for comparison and estimate. Other
scales than ten for counting and calculation have been
employed by tribes and nations : scales of twos, and
threes, and fives, and sevens, and twelves, and twen-
126 The Reign of the Manuscript
ties. The ancient Hebrews employed two or more
of these scales.
The Hebrews and Greeks as well as the Romans
used letters of the alphabet instead of figures for
counting and calculations. The system of notation
as we now have it was of gradual development. Un-
der Theoderic the Great (454-526 A. D.), Boethius
made use of certain marks or signs which were in
part similar to our nine digits. This was improved
upon by a pupil of Gerbeet, who used signs still more
like our nine digits. But all methods of notation
preceding the Arabic were unwieldly, complex, and
incomplete. The system did not originate with the
Arabs. As the Arabs had appropriated the Chinese
discovery and use of paper, so they appropriated the
Hindu system of notation. The system at first was
without a zero: that character was added probably
in the seventh century. The decimal character was
used to give positional or place value to the nine
digits, the cipher having no value except in com-
bination with the digits; it thus completed the sys-
tem of notation.
XVI
SOURCES OF THE BOOK-MAKING INDUSTRY
THE making of books and the depositories of
them prior to the invention of printing, and
especially during the Middle Ages or from the fifth
century to the fifteenth, inclusive, are matters of all
but romantic interest. In the very early times and
in all the principal cities of Greece and her colonies
there were professional scribes who engaged in the
business of copying and caring for books, the same
as we now have our professional "book-keepers"
(though with a different application) and our print-
ers and librarians. This was peculiarly the condi-
tion in the later Grecian and the earlier Roman
times. The accredited though almost incredible
number of volumes in some of the ancient libraries,
as at that of Alexandria notwithstanding the slow
and laborious process of their making, when every
book made was a separate production is proof
positive of the extent of this industry. It was equally
true of the very early times of the times of ancient
Assyria. That scribes, giving their whole attention
to the production of their books, were very numerous
in the period of the cuneiform writings is inferred
from the immense quantity of their writings con-
127
128 The Reign of the Manuscript
tained in the great libraries, and from the fact that
in some periods almost every document is found to
have been written by a different scribe. Women are
known to have been employed as scribes. 1
The treasures of learning and letters, preserved
from the pre-Christian times, as at Samos, Athens,
Megara, and Pergamos, quickly found their way (in
the early centuries of our Era) from Greece, the
fountain source of books and culture, into all those
parts of the world with which she was brought into
commercial relations and whither the conquests of
Alexander had already carried the Greek culture and
literature. And so it came to pass that to the cities
of the Mediterranean and the Euxine there was a
constant flow of books; and, in many of them, ex-
tensive libraries were collected and treasured. At a
later time, when the making of books had greatly
declined in consequence of the enveloping cloud of
ignorance, the monks, dignitaries of the Church and
even princes, brought a steadfast devotion to the
copying of the religious books especially the Bible
though not neglecting the classic literature. No-
ble Christian ladies, too, shared in this copying of the
Bible as a form of ascetic work providing, as they
believed, heavenly merit and the means of subsis-
tence. A Christian sometimes copied for himself a
gospel or some letters of evangelists, or even one or
more books of the Old Testament; and we are told
that wealthy Christians sometimes helped their
National Geographic Magazine, Vol. XXIX, p. 167.
Sources of the Book-Making Industry 129
poorer brethren by providing them with copies.
The production of books was mostly but not
wholly confined to the early centuries of the Chris-
tian Era; it certainly did not extend to any consider-
able degree beyond the fifth century. It is within
the historical facts to say that, from the fifth cen-
tury on, inclusively, throughout the "Dark Ages" or
for nearly a thousand years, the business of making
books greatly declined, and was limited largely to
books which persons of rank, literary taste, or re-
ligious devotion, themselves copied for personal use
or gratification, and to books copied in the religious
houses. Persons of wealth or position, too, would
sometimes employ copyists or men of sedentary
habits or scholarly tastes, and even their slaves who
were fitted for this occupation, to transcribe such
books as could be secured for the purpose. (A slave
of this period was often not the dull and degraded
bondman which we are accustomed to associate with
the designation "slave" but he might be a man in all
ways superior to his master.) Among the copyists
of the times were educated persons who, by reason
of the misfortunes of war, the handicaps of fate, or
the hard contingencies of life such as the loss of
possessions or the reverses of fortune had fallen
into a subject condition of servitude and were em-
ployed by their masters as secretaries, scribes, and
even as personal advisers and trusted friends. Ori-
gin, perhaps the greatest Bible scholar of the ancient
Church, is said to have been supported by a rich
130 The Reign of the Manuscript
admirer who put a number of slave copyists at his
disposal. These copyists were sometimes employed
to further the commercial enterprises of their own-
ers also; for books generally had a marketable value
often a high commercial value notwithstanding
the dearth of intelligence and decline of learning.
There were times when the possession of a book,
especially the Bible, was regarded as a treasure-
trove, and the owning of a book by whomsoever
written was considered a fact worthy of record by a
biographer.
So also, toward the close of the Middle Ages
when smaller libraries had been established in ab-
beys and schools, as in France and Spain, manu-
script books were borrowed from neighboring li-
braries and copies were made therefrom to increase
many local collections. It was a custom, further-
more, in wide areas for libraries rx> exchange dupli-
cate copies of books and thus the extension of litera-
ture went on even in the "Dark Ages," though with
a fluctuating progress. More than this, since much
of the literature of the times was written upon the
fragile papyrus, a constant renewal of books was
made necessary in order to replenish, maintain, and
enlarge existing libraries and private collections.
This, in the later days, furnished occupation for im-
pecunious students of the universities as well as for
slaves, professional scribes, and occupants of the
religious houses.
But in the intellectual torpor that abounded, and
Sources of the Book-Making Industry 131
in the pall of almost universal ignorance that over-
cast the civilized world under which there were
princes and kings who could not even read it is
unreasonable to suppose, notwithstanding the feeble
intellectual Bickerings that lingered, that there was
any very considerable demand for literature during
a long period of time, or for a large portion of the
"Dark Ages." It was the fact, as says Hallam, the
historian of this period, that u a cloud of ignorance
overspread the whole face of the Church, hardly
broken by a few glimmering lights, who owe much
of their distinction to the surrounding darkness."
And he portrays at length the gross darkness that
enveloped the people, both clergy and laity. 2 In
an age when scarcely anybody could write or even
read, when learning had well-nigh disappeared under
the pall of ignorance, we may easily believe that
books were neither extensively made nor highly
valued. To again quote from Hallam: "If it be
demanded by what cause it happened that a few
sparks of ancient learning survived throughout this
long winter, we can only ascribe their preservation
to the establishment of Christianity. Religion alone
made a bridge, as it were, across this chaos and has
linked the two periods of ancient and modern civil-
ization." Similar is the testimony of Mr. George
H. Putnam: u ln the centuries which elapsed be-
tween the downfall of the Roman Empire and the
invention of printing, the centers of intellectual ac-
* Middle Ages, Vol. II, pp. 459, 463.
132 The Reign of the Manuscript
tivities and of scholarly interests were undoubtedly
the churches and the monasteries, and it is probable
that if it had not been for the educational work done
by the priests and monks, and for the interest taken
by them (however inadequately and ignorantly) in
the literature of the past, the fragments of this litera-
ture which have been preserved for to-day would
have been much less considerable and more frag-
mentary than they are. As I understand history,
the literary interests of the world owe very much to
the fostering care given to them by the Church, or
by certain portions of the Church, during the
troublous centuries of the early Middle Ages.
Throughout these centuries the Church not only
supplied a standard of morality, but kept in exist-
ence whatever intellectual life there was." 3
"Authors and Their Public, pp. 273, 274.
XVII
THE LITERARY PREEMINENCE OF ALEXANDRIA
THE fact that, for hundreds of years, Alexan-
dria held the preeminence as the center and
source of literary achievement down to the cul-
mination of her distinguishing history in 642 A. D.
will not blind our eyes to the recognition of the
earlier and narrower centers and sources of intel-
lectual activity. The fact must not be overlooked
that, long before the imperial City was founded at
the northern extremity of Egypt in 332 B. C., there
were other important centers of learning and well-
known depositories of written records.
Perhaps the very earliest extensive depository of
written documents of any character which have sur-
vived for millenniums of years was at ancient Nip-
pur, in the region of Babylon and between the
Euphrates and the Tigris. This Nippur, or the
modern Nuffar, is spoken of in the old Sumerian
legends as the oldest city of the earth, and the influ-
ence of which has been felt by all classes of Baby-
lonian peoples for fully four thousand years.
Through explorations, patiently and hazardously
prosecuted at Nippur and elsewhere in Babylonia
a long-forgotten world has slowly risen from its
133
134 The Reign of the Manuscript
sealed entombment for multiplied centuries into
resurrection life and reality. The Babylonian Ex-
pedition, organized and equipped for the purpose
by the University of Pennsylvania, has carried on a
succession of expeditions, with some interruptions,
from 1889, forward, on the site of this ancient for-
gotten city. As part results of its excavations, there
have been unearthed, not only temple walls with
their contents of sarcophagi, bas-relief, vases, play-
things, weapons, objects and ornaments in gold,
silver, bronze, iron, clay, and stone, together with
human bones, but also more than 32,000 cuneiform
tablets. These tablets, the first-fruits of the vast
literary deposits of this ancient city, are of a mani-
fold character and consist of syllabaries, letters,
chronological lists, historical fragments, religious
texts, and the like. The tablets already examined
indicate the probable value of many of these records
from that far-off age. The oldest of them, accord-
ing to Professor Hilprecht, have an antiquity of
about 2800 years B. C., one particular fragment,
containing a part of the deluge story more ancient
by a thousand years than any yet found, antedates
Abraham's leaving Ur of the Chaldees full two hun-
dred years. The story as inscribed thereon, being
deciphered by Professor Hilprecht, not only tallies
with the Bible record but adds minute details and
clarifies in some particulars the inspired narrative
contained in Genesis. 1 The newspapers of the time
1 Recent Research in Bible Lands, pp. 45-63.
The Literary Preeminence of Alexandria 135
of this "find" contain this account of the difficulty
in the way of the tablet's decipherment: "Because
of its long period in the earth the tablet was in-
crusted with crystals of nitre, which filled up the
characters of the ancient text. Besides, the clay
was in a state of decomposition and exceedingly diffi-
cult to handle without destroying the tablet and
losing the precious writing on it. For weeks Profes-
sor Hilprecht worked several hours a day to remove
the crystals and to put the tablet into a state in which
it could be deciphered. Then he set about the work
of translating the writing."
The chief library of ancient Assyria and the one
of which we have the most definite knowledge was
that of Assnr-bani-pal at Nineveh. This distin-
guished king of Assyria, successor of Sargon, Sen-
nacherib, and Esar-haddon, and the conqueror of
Babylon, greatly enlarged the library of which his
predecessors had made beginnings, bringing into it
the plundered books of Babylonia and otherwise
greatly developing its resources. The date of this
library at Nineveh is fixed at about 670 B. C., and
is accredited to have contained in its archives more
than thirty thousand tablets and a large collection of
hexagonal and octagonal cylinders, seals, and other
valuable archaeological treasures, including clay sar-
cophagi. Assur-bani-pal sent his scribes to copy the
vocabularies of foreigners wherever accessible and
added thus to the treasures of his library by the ex-
tensive transcription of tablets and cylinders. Pro-
136 The Reign of the Manuscript
fessor Sayce tells us that u a whole army of scribes
were employed in it, busily engaged in writing and
editing old texts." In the library, too, the study of
the Accadian tongue was revived and the language
and literature of the primitive progenitors of the
Assyrio-Babylonians was written, not only with Baby-
lonian translations but also with their Assyrian
equivalents. Sir Henry Layard, as long ago as in
1850, in the course of his explorations unearthed on
the site of this old library more than twenty thou-
sand clay tablets, which were brought, later, to the
British Museum. It was estimated that as many
more tablets remained as had been carried away.
These tablets vary in dimensions, the largest measur-
ing from nine inches by six and a half while the
smallest in some cases are not more than an inch long
and with but one or two lines of writing on them.
These tablets are covered over with cuneiform char-
acters. These characters are so small on some of
the cylinders and tablets that, according to Professor
George Rawlinson, five or six lines have been traced
within the space of an inch. The delicate character
of the writing on some of the tablets has led some
of the archaeologists to conclude that the inscriptions
thereon must have been written with the aid of a
magnifying glass; indeed, a magnifying lens of
crystal, now exhibited in the British Museum, was
found on the site of this library at Nineveh. These
tablets, like those at Nippur, cover a wide range of
subjects: historical, mythological, linguistic, mathe-
The Literary Preeminence of Alexandria 137
matical, geographical, and astronomical.
The next in point of time among the great libraries
of the ancient world was that at Pergamos in Asia
Minor. Eumenes II. (197-159 B. C.) and other
kings of Pergamos established a library in this city
of ancient Mysia in which was stored a vast collec-
tion of manuscript books, approximating 200,000
rolls, written on papyrus and parchment. This li-
brary at Pergamos flourished for a period of one
hundred and fifty years, or from its establishment on
until it was given to Cleopatra by Antony, and trans-
ferred by his authority to Alexandria in order to
replace one of the libraries which was said to have
been destroyed by fire in the wars of Caesar; and so,
thenceforward, became incorporated in the Alexan-
drian Library and shared its fateful history.
The city of Alexandria, located on the delta of
the Nile, became and remained for centuries both
prior to and after the Christian Era had begun
preeminent among the cities of the age we are con-
sidering, as a literary center and source of intel-
lectual virility. Grecian literature and learning
flourished there under the patronage of the Ptol-
emies; and there, under Ptolemy I. (Ptolemy
"Soter") at about 300 B. C., was begun the Alex-
andrian Library and Museum, the largest, most
valuable, and the most renowned of all ancient li-
braries. While the Alexandrian Library was begun
under the rule of Ptolemy "Soter," a general of
Alexander the Great, it was during the reign of his
138 The Reign of the Manuscript
son and successor, Ptolemy Philadelphia, that the
Library took on organized proportions and greatly
augmented resources. Ptolemy Philadelphus sent to
all parts of Egypt, Greece, and Asia to secure the
most valuable books; no exertions nor expense were
spared to enrich and enlarge the collection in the
Library; and he left, it is said, 100,000 volumes
therein. Staffs of copyists were gathered in the
Museum and search was continually made through-
out Greece and Asia Minor for copies and duplicates
of existing rolls. Extravagant prices were paid for
books by the librarians (page 30) and thus a steady
flow of literature was turned toward Alexandria
from all parts of the then civilized world. The
Library further grew, during the Ptolemaic Dynasty,
and, as augmented by the collection of books from
Pergamos, to the vast proportions of 700,000 books
(all, of course, in manuscript) in this proud Capital
on the Nile.
We must ever bear it in mind, however, while con-
sidering the large number of books treasured in the
Alexandrian Library, or in any other ancient collec-
tion, that a manuscript roll the common form of
most ancient books was generally written on one
side of the parchment or papyrus only and there-
fore could contain at most only one-half the amount
of matter embraced within a book of leaves and
pages.
We have already called attention (p. 62) to the
change in literature from the roll book to the book
The Literary Preeminence of Alexandria 139
of leaves; and would now note the further change
in the roll-book by which the smaller rolls, con-
venient for handling, were substituted for the enor-
mous and cumbrous ones often encountered. The
bulkier manuscript rolls, composed as they were of
parchment or papyrus, chiefly of papyrus at Alex-
andria sometimes having the length of one hundred
and twenty feet or even longer, came to be divided
into smaller rolls as making up a given large work,
the number of which being determined by the
size of the respective works, or, somewhat, as in
poetry, by the character of the composition. The
object of this was to facilitate handling and refer-
ence, and, incidentally, the preservation of the manu-
script; the opening portions of the roll, as also
the initial pages of a book of leaves, being most
frequently handled, were subjected to greatest "wear
and tear." Under this change, the History of Hero-
dotus, e. g., was multiplied into nine and the Iliad
of Homer into twenty-four "books" or volumes;
and the entire Bible which, if contained in one roll
would prove unwieldly and almost incapable of use,
would require thirty or forty or more rolls. The
size of the Medieval Bibles, when made up in a
book with leaves instead of the roll form, was im-
mense. They were veritable libraries in themselves
consisting of four or five, in one instance of four-
teen, great folio volumes. The Bible, however, be-
ing written by many different authors and having a
great diversity of themes, would, by reason of this
140 The Reign of the Manuscript
difference in authorship and subject-matter, more
readily lend itself to an arrangement into separate
rolls or books than many of the early classic writ-
ings. Indeed, the Bible, while it is THE BOOK, is,
essentially, a large collection of separate books.
Not the Bible alone but other large works, as the
Iliad and the Odyssey, notwithstanding the unity and
continuity of their themes, were also divided into
"books" or rolls, and these were numbered or named
by the letters of the Greek alphabet: "Iliad A"
would designate the first book of Homer's Iliad,
and so on unto the end of the composition. This
change to smaller books, and thus to a larger num-
ber of separate volumes, came about or was facili-
tated and expedited in the Library at Alexandria.
One, Callimachus, the grammarian, seems to have
been greatly instrumental in its furtherance; for, as
says Mr. Putnam, "From his time the cumbrous
scrolls began to disappear, and as well for the edi-
tions of the classics as for the literature of the day,
the small rolls came into use."
The method of collecting books (as well as the
multiplication of smaller rolls from a single larger
roll by transcription) tended also to the enlargement
of the Alexandrian Library. We are informed by
tradition that, in addition to the purchase of rolls,
the books taken by the authorities from Greeks and
other foreigners coming into Egypt were sent to the
Library and there copied by the scribes in its em-
1 Authors and Their Public, p. 142.
The Literary Preeminence of Alexandria 141
ploy. The copies thus made were delivered to the
owners of the books, while the originals from which
the copies were made were deposited in the Library.
If this tradition is to be credited, then, how abso-
lutely beyond estimate was the importance of the
Alexandrian Library as the chief and the almost
exclusive depository of original manuscripts of both
sacred and classic literature and for a long period
of time. And if this was the fact, then it is highly
probable that the original copies of the New Testa-
ment, or of books thereof, and of the Old Testament
entire, were translated into the Greek during this
period of literary activity in Alexandria in order to
meet the needs : First, of the Greek-speaking Jews
later, of the Greek-speaking apostles and Chris-
tian teachers and disciples; and that these books were
among the treasures of this most famous Library of
the ancient world, or, indeed, of all time. On the
authority of Tertullian, who lived in the first quarter
of the third century, and of Chrysostom, who lived
in the last half of the fourth century, the original
Septuagint Version of the Old Testament scriptures
reputed to have been made near Alexandria in
the third century B. C. and, probably, with it auto-
graph copies of the whole or parts of the New Testa-
ment were deposited in the Library at Alexandria.
[It may not be without its interest while referring
to the large number of books treasured in the Alex-
andrian Library to mention, parenthetically, the
number of volumes contained in some of the leading
142 The Reign of the Manuscript
libraries of the United States and of the world:
Johns Hopkins University 220,000
The University of California 240,000
The University of Michigan 252,000
Princeton University 260,000
The University of Pennsylvania 285,000
Cornell University 355ooo
Columbia University 430,000
The University of Chicago 480,000
New York State Library (Albany) . . 500,000
Yale University 550,000
Harvard University 800,000
Boston Public Library, about 1,000,000
New York Consolidated Libra rv,
about i ,400,000
Library of United States Congress,
about i ,800,000 3
Strasburg University, France 700,000
Royal Library, Berlin 1,000,000
Imperial Library, Petrograd 1,500,000
British Museum, London 2,000,000
Bibliotheca National, Paris 3,000,000*]
'Encyclopedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition).
* World Almanac,
XVIII
VARYING FORTUNES OF THE ALEXANDRIAN LIBRARY
THE incomparable Library at Alexandria was
exposed to the same vicissitudes as those which
beset everything mundane. It was frequently rifled
and portions of its contents were often destroyed
through disturbances occurring in the period of the
Roman domination, but it was as frequently replen-
ished by the literary activity which found home and
harborage in Alexandria for hundreds of years after
the Christian Era had begun.
Tradition is divided both as to the time and the
circumstances under which the Alexandrian Library
and Museum, viewed as one institution, came to its
end. The tradition which gained large credence
that its career terminated at the time of the Saracen
conquest of Alexandria in 642 A. D., and under the
fanatical frenzy of the Caliph Omar, rests upon very
questionable authority. The oft-quoted answer of
the Saracen Emperor to the importunate appeal of
the Alexandrian scholar (Joannes Grammaticus) to
spare the Library, that, "If those books agreed with
the Koran they were useless; if they did not agree
with the Koran they were pernicious; in either case
should be destroyed,' 7 rests mainly on the evidence
143
144 The Reign of the Manuscript
of a stranger who lived six hundred years later, is
discredited by the best authorities, and is "over-
balanced/ 1 as says Gibbon, "by the silence of the
early and native annalists." Says a writer in the
North American Review: "It may have been de-
stroyed during the great riot between the orthodox
and Arian factions in 389, when the Serapeum, which
is said to have housed it, was burned. It can hardly
have had the wasting fate that perhaps befell its
Roman rival, and it is certain that Omar's icono-
clasm is a myth. With Gibbon's judgment modern
historical scholarship concurs: 'The solitary report
of a stranger who wrote at the end of six hundred
years in the confines of Media is overbalanced by
the silence of two annalists of a more early date,
both Christians, both natives of Egypt, and the most
ancient of whom, the patriarch Eutychius, has amply
described the conquest of Alexandria.' " l The bet-
ter conclusion, therefore, seems to be that there was
little of the famous Alexandrian Library in existence
at the time of the Saracen conquest in 642 A. D.,
owing to the fact of its earlier demolition, which was
begun, at least, in the time of the Emperor Theo-
dosius, when, under the Emperor's permission, Arch-
bishop Theophilus, at the close of the fourth cen-
tury, led fanatical Christians in the destruction of
heathen temples not sparing the literary treasures
of the Library which had been associated with an
antecedent heathen patronage.
'June, 1914.
Varying Fortunes of the Alexandrian Library 145
But, whatever the agencies of destruction, and
whenever it was consummated, there is no difference
of opinion among antiquarians, historians, and men
of letters as to the world's irreparable loss and liter-
ary impoverishment when this far-famed Library
and Museum (wherein had been gathered and treas-
ured literature from Egypt, Rome, Greece, and
India, with its extensive departments for the busi-
ness of transcribing literature, u and with every pos-
sible advantage which royal munificence on the one
hand and learned assiduity on the other, could in-
sure") was destroyed; and the literary accumula-
tions of centuries, including the immense library from
Pergamos and inestimably valuable manuscripts of
the Bible, were ruthlessly and irremediably wasted.
XIX
CONSTANTINOPLE THE LATER CENTER OF
LITERATURE
OUR gaze is now transferred from Africa to
Europe. As Alexander had given his name to
the City on the delta of the Nile, so Constantine has
given his to the City on the Bosphorus. Constanti-
nople stood as the capital and metropolis of the East
for a thousand years, or from 329 A. D. (the date
at which he removed his throne thereunto) on until
near the middle of the fifteenth century, when the
proud City fell into the hands of the Mohammedans
and became in consequence the seat of the Ottoman
Empire. When Constantine removed the capital of
the Empire from the West he took many elements
of intellectual life which had been the proud boast
of the City of Augustus with him unto Byzantium;
and, in process of time, the pomp, power, and learn-
ing of Rome and Alexandria were transferred to
Constantinople supreme in beauty and convenience
of location. Constantinople seemed to occupy for
more than a millennium of years both a charming
and a charmed position. While Rome for cen-
turies a center and source of literature, having, after
the time of Augustus, numerous libraries together
146
Constantinople the Later Center of Literature 147
with the capitols of provinces and countries of Eu-
rope had been successively occupied by contending
armies, Constantinople had remained safe in her
commanding position at the portal of two continents
and had continued "unconquered and even un-
assailed." At the fall of the Capital in the East,
however, Rome became again the head of the Em-
pire, and its imperial Seat was transferred from the
Bosphorus to the Tiber.
Under the favor shown by Constantine at his ac-
cession to the ranks of the Christian faith, whatever
his motive, distinctively Christian literature was
given an honored place in the imperial library; and
through his cooperation, at a time when books were
relatively scarce and difficult to obtain, several thou-
sand volumes were collected. This collection, made
up largely it is claimed of Christian literature, was
augmented under some of his successors to the
dimensions of a hundred thousand volumes. Fur-
thermore, an efficient librarian had charge of these
archives and directed the staff of copyists which were
employed therein somewhat as had been the distinc-
tion of the Alexandrian Library. A new impulse
was added in collecting and copying books by the
personal favor of the Emperor he himself, order-
ing from Eusebius, the church historian of the time,
fifty copies of the Scriptures to be written on "arti-
ficially wrought skins by skillful calligraphists" for
the use of the churches in and about Constantinople.
And it is deemed possible and even not improbable
148 The Reign of the Manuscript
that the Sinaitic manuscript one of the oldest and
best of existing Greek manuscripts may be a sur-
vivor of this number. The library at Constantinople,
like all libraries, was exposed to the wastings of
time and change but was replenished and renewed
through that measure of intellectual vitality which
survived in the city on the Bosphorus for a millen-
nium of years.
Besides the imperial library, the churches and re-
ligious houses of Constantinople were enriched with
collections of manuscripts more or less extensive.
And not only in the favored City but in the regions
adjacent in the islands of the ^gean, on Cyprus,
and in many other quarters manuscripts were col-
lected, transcribed, and preserved. (Isaac Taylor.)
Constantinople, while it continued to be the center
of learning and literature, was by no means the ex-
clusive center; for the enterprise of collecting and
treasuring books was widely disseminated. "No
spot," says Isaac Taylor, "was more famed for the
production of books than Mount Athos the lofty
promontory which stretches from the Macedonian
coast far into the ^gean Sea." And the churches,
too, in wide areas, became depositories of books,
especially of the Bible or parts thereof, liturgical
volumes, and works of devotion. There were also
church libraries at Jerusalem, at Rome, and in many
other localities. One at Csesarea is said to have con-
tained, as augmented by Eusebius, the historian,
about thirty thousand volumes. Gradually into all
Constantinople the Later Center of Literature 149
these regions into Crete, Italy, western Europe;
and even into the British Isles; into Palestine, Ara-
bia, and northern Africa numerous monasteries
with their collections of books were established and
maintained. These religious houses were every-
where peopled by recluses, among whose principal
duties was the care for and the transcription of
books.
For long periods of time, however, and univer-
sally throughout Europe during the Middle Ages,
there was, as has already been noted, a great decline
in learning and but little interest in books the ex-
ception to this condition being almost wholly limited
to the occupants of the religious institutions. It is
the record of history that, as civilization lost its
energy in wide areas especially throughout Gaul-
intellectual darkness spread over all the country, so
much so that there was hardly a layman and only a
few among the clergy who could even read. Mighty
leaders of state shared in this intellectual desuetude.
Even Charlemagne, that great ruler who welded
divergent peoples into one body to resist Saracen
and savage, and who did much to institute and pro-
mote educational movements, lived and died with
modicum attainments of technical learning. It is
recorded of him in witness of his meager achieve-
ments in this direction that "He could read and
understand Latin but how well, perhaps, we had
better not too closely inquire ; he tried late in life to
learn to write, but his progress in that direction did
150 The Reign of the Manuscript
not greatly impress his biographer." Macaulay as-
serts it of the twelfth century that "There was then,
through the greater part of Europe, very little
knowledge, and that little was confined to the clergy.
Not one man in five hundred could have spelled his
way through a psalm. Books were few and costly.
The art of printing was unknown."
A number of factors and forces combined to keep
alive the feeble and smouldering sparks of learning
amidst the wide-spread intellectual gloom of the age.
Early and prominent among these was the establish-
ment and subsequent development of the abbeys and
cathedral institutions in various parts of the conti-
nent and in Britain. Then came the founding of the
Benedictines (which flourished from the sixth cen-
tury on, spreading from Italy westward into France
and England and in other directions, and gathering
unnumbered devotees under the threefold vow of
poverty, chastity, and obedience into thousands of
establishments) together with the various Orders
that arose from the tenth century on in all of which
there were greater or lesser attempts at study, learn-
ing, and literature, along with their other and more
distinguishing ideals. [The orders and the dates of
their respective beginnings were as follows: Carthu-
sians, 1084; Cistercians, 1098; Carmelites, 1156;
Dominicans, 1170-1221; Franciscans, 1209-1226.
"The two orders," Franciscans and Dominicans, says
Thatcher, "furnished all the great scholars of the
later Middle Ages."] And toward the close of the
Constantinople the Later Center of Literature 151
"Dark Ages" the movement toward enlightenment,
known as the Renaissance, was accelerated in the be-
ginnings of the great universities, the roots of which
run down into the soil of the thirteenth century.
Prominent among the great universities that date to
the thirteenth century and which were located in
widely separated regions and among divergent peo-
ples, in England, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and
the North, were those at Cambridge, Oxford,
Naples, Salamanca, Lisbon, Paris, Orleans, and
Upsal. In all these there were nascent movements
in the direction of literature manifested in the estab-
lishment of libraries as well as in the development of
learning.
As indicating the extent and the importance of the
specific movement toward the establishment of li-
braries, promoting thus the revival of learning after
the long night of the "Dark Ages," we desire to con-
dense the following paragraph from a recent and
valuable work: A number of libraries were estab-
lished in Paris and were available, not only for pro-
fessors, scholars, and students of the schools, but
for those interested in books and literature and duly
accredited strangers who came from elsewhere and
who would accept the easy conditions of the libraries'
protected use. There were libraries also connected
with the numerous abbeys of these and of previous
and subsequent times. A score or more of these
abbeys came, in time, to be located in England, as
those at Wearmouth and Jarrow places forever
152 The Reign of the Manuscript
distinguished for the life labors of the Venerable
Bede in a dozen of which there were fine libraries
with large writing rooms wherein books were con-
stantly copied and treasured. In France important
collections of books were to be found at Cluny and
in many other abbeys. The number of books in all
these libraries was constantly enlarged and the li-
braries enriched from various sources: By the ex-
change of duplicate books with other libraries; by
borrowing from neighboring libraries for the pur-
pose of copying; and by donations of books from
private sources and individual donors. As an ex-
ample of this last mentioned source of increase and
enrichment, the library of La St. Chapelle of Paris,
founded by Louis IX., was constantly augmented by
his donations of the books that had been given to
him and which he passed on for the advantage of
the library's patrons. Moreover, the constant "wear
and tear" of books even when written on parchment
or vellum, and notwithstanding the stringent regula-
tions safeguarding their use to legitimate channels,
constantly called for the re-writing of worn-out vol-
umes that were passed along from one generation to
another. 1
The Arabian conquests, too notwithstanding the
sore disasters which they at first seemed to threaten
turned rather, through the caliphs 7 subsequent
patronage of learning and science, to the preserva-
tion and extension of literature. The Greek manu-
1 The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries, Chapter IX.
Constantinople the Later Center of Literature 153
scripts came to be eagerly sought for by the Arabians
and were translated into their own language. Col-
leges, schools, and libraries, in numerous places, were
the tangible and assuring tokens of the subsequent
favor of the Arabians toward literature. Bagdad
in the far East and Cordova in the far West, with
Cairo and Tripoli lying between, became seats of
rich developments of science and letters and the de-
positories of books during the age when Europe was
deeply enshrouded in intellectual darkness."
* Encyclopedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition).
XX
MONASTERIES AND THE MONASTIC INSTITUTION
THE roots of the great monastic movement
which continued for nearly the whole of the
Middle Ages run well back into the early Christian
centuries. While the beginnings of Monasticism are
involved in uncertainty they probably sprang from
exaggerated tendencies on the part of individuals,
toward lives of privation, hardship, and exposure,
of which there were early numerous examples and
conspicuous manifestations. These travesties upon
devout character and mere abnormalities of religious
devotion were not true products of Christian senti-
ment and ideals but glaring manifestations of morbid
self-assertion. This movement was not contermi-
nous nor contemporaneous with the development of
Christianity; it existed apart from and prior to
Christianity. There were tendencies and examples
in the direction here indicated among the Jewish
teachers; and it had a large embodiment in the an-
cient Buddhist as in the modern Indian systems. The
central idea of the early ascetics, ever, was that the
body is a clog and hindrance to the spirit of man,
and hence the assumption of merit in and through
the practice of severe austerities and rigid self-abne-
154
Monasteries and the Monastic Institution 155
gation. There were many gross, horrible, and idiotic
applications of this practice in the early stages of
Christian history as there are in India to-day. The
period of its chief ascendency was in the third and
fourth centuries.
The monastic movement spread in the fourth cen-
tury into the extreme West. "Many of the islands
around Ireland and Scotland," says Professor
Thatcher, "were occupied by the monks, a large
number of whom were hermits. Many monasteries
were established. The movement became immensely
popular, and within a hundred and fifty years there
were hundreds of monasteries in the West and thou-
sands of monks in them." x The order of Benedic-
tines (founded by Benedict of Nursia at the begin-
ning of the sixth century) ran its course and flour-
ished for centuries. The order of Benedictines was
followed (not superseded) by a succession of orders
modeled somewhat after their earlier precurser.
This movement extended its existence and its influ-
ence also far into the East as well as to the westward.
Syria, Palestine, and Arabia especially in the region
of Mt. Sinai were thickly studded with monasteries
and "literally swarmed with recluses." Jerome, who
lived well into the first quarter of the fifth century
(died 420 A. D.), wrote at Bethlehem, Palestine,
"We daily receive monks from India, and Persia,
and Ethiopia."
The monasteries, so widely established during the
1 Europe in the Middle Ages, pp. 325, 326.
156 The Reign of the Manuscript
period we are considering, became the schools and
training-houses for the clergy the only schools for
a long period of time. And we are told that the
rulers in the West encouraged the monasteries to
open schools for boys in connection with their
houses. The schools of this period, to be sure, would
not compare with those of modern times, but they
were the best available in fact, the only schools;
and they were not circumscribed to religious instruc-
tion. The testimony of Professor Dobschiitz is
that, "All the great fathers of the church insisted
upon classical training; so did Jerome himself and
Saint Augustine, not to speak of the great classical
scholars in Christian bishoprics in the East. And
even in the later centuries, when classical civilisation
had gone and was only kept up artificially by assidu-
ous reading, it was the church which maintained the
right and the necessity of a classical training for the
clergy. . . . There was a time when there was no
reading at all outside the clergy and the monasteries,
but this reading was a combination of classical and
Biblical. That is the great merit of the medieval
church." 2
The value and the extent of the instruction given
in these schools was, for the most part, exceedingly
limited, in both range and research. The monas-
teries were and continued to be, for long of far
greater significance and service, no doubt, in their
relation to literature to its preservation and also
'The Influence of the Bible, Etc, pp. 70, 71.
Monasteries and the Monastic Institution 157
its dissemination than they were as seats and
sources of learning. "If there had not been great
abbeys where schools of grammar were established,
and where as many books as possible were jealously
preserved, perhaps not one Latin writer would have
come down to us." 3 Most of the monasteries, es-
pecially the larger ones, were provided with a
"scriptorium" or a writing-room, where the monks
with an inclination to literature and those also who
were skillful with the pen were required, in the cus-
tom of most monasteries, to devote a proportion of
every day to the employment of copying books. The
large majority of all the scribes, throughout this
entire period of a thousand years, were connected
with the churches or the monasteries. By their em-
ployment in the writing-room worn-out manuscripts
were replaced; borrowed books, transcribed, the
copies made therefrom being retained at the return
of the borrowed book; and thus in these and in other
ways, gradually an increasing number of books found
a home in the monasteries.
In the business of transcribing books, as often
extensively carried on in many monasteries, several
monks would sometimes copy manuscripts at the dic-
tation of a reader and thus a number of copies would
be produced at the same time. Each copy thus pro-
duced, however, was an "individual" and not a
"manifold" or duplicate of the others, as in carbon
copies or as printed from a type-plate. Writing at
8 Medieval Civilisation, Edited by Munro and Sellery.
158 The Reign of the Manuscript
the dictation of another was an ancient custom. It
may have been practiced in the transcription of the
cuneiform tablets. It is affirmed that Jeremiah, the
prophet, thus dictated the writing to his faithful
scribe, "And they asked Baruch, saying, How didst
thou write all these words at his mouth? Then
Baruch answered them, He pronounced all these
words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them
with ink in the book." (Jeremiah 36:17, 1 8.) It is
possible, or perhaps probable, that the fifty copies
of the Scriptures which Constantine is said to have
ordered to be made for the churches in and about
Constantinople, may all have been produced at the
dictation of a single reader. In that event, each
respective copy, while collectively made by individual
monks in the scriptorium, would bear its own dis-
tinct individuality. The copies thus made at dicta-
tion would not be facsimiles of one another or a
proof copy of the original, but each copy would
preserve a special kinship to all the other copies
made under the same general conditions. And this
is an important consideration in textual criticism
especially in tracing "family" likeness of certain
manuscripts. And so, no doubt, from the scriptoria
of the monasteries came the books, or many of them,
with which the provincial mansions of the nobility
and the private and public libraries were supplied.
These manuscripts, made by the monks, were after-
wards collected (or many of them were) in the
libraries of Rome, Florence, Venice, Milan, and
Monasteries and the Monastic Institution 159
elsewhere, as well as those treasured in abbeys and
churches.
The monks, who were the principal copyists of the
times, fostered distinct traditions of penmanship that
led to distinguishing "hands" (page 115). They
cultivated, also, not only the science and art of pen-
manship but the higher art of embellishment and
illumination of manuscripts. For this they had both
the time and the inspiring motive. From the mon-
asteries of this period issued some of the finest speci-
mens of the book-making industry and art extant in
the world. In speaking of the illuminated books of
the thirteenth century, Dr. Walsh says that, "Con-
sidering the number of them that are still in exist-
ence to this day, in spite of the accidents of fire, and
water, and war, and neglect, and carelessness, and
ignorance, there must have been an immense number
of very handsome books made by the generations of
the thirteenth century." And, quoting from another
author concerning a special manuscript of this
period, he says, "Every page is sufficient to make the
fortune of the modern decorator by the quaint and
unexpected novelties of invention which it displays
at every turn of its intricate design." 4
Allowing as we must from the evidence that
monasticism possessed many inherent weaknesses
and deficiencies, such as these : It withdrew many
useful forces from society; it developed indifference
for the family and the family life; it isolated re-
4 Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries, pp. 162, 163.
160 The Reign of the Manuscript
ligion from relation to and contact with the world;
it nourished and incited materialistic aims and ideals
under the garb of superior sanctity; it prompted and
promoted fanatical zeal for part truths and whole
errors; and other and kindred weaknesses and ex-
cesses and yet, with due recognition of its limita-
tions and perversions, its crudities and idiosyncrasies,
it remains true, nevertheless, that monasticism, as a
system, made many and important contributions, in
various directions and for centuries, to the good of
mankind, and furnished the most important link in
the chain of events which perpetuated learning and
literature in an age when, except for so extraordinary
provision and guarantees, they must inevitably have
perished. The monastic institution supplied, in a
special and adequate manner, through the abbeys
and monastic houses in which, so to speak, it was
domiciled, a safe asylum and depository for the word
of God. The common isolation of these establish-
ments, together with the reputed sanctity of their
occupants, were double security against the hand of
violence and, therefore, a double means of preserva-
tion for the literary treasures including both the
Bible and classic literature made and treasured
therein.
But these affirmations are not to be maintained by
reasoning however cogent nor by logic however con-
vincing but by evidence; by the testimony of the
historians for the period in question. The witness
of competent historians is summoned in their cor-
Monasteries and the Monastic Institution 161
roboration. Mr. Lecky declares: "It is undoubted
truth that, for a considerable period, almost all the
knowledge of Europe was included in the monas-
teries, and from this it is continually inferred that,
had these institutions not existed, knowledge would
have been absolutely extinguished. . . . The mon-
asteries, as corporations of peaceful men protected
from the incursions of the barbarians, became very
naturally the reservoirs to which the streams of liter-
ature flowed; but much of what they are represented
as creating, they had in reality only attracted. The
inviolable sanctity which they secured rendered them
invaluable receptacles of ancient learning in a period
of anarchy and perpetual war, and the industry of
the monks in transcribing, probably more than
counterbalanced their industry in effacing the classi-
cal writings." 5 "It is certain," say Munro and Sel-
lery, "that we are indebted for the preservation of
classical literature as far as it has been preserved,
to the monks above all others. For hundreds ot
years they truly sheltered and preserved the treas-
ures heaped up by those gone before, and also multi-
plied them through copying. ... If the rules of
some monastic orders forbade the reading of the
pagan authors, the rules of other orders not only
permitted it, but made it an express obligation to
copy manuscripts. In this way the monks of the
tenth, the eleventh, and the twelfth centuries ren-
dered services to civilization which will never be
5 History of European Morals, 2: 207, 208.
1 62 The Reign of the Manuscript
forgotten. . . . With the foundation of the mon-
asteries by the missionaries, learning and poetry
made their entrance into Germany. Many of the
writings of this early time are, of course, lost for-
ever; but enough survives to enable us to declare,
with certainty, that virtually all who studied and
wrote did so in the quiet of the monastic cells." 6
Hallam testifies: "The monasteries were subjected
to strict rules of discipline, and held out, at the worst,
more opportunities for study than the secular clergy
possessed, and fewer for worldly dissipations. But
their most important service was in the fact that they
were the secure repositories for books. All our
manuscripts have been preserved in this manner, and
they could have hardly descended to us by any other
channel; at least there were intervals when I do not
conceive that any royal or private libraries existed." 7
"The monks were also the civilizers," say Thatcher
and Schwill. "Every monastery founded by them
became a center of life and learning, and hence a
light to the surrounding country. They cleared the
lands and brought them under cultivation. They
were farmers and taught by their example the dig-
nity of labor in an age when the soldier was the
world's hero. They preserved and transmitted much
of the civilization of Rome to the barbarians. They
were the teachers of the West. Literature and learn-
ing found a refuge with them in times of violence." 8
"Medieval Civilisation, pp. 282, 290, 330.
7 Middle Ages, 2 : 484.
"Europe in the Middle Age, p. 333.
Monasteries and the Monastic Institution 163
"The monks became missionaries," declares Myers,
"and it was largely to their zeal and devotion that
the Church owed her speedy and signal victory over
the barbarians; they also became teachers, and under
the shelter of the monasteries established schools
which were the nurseries of learning during the Mid-
dle Ages; they became copyists, and with great care
and industry gathered and multiplied ancient manu-
scripts, and thus preserved and transmitted to the
modern world much classical learning and literature
that would otherwise have been lost. ... In a
word, these retreats were the inns, the asylums, and
the hospitals, as well as the schools of learning and
the nurseries of religion of medieval Europe." 9
Speaking of the monks' contribution to civilization,
Professor Emerton gives this estimate: "They
opened up vast tracts of land to civilized culture;
they helped by their lives of self-denial to keep in
the minds of men a standard of morals somewhat
higher than their own; they furnished a safe retreat
where the spark of learning, beaten out by the vio-
lence of the time, might find a quiet corner in which
to smoulder at first, and then to flicker up slowly and
feebly, yet steadily into a brilliant flame." 10 Similar
is the witness of Professor Harding: "Each mon-
astery was a settlement complete in itself, surrounded
by a wall ; and the monks were not allowed to wander
at will. New monasteries were often located on
9 Medieval and Modern History, pp. 26, 27.
10 Introduction to Study of the Middle Ages, p. 144.
164 The Reign of the Manuscript
waste ground, in swamps, and in dense forests; and
by reclaiming such lands and teaching better methods
of agriculture the monks rendered a great service to
society. Schools were also maintained in connection
with the monasteries. . . . The monks were en-
couraged to copy and read books." ll Professor
Duruy claims that "the Benedictines added agri-
culture to preaching, and copying manuscripts to
prayer. Schools were usually annexed to their con-
vents, and contributed toward the saving of letters
from complete ruin." 12 Says another: "Only with
the revival of learning did literature and art issue out
to the world in general; and then the end of the
reign of the manuscript was at hand. So, before the
decline of monasticism was accomplished, its special
work as the exclusive guardian of literature was
done; and the secular world was ready to take into
its own keeping the heritage of learning which the
monks had been so largely instrumental in handing
down to it." 13 And says Mr. Putnam: "The fall
of Constantinople in 1453," (at the very time when
Gutenberg was engaged in printing the first book)
"and the introduction into Europe of the Turks, was
unquestionably a great injury to Europe and to
civilization, and the destruction of the collections of
manuscripts existing in the capital itself and in the
monasteries and libraries in other cities of the Em-
11 Medieval and Modern History, p. 87.
" History of the Middle Ages, p. 288.
" Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
Monasteries and the Monastic Institution 165
pire, was an irreparable loss for literature. For the
educational interests and the literary development of
Europe there were, however, considerations to offset
this serious disaster. Great as was the destruction
of manuscripts, a number were preserved by indi-
vidual scholars and in the hidden recesses of certain
convents and monasteries. Many of these were at
once taken to Italy, Germany, and France by the
scholars flying from the barbarous conquerors of
their land, and the works were thus brought to the
knowledge and made available for the use of Euro-
pean students. Others were secured from their hid-
ing places years after the capture of the City, by
Greek scholars sent back for the purpose on behalf
of the publishers of Italy and France, or of the uni-
versities of Bologna, Padua, and Paris, while some
few valuable parchments were hidden so safely that
they have been forgotten for centuries and are only
to-day being brought to light from the vaults and
attics of old monasteries, so as again to be included
in literature accessible for the world." 14
The monasteries, as the tangible and permanent
accretion of monasticism, then, may be justly re-
garded as the centers of learning and sources for
the making of books and by the slow and laborious
process of hand-writing. And it was a slow and
laborious process even though many copies were
made at the same time from the dictation of a single
reader. The monasteries became also the deposi-
14 Authors and Their Public, pp. 292, 293.
1 66 The Reign of the Manuscript
tories wherein the Scriptures, together with other
literature, including often the classical writings, were
preserved from destruction which the vandal hordes
that often devastated large sections of Europe occa-
sioned. The larger ancient libraries, except that at
Constantinople, were destroyed through the fanati-
cism and ruthlessness of Saracen and savage, as these
forces swept across northern Africa, overran Eu-
rope, and dominated all Bible lands. But in conse-
quence of the previous wide diffusion of books into
the monasteries and religious houses of the Roman
Empire and beyond in fact, into all parts of Europe
and western Asia the destruction by vandal, savage,
and Saracen was far less sweeping, undoubtedly,
than these successive invasions and revolutions
these changes and upheavals in society and govern-
ment would otherwise have occasioned. While
cities were sacked and burned, castles, palaces,
strongholds, and many churches were pillaged and
overthrown, and whole countries were laid waste, a
measure of immunity from attack was accorded to
these religious houses the homes of the monks and
the Orders.
This immunity from attack, secured by the mon-
asteries, was due often, and perhaps chiefly, to the
fact of their secluded situations and to the strong
defenses of resisting masonry which made subjection
and pillage difficult and profitless. The convent of
St. Catharine, where Dr. Tischendorf discovered the
peerless Sinaitic Manuscript of the Bible in 1859, is
Monasteries and the Monastic Institution 167
an example and illustration. This monastery was
perched, as it were, on the precipitous slopes of Mt.
Sinai at an altitude of full 5,000 feet above the level
of the sea ; and, until recently, the only manner of
access beyond its solid, massive, and centuries-old
masonry, was by means of a crude and primitive
"lift" consisting of a chair and rope, controlled by
the inmates and operated by a windlass and drum
within and above. By this appliance all visitors were
"elevated" some twenty or twenty-five feet from its
base to the main entrance of the monastery. This
arrangement safeguarded the occupants and the con-
tents of this religious stronghold from risk of rob-
bery and violence. These religious houses furnished
even greater security by their position and isolation
and were generally respected by the fiercest invaders.
The safety of the monks of peaceful occupation
and mien and of their possessions almost wholly
literary, even in the periods of disorder and violence
was often due to the supposed sacredness of the
roofs under which they were sheltered. And even
when these asylums were not respected but seized
and plundered, the books which they treasured had
little or no value in the eyes of the ignorant and
hostile invaders, or were hidden away in recesses
of the monasteries beyond the reach of prying eyes.
And even when the manuscripts of a single mon-
astery, or the monasteries of a given region, were
all destroyed, untold numbers of copies and largely
duplicate copies by reason of their previous exten-
1 68 The Reign of the Manuscript
sive dispersion throughout wide areas and secluded
regions, were preserved elsewhere to be again
brought to light in more favored times, and, finally,
at the revival of learning, which awaited the coming
of the printing-press.
The thirteenth century has been called u the great-
est of centuries," and, mainly, because it was the be-
ginning period of emergence from the 'Dark Ages'
and because the hearts of men were beginning to be
thrilled with the anticipatory birth-throes of the
coming revival of letters. "There is," says Goldwin
Smith, u no more romantic period in the history of
the human intellect than the thirteenth century."
The Italian renaissance in the fourteenth century
brought a deepening interest for the old Latin writ-
ings, and this, in turn, revived attention to the Greek
classics the fountain-head of the world's pagan
literature. The awakening concern for classic litera-
ture led the Humanists in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries to ransack the libraries of the monasteries
and religious houses in even out-of-the-way places of
Europe for all kinds of old manuscripts. Statesmen
as well as students gave themselves up to the recover-
ing of the literary and art treasures of Greece and
Rome. The Greek empire, the Levant, and all
western Europe were ransacked in every nook and
corner; and the treasures of the Indies and the
libraries of the Levant were bought, says one, "with
impartial interest and equal delight."
This was a new and more fruitful kind of crusade,
Monasteries and the Monastic Institution 169
of which Symonds declares, "As the Franks deemed
themselves thrice blessed if they returned with relics
from Jerusalem, so these new Knights of the Holy
Ghost, seeking not the sepulchre of a risen Lord,
but the tomb wherein the genius of the ancient world
awaited resurrection, felt holy transport when a
brown, begrimed and crabbed scrap of some Greek
or Latin author rewarded their patient search."
And of Petrarch, one of the most enthusiastic search-
ers for these ancient writings, Myers says: "He
made many a long and wearisome journey, with the
object of collecting manuscripts. The precious docu-
ments were found covered with mold in damp cel-
lars, or loaded with dust in the attics of monasteries.
This late search for these remains of classical authors
saved to the world hundreds of valuable manuscripts
which, a little longer neglected, would have been lost
forever." And he says, further, "Libraries were
founded where the new treasures might be stored,
and copies of the manuscripts were made and dis-
tributed among all who could appreciate them." 10
For it was a specific outgrowth of these new intel-
lectual and literary impulses which heralded the
passing of the "Dark Ages" that came the beginnings
of the Vatican Library at Rome. This renowned
library was established by Pope Nicholas V. at about
the same date as the invention of printing and con-
curred with that invention to make effective for all
time to come the revival of learning and of letters.
13 Medieval and Modern History, p. 270.
170 The Reign of the Manuscript
We have come back from our far-journeying to
our starting point, the invention of printing, and per-
haps cannot more fitly conclude this discussion than
in the words of Lord Macaulay in his tribute to that
great patron of learning after the u Dark Ages/'
Pope Nicholas V. : u By him was founded the Vatican
Library, then and long after, the most precious and
the most extensive collection of books in the world.
By him, were carefully preserved the most valuable
treasures which had been snatched from the ruins of
the Byzantine Empire. His agents were to be found
everywhere in the bazaars of the farthest East, in
the monasteries of the farthest West purchasing or
copying worm-eaten parchments, on which were
traced words worthy of immortality."
INDEX
Ablavs centers of monaituism.
128, 155-157, 167. (See Monasti-
An-adians writing and literature
f, 99. 100; language of, 92, 136.
"Art. nits" absent in early Greek
literature, 124.
Achievements two conspicuous, of
last century. 94, 98-104.
Alphabetic writing origin of, 91,
104, 105, 110, 111; occasion
fur, 104-106; earliest document in.
110; Phoenician development, 105-
107; the undeciphered Cretan,
100, 105. 106-108; cosmopolitan.
116.
Alexandrian manuscript <
64, 65; number of columns to
page, 64, 65; depository of, 64;
Library and Musi-urn. I J7, 137-
141.
:dria strategic location, 115,
1.17; literary activity of, 123, 127,
133, 145.
Antony gift of, 137.
Arabia paper first made and used
in. 73; monasteries of, 149, 155;
schools and literature of, 152, 153,
155.
Arabs brought paper-making into
Spain, 73; originafed modern sys-
tem of notation, 126.
Architecture characteristic of an
age, 118.
Asceticism origin and develop-
ment of, 154.
'nni-pal ancient king of As-
syria, 135; fostered literature and
learning, 135, 136; library of, 135,
136; discoveries by Layard on
library site, 136.
Authorities quoted, cited, and re-
ferred to:
Americana, The, 74.
Appleton's New Practical, 72.
Author, an anonymous, 26.
Baikie, Mr. James, 100.
Bible, The, 22, 33, 34, 43, 61, 62,
80. 87, 109. 112, 121, 158.
Authorities quoted, cited, and re-
ferred to:
Birt, 6S.
op. Wm. Frost, D.D., 91, 110.
Book Record, The. 32.
Mrui-r. 1'rofessor A. B., 41, 42.
Budge, Mr. Wallace, 85, 97.
Callimachus (Grammarian), 140.
Chambers' Encyclopedia, 72.
Champollion, Professor, 98.
Christ in the Gospels, 29.
Chrysostom, 141.
Professor Albert T., 100,
102.
Clodd. Professor Edward, 91.
is, 59.
raeli, 26.
Dobbschiitz, Professor Ernest
Von, 12, 25, 26, 38, 39, 5
62, 63, 120, 156.
Duruy, Professor Victor, 164.
Kdwards. Miss Amelia B. (Egyp-
tologist), 93.
Emerton, Professor, 163.
Encyclopedia Britannica (Eleventh
Edition), 12, 24, 75, 80, 84,
105, 106, 108, 113, 142, 153.
Eusebias (Ecclesiastical Histo-
rian), 52, 147, 148.
Euthalius, 124.
Evans, Dr. A. J. (Antiquarian),
106, 107, 108.
Gibbon (Historian), 37, 144.
Grammaticus, Joannes (Scholar),
143.
Grotefend. Dr., 103.
Guizot (Historian), 18.
Hallam (Historian), 16, 131. 162.
Harding, Professor S. B., 163.
Harper, Professor Robert F., 80.
Harkness, Mr. M. E., 93, 97.
Hastings' Bible Dictionary, 164.
Herodotus (Ancient Historian),
59, 139.
Hillis, Newell Dwight, D.D., 56.
Hilprecht, Professor Herman V.,
134, 135.
Hugo (Cardinal), 122.
Huston, Professor C. W., 96.
171
172
Index
Authorities quoted, cited, and re-
ferred to:
Huxley, Professor, 90.
International Standard Bible En-
cyclopedia, 17, 21, 22, 25, 27,
47. 48, 111.
Jerome, St. (Scholar), 124. 155.
Jewish Encyclopedia, 51. 59, 112.
Klein. Dr. (Traveler), 109.
Layard, Sir Henry, 104, 136.
Lecky, Mr. \V. E. H., 161.
Macaulay, Lord, 150, 170.
Mahaffy, Professor J. P.. 118, 119.
Milligan, Professor George, 66.
Munro and Sellery, Professors,
157, 161. 162.
Myers, Professor, 163, 169.
nal Geographic Magazine,
100, 102, 108, 128.
Nelson's Encyclopedia, 105.
New York Daily. 54.
NIC: ' >pe), 169, 170.
. h American Review, 144.
Petrarch (Biographer), 169.
IVtrie, Professor, 79.
>. 23. 31.
69. 81. .
Press dispatches, 57.
Prescott (Historian), 26, 78, 95.
Prideau, 50. 66. 67.
Puti: .ret- H.. 11. 12.
13. 30, 31, 68, 75.
78, 103, 104. 131, 140, 164, 165.
Rawlvi- .!. Pr.-fcssor George. 136.
Richardson. Mr. E. C., 21, 22, 25,
27, 47, 48. 111.
Robv: Frederick V
Roget, M. Kmmanucl De, 92.
Sayce, Profess. 27, 79,
101. 106, 109. Ill, 136.
Smith, Mr. Goldwin. 168.
Stephens, Robert (Printer). 122.
Symonds, Professor, 169.
Taylor (Canon). 104.
Taylor. Dr. Isaac, 18. 71. 118. 148.
Tertullian (Church Father), 141.
Thalhcimer (Historian). 74.
Thatcher and Schwill, Professors,
150. J55. 162.
Tis<-licndorf, Professor, 64. 166.
Vincent. Dr. Marvin R., 38.
lessor, 151. 152, 159.
World Almanac, 142.
Wright. Professor George F.. 40,
Wycliffe. John. 29. 30.
Young. Professor, 98, 99.
Dahylonia inscribed temple walls,
100; clay tablets of, 79, 134. 135,
136; ancient syllabary script of,
105.
Babylonian expedition, 134; ex-
ploraiinns at Nipi<ur, 134, 135;
"deluge" tablet, 134, 135.
Benedictines-^founding of Order.
150, 155; civilizing and beneficent
influences of, 162, 164.
Bible a divine-human book, 40-45;
for man, 18, 40; collective volume,
140; versions, 38, 39; preeminent
of, 64, 65; lost autographs,
4-4; Septuagint Version, 141; dec-
orated and embellished copies, 52-
54, 159; cost of making, 29-32;
rinted ("Mazarin"), 14, 15;
Revised N. T., 28; numerous man-
uscripts of, 37-39; American Bible
Society, 32; permanency of, 18;
chapters and verses, 122, 125.
Book definition of, 19, 20; evolu-
tion, 20, 21; form of ancient, 63;
change from "roll" to "leaf"
form, 63-64, 69; "diptych." "trip-
tych." "polyptych," 82; "Book of
the Dead?' 84, 85, 93; size of roll-
book, 68. 69, 139, 140.
Books earliest, 21, 22, 59; valua-
tion of. 14. 29-32, 130; making
and commerce of, 127-132; "rein-
forced" papyrus and paper, 69, 75;
embellishment of. 52-54; cost of
v. rittcn and printed compared, 29-
32; enemies of. 48; materials, 44
(see chapter XI); rare, 52-54, 64,
65; depositories of, 127, 128, 130-
148. 149; repairing, 49, 69,
152; new crusade for, 169.
"Breathings" of the Greek MSS, 124
British Museum depository, 59, 64,
136.
Champollion and the Rosetta Stone,
98.
Charlemagne referred to, 149; pa-
tron of schools and learning, 149;
scarcity of books at his time, 149,
150; meager intellectual attain-
ments of, 149, 150.
Chinese inventors of printing, 11,
12; first paper-makers, 72; ideo-
graphic writing of, 105, 117; an-
cient library of, 81.
Churches relation to learning, 131,
132. 156; libraries in, 148.
Cleopatra name on Rosetta Stone,
99; Antony and, 137.
Code Hammurabi, 80, 110.
"Colon" punctuation mark, 124.
Columns in roll-book. 50, 61, 63,
64. and age of MSS, 64, 65.
"Comma" punctuation mark, 121, 124
Constantine founder of Constanti-
nople, 146; patron of Christianity,
147; furthered the Bible, 147, 148,
158.
Index
173
Constantinople secure and favored
position, 146, 147; center of liter-
ary and religious activity, 147-149,
164.
Copyists professional, 69," 127, 132,
138, 140, 147, 149 (see monks);
women, 128; other, 128-130, 138;
wage of, 29, 32, 54; concern for
their work, 49-52; dictation to,
157, 158, 165; rules governing, 49-
51; repairing MSS, 49, 69; artistic
accomplishments of, 52-54; para-
phernalia of, 86, 88.
m Cretan palace of, 107;
"finds" in, 107, 108.
Crete recent discoveries in ancient,
100, 107, 108.
Cuneiform writing, 28, 99-104; dis-
tinguished from hieroglyphic, 100;
made with stylus, 102; hierogly-
phic, origin of. 100; great quan-
tity of writing in, 102, 104, 134-
136; discoveries of Layard, 104.
136; of Rawlinson, 136; diminu-
tive specimens, 136; Dr. Grote-
fcnd's "guess," 103; how read,
102; incorruptible character of,
103, 104; cylinders, 79; "deluge"
tablet, 134.
"Dark Ages" extent, 127, 129; de-
cline of learning and literature
therein, 33, 129-132, 149-151;
emergence from, 150-152, 168, 169.
"Demotic" writing, distinguished
from "hieratic,' r 70, 92, 98, 99;
on Kosetta Stone, 99.
"Diptych" defined, 82.
Ephraem monk, 63 ; Manuscript
("C"), 63, 64, 65.
"Ga't" of hand-writing, 55; of
mind, 57.
Greece fountain source of litera-
ture, 138.
Grotefend (Dr.) and cuneiform in-
scription, 103.
Gutenberg place and time of birth,
12; his invention and its signifi-
cance, 12, 13; first printed book,
14. 15; first press, 13; experimen-
tations. 13, 14; price paid for one
copy, 14; first edition printed, 30.
Hammurabi code of, 80; inscription
and purpose of, 80, 110.
'Hand" importance of, 47, 56, 57,
159; changes in, 112-117; provin-
cial and national "hands," 115-
Handwriting unwritten literature,
20, 27, 28; the two great stages of
the classic, 113, 114; slow and la-
borious process of, 27-29, 47; two
chief desiderata of written MSS,
46, 47; costly, 29-32.
Hebrew lar.guage and literature,
109, 110, 122, 123.
Herodotus testimony to Persian ar-
chives, 59; books of, 139.
"Hieratic" writing, defined, 92; dis-
tinguished from "demotic," 70, 98.
Hieroglyphic writing, earliest mode
of recording ideas, 20, 21, 28, 70,
91-99; universal, 92, 107; one of
the trilingual inscriptions, 98; two
classes of, 94-97; number of, 97.
Homer writings of long un-re-
corded, 24; "books" of, 139, 140.
"Ideographic" writing, defined, 94,
95; clumsy and imperfect, 97, 98;
limitations of, illustrated, 97, 98;
key to decipherment. 98, 99; Cre-
tan undcciphered, 107, 108.
"India" paper, quality, 76, 77; tests
:cngth and durability, 77; re-
markable productions on, 76, 77;
ink, 86.
Inks importance and necessity of
good, 47, 57, 83; composition of
ancient, 83, 84; lost art, 86; vari-
ous kinds and colors, 84, 85, 86;
uses of colored, 85; millenni'.ims-
old, 84; tests of genuineness of
written documents, 57; printers',
14; "royal," 86; "India,'' 86.
"Interrogation" ( ?) punctuation
mark, 124.
Inventions outgrowth of necessity,
40, 60, 62; in printing, 11; in
paper, 72; in the alphabet, 91, 92.
106, 107; improvement and prog-
ress in, 16, 17, 62, 63; in punctu-
ation, 120, 121, 123, 125; improve-
ment in materials and arrangement
of books, 62, 69, 70, 72-77, 81, 32.
Jews devotion to sacred books, 49;
rules governing copyists, 49, 50,
51; Septuagint Version for, 141.
Language most distinguishing char-
acteristic of mankind, 90; earliest
decipherable, 108-111; first use of
alphabetic writing, 105, 106; the
Gospel in many languages, 34-38,
41; many and various versions,
38. 39. '
Leather earliest material of port-
able books, 59; Hebrew statutes
written on, 59; age of skin-rolls,
59; royal archives of Persia on,
59; Yemanite rolls, 59.
Libraries earliest at Nippur, 133-
135; contents of Nippur tablets,
134, 136; "deluge" tablet, 134,
Index
135; at Assur-bani-pal, 103, 135;
scribes of, 135, 136; the number
of tablets therein, 135, 136; sire
of tablets and of writing, 136;
magnifying lens found. 136; con-
tents of tablets, 134, 136, 137; at
Pergamos, 137; number of rolls
in. 137: di -f. 137, 145;
\icxandria, 137, 138; ti
of learning in. 127. 137, 138, 141;
preeminence of, 137, 138; books
of, 138; bow books secured, 135,
138, 140. 141; scribes of, 127,
136, 137. 138, 140; number
and size of books therein, 137-
140; varying fortunes of, 143-145;
.irablc loss, 145; tradition of
the destruction, 143. 144; at Con-
;nople, 146-148; fostered by
the Em pen r. 147 -14S; successively
wasted and renewed, 148. 152; of
I, 132. 148. 149,
151. 152; of churches. 148; at
. and elsewhere. 64, "
>3; the Vatican. 64. 170;
'. 136;
libraries perpetuated and re-
135, 136-141. 147.
152. 157. 163; number of books in
ng modern. 142.
literature how first perp*
materials of writv
>f literature. 120-125; stichometry,
t-rs and verses of the
ideomatic use of
language in, 123; modern distinc-
tions of, 120-12 : tnutius
and modern pur.ctuaf
t(ivl' in conquest
cm of notation, 126.
Manuscripts form of book, 61-65;
period of. 19-33; two desiderata
for. 46. 47: cost of. 29-36, 46, 54,
130; enemies of, 48; restoration
of palimpsest, 63; repairing old
and damaged, 49, 130; abundance
: Me and why. 33. 35-3"
ervation of, 47, 48, 130, 165, 167;
the preeminent "uncials": codex
"N" (Sinaitic). 44. 64, 65, 147,
166; o"K-x "H" (Vatican). 44. 64.
65: codex "A" (Alexandrian), 64.
cm). 63, 64.
are and embellished,
*>3. 04. ]50 ; the Septuagint. 141.
and chart _
44. 47. 55-58. 79; skin of animal?,
i^O. 61 ; parchment,
59; vellum. 59. 61, 147; papyrus.
reparation of papyrus. 67, 68;
first form of books, 61, 62; letter
form, 62; earliest known roll-
books, 59; commerce in, 31, 70,
71; paper introduced in West. 73;
variety of substances used in pa-
per-making, 72; other materials
displaced by paper, 75: develop-
ment of paper-making and print-
ing-press, 75; paper long made by
hand, 75, 76; "India" paper, 76,
.iblets of various kinds, 78-81,
101; protected tablets, 81, 82 (see
Tablets).
Manutius and system of punetua-
125.
"Mazarin" P.ible. first printed book,
14; why so called. 14.
: y phenomenal and reliable.
Middle Ages referred to, 53, 63.
Is of,
129; ignorance in. 1
149, 150. 154; period of em<
(renaissance). 168, 169.
y and
literature,
Mo.ibitc Stone referred to, 7
covered, described, and
ered, 79, 108, 109; age and impor-
109-111; kinship with the
Siloam Inscription, 111. 112.
Monasteries widely established. 14S
154-157. l'5'Mr -
:naking industry. 157-159; de-
ries of books, 157-169; rela-
to learning, 150, 151. 15(>.
:id value of
ols' instruction, 156, 160.
Monasticism origin of, 154. 155;
extent of, 150-1 : .ikness-
es, 159, 160; contributions to so-
ciety. 156-165, 168.
Monk-* copyists, 132, 157, 158, 161-
165; civilizers, 162, 163, 16 -
promoted learning and letters, 161-
164.
Moors relation to civilization in
Kurope. 73; first paper-makers of
. 73.
i British. 59. 64. 80. 93,
104. 136; Alexandrian. 137, 138.
145: destruction of. 143. 145; Ber-
lin, 80.
Nippur antiquity of, 133: results of
'.rations on sitr, 133-137.
Notation system, a development,
125. 126; "cipher" of, 126.
"Orders" first. 150. 155 (see mon-
asteries, monasticism, monks).
Paintings mural, at Washington,
20, 21; on MSS, 52, 53, 54.
Index
Palaeography art and science of,
89, 90, 159; development, 90, 92;
modern penmanship a questionable
accomplishment, 90; writing, crys-
talized speech, 90, 91; three
sources of written language: (1)
Hieroglyphics, 20. 21, 91-99; (2)
Cuneiform, 99-104; (3) Alpha-
betic, 91, 92, 104-112; classic
writing a product, 112; two stages
of classic writing "uncial," 113,
114; -minuscule," 113, 114; unde-
ciphered script of ancient Cretans.
100, 108; provincial and national
"hands," 115-117; the "ascent" of
the Anglo-Saxon "hand," 115,
116; changes in the direction of
writing, 116, 117; the "hand" a
factor in determining age of writ-
. 117-119.
"Palimpsests" defined, 63; ex-
amples, 63.
Paper -origin of, 72, 73; itinerary of
progress in making, 72. 73; sub-
stances used as "pulp" for, 72;
materials for making cotton, 57,
73, 74: limn. 58, 74; flax and
rags, 58, 74; other substances, 72,
74, 78; supercession of other ma-
terials by, 75, 76; earliest docu-
ments on, 74; "water marks" of,
55, 56; long made by hand. 75;
interleaved and "reinforced," 69,
75; improved methods of making.
74-76; complement of the print-
ing-press, 74, 75; "India" paper
and tests and examples of. 76, 79.
Papyrus source of, 66; plant de-
scribed, 67, 101; preparation of,
67, 68; cost, 31, 66; general use
of, 66, 70, 71; period o f use , 44,
70, 71; commerce in, 70, 71; ex-
portation from Egypt forbidden,
60, 70, 71; roll-books on, 68. 69;
"reinforced," 69; subdivision of
large rolls on, 139, 140; fragile,
44, 48, 69, 103; the oldest rolls
on, 70. 84, 85; the "Prisse" papy-
rus, 93.
Parchment from skins of animals,
59, 60, 62; preparation of, 60; best
material, 60, 61; scarcity and cost
and "palimpsests," 63; valuable
MSS of Bible on, 52-54, 64. 65.
Perpamos parchment first made at,
60; library of, 137. 145.
Pens for writing. 87; "pen-knife,"
Pentecost relation of first to spread
of Gospel, 34-36.
"Period" punctuation mark, 124.
Phoenicians developed ideographic
alphabet, 105-107, 109, 110; earli-
est traders and first to need a
communicable language, 106; al-
phabet and Philistines, 106.
"Phonetic" writing, described, 94-
96.
"Pointings" a development, 122,
123, 124.
" Polyptych" described, 82.
Printing the invention of, 11-13;
reputed examples in China and
Japan. 11. U. 14; Gutenberg the
inventor, 13; first types, 13; orig-
inal press and modern, 13, 28, 29,
30; importance of, 16-18, 28, 29,
75; typography witness to date of,
117, 118; contrasted with oral tra-
dition, 24, 25; "proof correction"
an aid to purity of literature, 17,
18.
Punctuation system developed, 120-
1J5; modern, 11 ' : indis-
pensable to literature and com-
merce, 120-122; system completed,
125.
Ptolemaic (dynasty) "S..ter," 137;
"Phila.lclrhus," 137. 138; relation
icxandrian Library, 137, 138;
"Kpiphanes," 98, 99.
Renaissance time and importance
of, 150-152, 168, 169.
Revelation progressive, 41. 4J; ma-
terials embodying, subject to ex-
posure, 42-44.
Revised Version feat of N. T. pub-
lication, 28; errors in, 17.
Roll-book earliest form in leather
and papyrus, 59, 61. 68, 69; an-
tiquity of, 59, 70, 84; size of, 68,
69, 83, 139, 140.
Roman alphabet ascendancy of and
reasons for, 114, 115, 116.
Rosetta Stone referred to, 70, 79;
discovery of, 79, 94, 98; described,
98, 99; tri-lingual inscription on,
70, 98, 99; key to decipherment,
99; and Egyptian literature, 79,
99.
Schools of abbeys and monasteries,
151, 156, 157, 163, 164; Arabian,
155.
Scribes professional, 127; monks,
128, 157-159, 163, 164; dignitaries
and princes, 128; slaves, 129, 130;
persons of sedentary habits, 129;
women, 128; dictation to by read-
er, 157, 158; beauty of work, 52-
54, 159; wages of, 29-32; employed
in libraries, 135, 138, 140, 145,
147.
"Scriptorium" of monasteries, 157,
158, 165.
I 7 6
Index
"Semicolon" punctuation mark, 124.
"Septuagint" what and for whom,
141; probable fate of original,
141; compared with, 145.
Siloam Inscription place, date, and
object. 111, 112; discovery and
significance of. Ill, 112; related
to Moabite Stone, 112.
Sinaitic Manuscript referred to,
44; when and by whom discov-
ered, 166; described 61, 64. 65,
148; where treasured, 64; rank,
65.
Speech distinguishing characteristic
of man, 90.
St. Catharine convent of. 64, 166,
depository of Sinaitic MS for
ries. 166; location and en-
trance. 167.
"Stichomctry" species of early
punctuation. 123. 124.
Stylus instrument used on clay,
wax, etc., 81, 82, 87, 101, 102.
Tablets early, 28, 48; the material
of and preparation, 78, 79, 81.
101, 102; size and form, 79, 135.
136; number, 79, 104, 134, 135,
136; Tel-el- Amarna, 79, 80; Cnos-
sos, 107; character of writing on,
79, 80, 101-103, 136; subjects
tr.ated. 79. 80, 134, 136, 137;
wood for, 81; wax, 78, 81, 82; en-
velopes for, 101; protected, 82,
101; "deluge," 134.
Thirteenth century referred to, 30,
39, 54, 159; great, 151, 159. 168;
renaissance began in, 151; li-
braries and universities founded
during, 151, 152.
"Tongues" at Pentecost, 34; object
of the "gift," 34-36.
Tradition preceded written records,
reserved and perpetuated lit-
erature, 21-27; of the Alexandrian
Library's destruction, 143, 144.
"TriptycrT'-^described, 82.
Types printing, 12; composition of,
13, 14; changes in. an aid in de-
termining age of literature, 117,
118.
I'mial" the earliest classic
"hand," 113. 114; the "hand" of
the preeminent MSS of the Bible,
65.
-ities when founded, 151;
expeditions of Pennsylvania Uni-
-ity, 134.
Vatican manuscript referred to. 44,
53; described, 64, 65; on vellum,
I, 61; depository of, 64; Li-
brary, 64, 169, 170.
Vellum described, 61; ttib.
on, 52-54, 61.
Versions of the Bible, 35-39, 45;
Septuagint, 141.
Volume earliest form of books, 61-
65, 68; size of, 68, 69, 139; first
writing on one side of, 61, 138;
larger works divided, 139, 140;
roll-books designated by letters,
140.
Wage for scribe in time of Dio-
cletian, 31.
"Water marks" impressed in fiber
of paper, 55, 56; old custom and
f genuineness of documents,
57.
Writing materials used and changes
in, 46-48, 50, 52-58, 60, 70, 71,
78; instruments adaptable to. 87;
inks, 83-86; art and science of, 89,
90; modern neglect of the art, 90;
nlized" speech, 90, 91; de-
velopment of, 91, 92; picture writ-
ing, 20, 91-98; the three great
"species" of, 92 (1) Hierogly-
phic. 91-99; two classes of: "ideo-
graphic" and "phonetic," 94-96:
distinctions of ''hieratic" and "de-
motic," 70, 94. 98, 99; the Rosetta
v" to the early
Kiryptian writing, 94. 98, 99;
clumsy and uncertain, 97, 98: (2)
Cuneiform, 99-104; Dr. Grote-
fend's decipherment of, 103: tab-
md cylinders, 7982: Tel-cl-
Ainarna tablets and the Hammu-
rabi monument. 79, 80; (3) Al-
phabetic, 104-112; origin
92, 105, 106; oldest deciphered.
108-110; the undeciphered Minoan
script, 108; Moabite Stone and
Siloam Inscription. 108-112; Phoe-
nician contribution to ali>
literature. 105-108; the pre-rxilic
of Palestine, 111; classic writinp.
112-117; development of national
and provincial "hands." 112-117;
"uncial" and "cursive" "hands,"
113, 114; Anglo-Saxon "hand."
115. 116; changes in the direction
l writing, 116, 117; style of
writing a veri-similitude of genu-
ineness, 117-119; determining ape
of composition, 118, 119; com-
pared and contrasted with print-
ing, 27-32, 138.
Young (Dr.) labors in deciphering
the Rosetta Stone and the Egyp-
tian hieroglyphics, 98. 99.
"Zero" the cipher completing the
system of notation, 126; when and
by whom added, 126.
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