Writing

VIEW:27 DATA:01-04-2020

WRITING
1. Pre-historic—The origin of writing is not recorded in Genesis, where we should expect to find some account of it, but this omission may be intentional. Since God is represented as writing on two Tables of stone (This classic reference book has been a standard for the past 100 years among scholars and laity alike. James Hastings, one of the most influential Bible scholars and editors of the early 19th century, assembled this massive dictionary of all Biblical terms in 1909. Written by over 75 Biblical experts and pastors, each entry has an in-depth explanation, summary, cross-references, and contributor. This edition also has a list of abbreviations, maps, and a pronunciation guide. Hasting's one volume Dictionary of the Bible is not simply an abridged or condensed version of his 5-volume work. It is an entirely separate work.

This resource is essential for any student of the Bible, whether you×re a pastor, seminary student, or general reader. With the Logos edition, all Scripture references are linked to the other resources in your library, making study, devotions, and comparison easy. f.), it might seem improper that He should employ a human invention, while, on the other hand, there may have been no tradition that the art was first used on that occasion; the inference is therefore left to be drawn by the reader. Perhaps we may infer from the phrase in Isa_8:1 that there was a style known as ‘Divine writing,’ being the character used in these Tables. The Tables themselves scarcely figure in the historical parts of the OT, neither can we from the Pentateuch learn their contents with precision; yet the tradition that such Tables at one time existed is likely to be trustworthy, and the narratives given in Ex. and Deut. imply that there were whole Tables and fragments of Tables which had to be accounted for. From the statement that they were written on both sides—afterwards grotesquely misunderstood—we may infer that they resembled stelœ in form, and perhaps the original should be rendered by that word.
2. Origin of writing among the Israelites.—It is improbable that the OT contains any documents which in their written form are earlier than the time of David, when we first hear of an official scribe (2Sa_8:17). The question of the date at which writing was first in use in Palestine is absolutely distinct from that of its earliest employment by Israelites, though the two are often confused. There is no evidence of Israel ever having employed the cuneiform script or any form of hieroglyphic writing, though both may have been familiar in Palestine before the rise of the Israelitish State. Probably, then, their earliest writing was alphabetic, but whence the Israelites got the art is a question of great difficulty, never likely to be cleared up. It is certain that Hebrew orthography is etymological, i.e. fixed in many cases by the history of the word as well as by its pronunciation, and this being so, it must have come down by tradition from an earlier stage of the language; yet of this earlier language we have no monuments. The possibilities are: (1) that the Israelitish tribes contained men with whom knowledge of writing was hereditary; (2) that when they settled in Canaan—however we interpret this phrase—they took over the language, and with it the writing and orthography, of the earlier inhabitants; (3) that when the immigrants were settled, teachers of this art, among others, were sent for to Phœnicia. The second of these hypotheses has most in its favour, as it accounts best for the differences between Hebrew and Phœnician spelling.
3. Character of writing.—The alphabet employed by the Israelites consists of 22 letters, written from right to left, serving for 28 or more sounds, not including vowels, which some of the consonants assist in representing. The OT, which bas no grammatical terms, never alludes to these signs by name; yet we learn a few letter-names, not from their being employed to denote letters, but from their use as names of objects resembling those letters: these are Wâw and Tâw, meaning ‘hook’ and ‘cross’ (like our T-square, etc.), and it seems possible that two more such names may lurk in Isa_28:10. From the story in Jdg_12:6 it might be inferred that the letter-names were not yet known at the time; still those which figure in the Hebrew grammars must be of great antiquity, as is evinced by the Greeks having borrowed them. The Greek names are evidently taken from an Aramaic dialect, and of this language some of the names used by the Jews (Nûn, Rçsh) show traces. These names have often been thought to be taken from the appearance of the letters—or perhaps it should be said that the letters were originally pictures of the objects which their names denote—but it is difficult to draw up a consistent scheme based on this theory. The familiar order is found in the alphabetic Psalms and in Lamentations, and in the cypher of Jeremiah (Jer_25:26 etc., if the traditional explanation of those passages be trustworthy). Of the existence of any graphic signs other than the letters there is no evidence, though it is likely that the signs used by the neighbouring peoples to express units, decades, scores, and centuries were known to the Israelites, and they may also have had the dividing line between words, though the mistakes in the text of the OT due to wrong division show that it was not regularly used; a dividing point is used in the Siloam inscription. Isaiah, as has been seen, distinguishes ‘human writing’ or ‘the writing of ‘ĕnôsh’ from some other; and it would be in accordance with analogy that the spread of the art should lead to the formation of a variety of scripts. The style current, as exhibited in the inscription mentioned, and in a weight and a few gems, differs very slightly from that in use in the Phœnician settlements, of which the history is traceable from the 8th or 9th cent. b.c. down to Roman times. The papyri recently discovered at Elephantine show that in the 5th cent. b.c. a different and more cursive hand was used for Aramaic by the Jewish exiles; we should probably be correct in assuming that a similar hand was employed for Hebrew papyri also, in the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel.
The square character, according to the Jewish tradition, was substituted for the older writing (of which a variety is preserved in the Samaritan script) in copies of the Law by Ezra, but this can be regarded only as a conjecture. The modern character first appears in Hebrew inscriptions of the 1st cent. a.d., and a somewhat similar type in Palmyrene texts of nearly the same date; yet for certain purposes the older style was retained by the Jews, e.g. for coins, which show the ancient character even in Bar Cochba’s time. Still the numerous errors in the LXX [Note: Septuagint.] version which owe their explanation to the confusion of similar letters, show that an alphabet similar to that now in use must have been employed for writing the Law as early as the 2nd or perhaps the 3rd cent. b.c.; and the allusion in Mat_5:18 to Yod as the smallest letter of the alphabet, shows that the employment of this alphabet was familiar at that time. The change by which it had superseded the older scripts is likely to have been gradually rather than suddenly accomplished. The square character differs from the older, among other things, in the possession of five final forms, four of which are in fact nearer the older script than the initial forms; this innovation seems to be connected with the practice, adopted from the Greeks, of employing the letters for numeration, when five extra letters were required to provide signs for 500–900. That this practice was borrowed from the Greeks is confirmed by the Rabbinical use of the Gr. word gematria, ‘geometry,’ to denote it. The exact sense of the word rendered ‘tittle’ In Mat_5:18 is unknown; attempts have at times been made to interpret the word from the strokes called in the later Jewish calligraphy tâgîn.
4. Later history of Hebrew writing.—Of other signs added to the letters the only kind which can claim any considerable antiquity are the puncta extraordinaria, dots placed over certain letters or words (e.g. ‘and he kissed him’ in Gen_33:4) to indicate that they should be ‘expunged,’ a term which literally means ‘to point out.’ This practice was common to both Western and Eastern scribes in the early centuries of our era, and even before; and it has rightly been inferred from the occurrence of these dots that all our copies of the Hebrew OT go back to one, of no great accuracy. In Bible times the process of erasure is indicated by a word signifying ‘to wipe out’ (Exo_32:32), apparently with water (Num_5:23), whereas in Rabbinical times a word which probably signifies ‘to scratch out’ is ordinarily employed. The NT equivalent is ‘to smear out,’ e.g. Col_2:14 etc. During the period that elapsed between the fall of Jerusalem and the completion of the Tradition, various rules were invented for the writing of the Law. which are collected in the Tract called Sôpherîm; these involved the perpetuation of what were often accidental peculiarities of the archetype, and the insertion in the text of signs, the meaning of which had in certain cases been forgotten. A much more important addition to the text is later than the completion of the Talmuds, viz. the introduction of a system of signs indicating the vocalization and musical pitch or chant. Of the former, two systems are preserved, an Eastern and a Western, but the familiar Western system won general acceptance. The invention and elaboration of these systems stand in some relation to the efforts made by Syrian Christians and Moslems to perpetuate the correct vocalization and intonation of their sacred books and facilitate their acquisition; and indeed the Jewish inventions seem based on those already employed by Syrians and Arabs, and both in form and in nomenclature bear evidence of this origin. It would seem, however, that the first employment of vowel-signs for a Semitic language is to he found in the monuments of pagan Abyssinia. We should expect the introduction of extraneous signs into the sacred page to meet with violent opposition, yet of this we have no record; there is, however, evidence that the employment of the same signs for the punctuation of non-Biblical texts was disapproved by a party. The Karaite Jews appear to have saved the text from these additions by the expedient of transliterating it into Arabic characters, but this practice was soon abandoned, and the MSS which illustrate it belong to a limited period.
Some record of the process by which the text was vocalized would be welcome, for without this it has to he re-constructed by analogies drawn from the history of the Koran, which itself is imperfectly known. There are clearly many cases in which the vocalization has been affected by dogmatic considerations; it is not, however, certain that the punctuators were responsible for this, as there is evidence that before the invention of vowel-signs there were cases where fault was found with the traditional vocalization. The familiar series of variants known as Qerç, opposed to Kethîbh, appears to embody suggestions for the improvement of the text, dating from various ages. So elaborate a task as the vocalization must have been accomplished by a large and authoritative committee, labouring for at least some years; but whether there was any reason for secrecy or not, there is ground for thinking that even in the 9th cent. the memory of the event was exceedingly hazy.
5. Character of writers.—The OT gives little information on such subjects as schools and methods of instruction. In Isaiah’s time (Isa_29:11-12) an ordinary Israelite might or might not be able to read; apparently, however, such knowledge was usual in the higher classes (Isa_8:2), and the same seems to he implied by a scene in Jeremiah (ch. 36), whereas the precepts of Deuteronomy from their wording (Isa_6:9) rather suggest that the process of writing would be familiar to every Israelite, and in one case (Isa_24:1) distinctly imply it. Of association of the art of writing with the priestly caste there is perhaps no trace except in Num_5:23, where a priest has to write a magical formula; and the fact that in later times the order of scribes was quite distinct from that of priests shows that there was no such association. Unless we are to infer from Jdg_5:14 that the art of writing was cultivated at an early time in the tribe of Zebulun, it would appear that the foreign policy of David first led to the employment of a scribe (2Sa_8:17), such a person doubtless corresponding with the kâtib or munshi’ of Mohammedan States, whose business it is to write letters for the sovereign, himself often unacquainted with the art; these persons set the fashion and invent the technicalities which other writers adopt. Less distinguished scribes attach themselves to particular individuals, at whose dictation they write (as Baruch for Jeremiah), or earn their living by writing and reading letters for those who require the service. Closely connected with this profession ls that of copyist, but the development of the latter in Israel seems to have been peculiar. In Deuteronomy Moses writes the Law himself (Deu_31:24), and the kings are to make their own copies (Deu_17:18); of a professional copyist of the Law we do not hear till the time of Ezra, who is clearly regarded as editor as well as copyist; and though the word ‘scribe’ technically means one who copies the Law, its sense in Sirach (Sir_10:5 etc.) approaches that of savant, while in the NT it might be rendered by ‘theologian.’
Publication in ancient times was usually effected by recitation, whence one copy would serve for a large community; but the employment of writing altogether for the composition and perpetuation of books appears to have commenced late in Israelitish history. Thus Solomon’s ‘wisdom’ was spoken, not written (1Ki_4:32-34), and those who wished to profit by it had to come and hear the king, who may be thought of as holding séances for the recitation of his works. In Isaiah’s time the amount of a prophecy written appears to have been confined to just sufficient to remind the hearer of its content (1Ki_8:1); and this might he attested by witnesses. When the prophecies of Jeremiah were written at length, the process appears to have been regarded as an innovation of which some account was required (Jer_36:17); but after this time it seems to have become familiar, and in Hab_2:1 the prophet is commanded to write his prophecy clearly, to enable it to be read easily. Of a written Law, apart from the tradition of the Two Tables, there seems to be little or no trace prior to the discovery of Deuteronomy; how the older code embodied in Exodus was preserved is not known. Official chronicles—perhaps engraved on stone, but this is uncertain—seem to have commenced in the time of David, when we first hear of an official called ‘the recorder’ (2Sa_8:16); and to his age or that of his successor it is possible that certain collections of tribal lays go back, which afterwards furnished the basis of prose histories whose substance is preserved in the Pentateuch and following books; but the older theory of the documents contained in the Pentateuch (e.g. Exo_13:8) is that the memory of events would be preserved by ceremonies, accompanied with explanatory formulæ, rather than by written monuments. The founding of libraries (cf. 2Ma_2:13) and circulation of literature in masses probably belong to post-exilic times, when Ecclesiastes can complain that too many books are written (Ecc_12:12), and Daniel thinks of the OT as a library (Dan_9:2). But for legal and commercial purposes (as well as epistolography) the use of writing was common in pre-exilic times. So Jezebel sends a circular note in many copies (1Ki_21:8), which bear the king’s seal, probably in clay (Job_38:14); Job (Job_13:26; Job_31:35) thinks of his indictment as written, and Isaiah (Isa_10:1) appears to condemn the practice of drawing up documents fraudulently. Contracts of divorce and purchase of land are mentioned by Jeremiah (Jer_3:8; Jer_32:14 etc.), the latter requiring attestation by witnesses. The images of Isa_34:16, Psa_139:16 etc. appear to be taken from the practice of bookkeeping, which ben-Sira in the 2nd cent. b.c. so strongly recommends (42:7). Of genealogical rolls we hear first in post-exilic times, but the comparison of 1Ch_9:1-44 with Neh_11:1-36 shows that such documents were sometimes old enough to make it difficult for the archæologists to locate them with certainty. In the Persian period a few new terms for writings and copies were introduced into Hebrew, and we hear of translations (Ezr_4:7 ‘written in Aramaic and translated into Aramaic,’ where the first ‘Aramaic’ is surely corrupt), and of foreign scripts being learned by Jews (Dan_1:4). In Esther we read of an elaborate system in use in the Persian empire for the postage of royal communications.
On the whole, we are probably justified in asserting that the notion connected with writing in the classical period of Hebrew literature was rather that of rendering matter permanent than that of enabling it to reach a wide circle. Hence the objection that some have found to the Two Tables of stone being hidden away in the ark (unlike the Greek and Roman decrees engraved on public stelœ) is not really a valid one; the contents are supposed to be graven on the memory (Jer_31:33), the written copy serving merely as an authentic text for possible reference in case of doubt—like the standard measures of our time. This theory is very clearly expressed in Deu_31:26 and 1Sa_10:25, and renders it quite intelligible that the Law should have been forgotten, and recovered after centuries of oblivion. Such instruction as was given to the young was in all probability without the use of any written manuals, and in the form of traditions to be committed to memory. ‘We have heard with our ears and our fathers have told us’ (Psa_44:1) is the formula by which the process of acquiring knowledge of ancient history is described. The conception of the Law as a book to be read, whereas other literary matter was to be learned and recited without note, is due to the growth of synagogal services, such as commenced long after the first Exile. Even in the time of Josephus it would appear that a community rather than an individual was ordinarily the possessor of a copy of the Law, whence the term ‘to read,’ as in Luk_10:26, is the formula employed in quoting texts of Scripture only, whereas ‘to repeat’ would be used when the Tradition was cited. Both were doubtless habitually committed to memory and so cited, whence it comes that quotations are so often inaccurate.
6. Writing materials.—The ordinary verb used in Hebrew for ‘writing’ has in Arabic as its primary sense that of sewing or stitching, whence it might be inferred that the earliest form of writing known to the peoples who employ that word consisted in embroidery or the perforation of stuffs and leaves. More probably the sense of ‘writing’ comes through an intermediate signification to put together, make a list, compose, of which we have examples in Jdg_8:14, Isa_10:19, and perhaps Hos_8:12 and Pro_22:20; this sense is preserved in Arabic in the word katîbah, ‘regiment or list of men enrolled.’ From the Heb. word kâthabh, then, we learn nothing as to the nature of the material; more is indicated by a rarer word châqaq, lit. ‘to scratch,’ which implies a hard surface, such as that of stone or wood; and of ‘books’ of this sort, calculated to last for ever, we read in Isa_30:8 and Job_19:23-24. Wooden staves are specified as material for writing in Num_17:2 and Eze_37:16; and a ‘polished surface,’ probably of metal, in Isa_8:1. The instrument (AV [Note: Authorized Version.] pen) employed in this fast case has a peculiar name: that which was employed on stone was called ‘çt, and was of iron, with a point at times of some harder substance, such as diamond (Jer_17:1). There appears to be a reference in Job (l.c.) to the practice of filling up the scratches with lead for the sake of greater permanence, but some suppose the reference to be rather to leaden tablets. At some time near the end of the Jewish kingdom, the employment of less cumbrous materials came into fashion, and the word for ‘book’ (sçpher) came to suggest something which could be rolled or unrolled, as in Isa_34:4, where a simile is drawn from the latter process, and Isa_37:14, where a letter from the king of Assyria—which we should expect to be on clay—is ‘spread out’; in the parallel narrative of 2Kings this detail is omitted. Allusions to rolls become common in the time of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and though their material is not specified, it was probably papyrus; but skins may also have been employed. For writing on these lighter substances, reeds and pigments were required; references to the latter are to be found in Jer_36:18, Eze_23:14, but of the former (3Jn_1:13 (‘pen’)) there is no mention in the OT, though it has been conjectured that the name of the graving tool was used for the lighter Instrument (Psa_45:1); the later Jews adopted the Greek name, still in use in the East, and various Greek inventions connected with the preparation of skins. To an instrument containing ink and probably pens, worn at the waist, there is a reference in Eze_9:2 (EV [Note: English Version.] inkhorn), and to a penknife in Jer_36:23.
In Roman times parchment appears to have been largely used for rough copies and notes, and to this there is a reference in 2Ti_4:13. The Apostolic letters were written with ink on papyrus (2Co_3:3, 2Jn_1:5; 2Jn_1:12 etc.). Zacharias (Luk_1:63) uses a tablet, probably of wood filled in with wax.
Literary works, when rolls were employed, were divided into portions which would fill a roll of convenient size for holding in the hand: on this principle the division of continuous works into ‘books’ is based, while in other cases a collection of small pieces by a variety of authors was crowded into a single roll. The roll form for copies of the Hebrew Scriptures was maintained long after that form had been abandoned (perhaps as early as the 2nd cent.) for the quire by Christians in the case of Greek and Syriac copies. The quire was employed, it would appear, only when the material was parchment, the roll form being still retained for papyrus. Paper was brought from the far East by Moslems in the 7th cent. a.d., when factories were founded at Ispahan and elsewhere, and owing to its great cheapness it soon superseded both papyrus and parchment for ordinary purposes. The Jews, however, who were in possession of a system of rules for writing the Law on the latter material, did not readily adopt the new invention for multiplying copies of the Sacred Books.
7. Writing as affecting the text.—It has often been shown that accuracy in the modern sense was scarcely known in ancient times, and the cases in which we have parallel texts of the same narrative in the Bible show that the copyists took very great liberties. Besides arbitrary alterations, there were others produced accidentally by the nature of the rolls. The writing in these was in columns of breadth suited to the convenience of the eye; in some cases lines were repeated through the eye of the scribe wandering from one column to another. Such a case probably occurs in Gen_4:7, repeated from Gen_3:16. Omissions were ordinarily supplied on the margin, whence sometimes they were afterwards inserted in a wrong place. There is a notable case of this in Isa_38:21-22, whose true place is learned from 2Ki_20:7-8. Probably some various readings were written on the margin also, and such a marginal note has got into the text of Psa_40:7 b. Ancient readers, like modern ones, at times inserted their judgment of the propositions of the text in marginal comments. Such an observation has got into the text in 2Ma_12:45 ‘it is a holy and godly thought,’ and there are probably many more in which the criticism of an unknown reader has accidentally got embodied with the original: Ecc_10:14 appears to contain a case of this sort. A less troublesome form of insertion was the colophon, or statement that a book was finished, e.g. Psa_72:20. Similar editorial matter is found in Pro_25:1, and frequently elsewhere. An end was finally put to these alterations and additions by the registration of words, letters, and grammatical forms called Massorah, of which the origin, like all Hebrew literary history, is obscure, but which probably was perfected during the course of many generations. Yet, even so, Jewish writers of the Law were thought to be less accurate than copyists of the Koran.
D. S. Margoliouth.
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
Edited by James Hastings, D.D. Published in 1909

Egyptian Hieroglyphics are as old as the earliest monuments centuries before Moses. (See HIEROGLYPHICS; PENTATEUCH.) The Rosetta stone, containing a decree on Ptolemy Epiphanes in hieroglyphics, with a Greek translation alongside, furnished the key to their decipherment. Champollion further advanced the interpretation of hieroglyphics by means of the small obelisk found in the island of Philae by Belzoni, and brought to England by Bankes. The inscription in Greek on the base is a supplication of the priests of Isis to king Ptolemy, to Cleopatra his sister, and Cleopatra his wife. The name Ptolemy in the hieroglyphic cartouche on the obelisk itself corresponds to the Greek Ptolemy on the base and also to the similar cartouche on the Rosetta stone. Comparison of this with the cartouche which was guessed from the corresponding Greek on the base to be that for Cleopatra resulted in the discovery of several letters.
The first letter in Ptolemeus and the fifth in Cleopatra are P. So the first character in the cartouche I and the fifth in II are a square. This then represents P. The third letter in Ptolemeus and the fourth in Cleopatra are O. The respective characters in the cartouches are the same; a knotted cord therefore represents O. The fourth in Ptolemy and the second in Cleopatra are both L; so the characters in the cartouches, the lion therefore represents L. The sixth and ninth letters in Cleopatra are both A, so the sixth and ninth characters in the cartouches are both a sparrowhawk; this then represents A. The first letter in Cleopatra, C or K, is not in Ptolemy, so neither is the first character of the Cleopatra cartouche in the Ptolemy cartouche; the triangular block therefore is C or K. The third character in the Cleopatra cartouche is a Nile reed blade, but the sixth in the Ptolemy cartouche is two such blades, therefore the single blade represents the short "e", third in Cleopatra; the two reeds represent the long "e", sixth in Ptolemeus, omitting "e" after "L."
Champollion therefore put down the fifth character in Ptolemeus a boat stand, and the seventh, a yoke, for S. Other names verified these two letters. Thus the whole name in hieroglyphics is Ptolmes. The eighth letter in Cleopatra is R, which does not occur in Ptolemy, so the character is not found in the Ptolemy cartouche; a human mouth therefore represents R. The second letter in Ptolemy and the seventh in Cleopatra are both T, but the characters in the cartouches differ; a half sphere in Ptolemy, a hand in Cleopatra. Hence it results that the same sound has more than one representative; these are called homophones, and cause some confusion in reading. (See "Israel in Egypt": Seeley, 1854.) The following shows the Phonetic Letters of the Hieroglyphical Alphabet of Egypt, with their equivalents, according to M. de Ronge, Lepsius, and Brugsch. (See Canon Cook's Essay on Egyptian words in the Pentateuch, vol. 1, Speaker's Commentary)
Champollion was able to read upon the Zodiac of Dendera the titles of Augustus Caesar, confuting Dupuis' "demonstration" that its date was 4000 B.C.! The traditions of Greece point to Phoenicia as its teacher of writing. The names and order of the Greek alphabetical letters are Semitic, and have a meaning in Semitic but none in Greek. Thus, 'Aleph ( א ), representing a means an ox. Bet[h] ( ב ), a house. Gimel ( ג ), a camel, etc. All indicate that a pastoral people were the originators of the alphabet. In an Egyptian monument a Hittite is named as a writer. Pentaour, a scribe of the reign of Rameses the Great soon after the Exodus, composed a poem, engraved on the walls of the temple of Karnak. This mentions Chirapsar among the Kheta (i.e. the Hittites) as a writer of books. So Joshua took a Hittite city, Kirjath Sepher, "city of the book" (Jos_15:15); he changed the name to Debir, of similar meaning.
The words for "write" (kathab), "book" (ceepher), "ink" (deyo), belong to all Semitic dialects (except the Ethiopic and southern Arabic tsachaq "write"); therefore writing in a book with ink must have been known to the earliest Shemites before their separation into distinct clans and nations. Israel evidently knew it long before Moses. Writing is definitely mentioned first in Exo_17:14; but in such a way as to imply it had been long in use for historic records, "write this for a memorial in the (Hebrew) book." The account of the battle and of the command to destroy Amalek was recorded in the book of the history of God's dealings with Israel (compare Num_21:14, "the book of the wars of the Lord," Num_33:2. Also God's memorial book, Exo_32:32-33). Writing was however for many centuries more used for preserving than circulating knowledge.
The tables of stone written by the finger of God were laid up in the ark. The tables, as well as the writing, were God's work. The writing was engraved (charut) upon them on both sides. The miracle was intended to indicate the imperishable duration of these words of God. Moses' song (Deuteronomy 32) was not circulated in writing, but "spoken in the ears of the people" (Deu_31:19; Deu_31:22-30); and by word of mouth they too were to transmit it to others. The high priest's breast-plate was engraven, and his mitre too, "holiness to the Lord" (Exo_39:14; Exo_39:30). Under Joshua (Exo_18:9) only one new document is mentioned, a geographical division of the land. In Jdg_5:14 Zebulun is described as having "marchers with the staff of the writer" (copeer) or musterer of the troops; such as are frequently pourtrayed on the Assyrian monuments (2Ki_25:19; 2Ch_26:11, "the scribe of the host".)
The scribe and the recorder (mazkir) were regular officers of the king (2Sa_8:17; 2Sa_20:25). In Isa_29:11-12, the multitude have to go to one "knowing writing" (Hebrew for "learned") in order to ascertain its contents; so by that time there were some at least learned in writing. By the time of Jeremiah letters are mentioned more frequently, and copies of Scripture had multiplied (Jer_8:8; Jer_29:25; Jer_29:29). The commercial and other tablets now discovered prove this. Under the ancient empire of Egypt the governor of the palace and of the "house of manuscripts" was a very high official. The tutelary god of writing was Saph or Sapheh (related to Hebrew ceper); a Pharaoh of the fifth dynasty is styled "beloved of Saph." (See ALPHABET on the Moabite stone, 896 B.C., bearing Hebrew words and idiom in Phoenician letters).
Rawlinson fixes the invention 15 centuries B.C. The earliest monuments of Babylon reach back to 2300 B.C.; the language inscribed on them is Cushite or Ethiopian, (See BABYLON.) The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters; this was their number as early at least as David, who has acrostic psalms with all the 22; moreover, the letters expressed numbers, as the Greek letters did. Besides alphabetic there is syllabic writing, as the Assyrian cuneiform, which has from 300 to 4,000 letters. The process of growth and change is shown by recent studies of the Assyrian language. "The words by which these (Assyrian hieroglyphics) were denoted in the Turanian language of the Accadian inventors of the cuneiform system of writing became phonetic sounds when it was borrowed by the Semitic Assyrians, though the characters could still be used ideographically, as well as phonetically.
When used ideographically, the pronunciation was of course that of the Assyrians." (Sayce's Assyrian Grammar.) Then to these original ideographs were added the formal parts expressive of case, pronominal, and other relations. The latest examples of cuneiform writing belong to the Arsacidae, in the century before Christ ("Academy," August, 1878). The square Hebrew characters now used came from Babylon probably after the Babylonian captivity, under Ezra. The Semitic alphabets have only consonants and three consonant-like vowels, 'Aleph ( א ), 'Ayin ( ע ), Yod[h] ( י ), and are written from right to left. There are two chief classes.
(1) The Phoenician, as it occurs in inscriptions in Malta, the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar king of Sidon (600 B.C.), Cyprus, and coins of Phoenicia (from whence came the Samaritan and Greek characters); on Jewish coins; in Phoenician-Egyptian writing, with three vowels, on mummy bandages.
(2) The Hebrew Chaldee, to which belong the present Hebrew square character (resembling those in Palmyrene inscriptions, probably brought from Chaldaea and the ancient Arabic. The Himyeritic (oldest Arabic) was possibly the same as the ancient Phoenician. The Moabite stone contains an alphabet almost identical with Phoenician, 22 letters, read from right to left; the names and order are identical with the Hebrew as may be inferred from the names of the Greek letters which came direct from Phoenicia, not prior to 1000 B.C. The various forms of the alphabetic letters and the evidence of their derivation from each other will be seen from the following comparison, copied from an illustration in "The Moabite Stone," by Pakenham Walsh, Bishop of Ossory. (Dublin: Herbert.)
The early Greek, as distinguished from the later, is much the same. 'Aleph ( א ), an ox, a rude representation of an ox's head. Bet[h] ( ב ), a house, representing a tent. Gimel ( ג ), a camel, representing its head and neck. Daleth ( ד ), a door; a tent entrance; the sidestroke of Bet[h] ( ב ) was to distinguish it from this. He[h] ( ה ), a lattice. Vav ( ו ) or Waw, a peg of a tent. [C]Het ( ח ), a field enclosed. Kaf ( כ ) or Kaph, a wing, or hollow of the hand. Lamed[h] ( ל ), an ox goad, curved into a handle at one end, pointed at the other end. Mem ( מ ), water, a wavy line for the surface when disturbed. Samek[h] ( ס ), a prop, an ancient vine trellis. 'Ayin ( ע ), an eye. Tsade ( צ ), a fish spear. Qoph ( ק ), the hole of an axe, or eye of a needle. Shin ( ש ), a tooth with its fangs. Tav ( ת ) or Tau, a brand marking flocks.
In Egyptian the letters were similarly copies of objects to which the initials of the names respectively correspond. Thus, A is the first letter of ahom, an eagle; so an eagle is the Egyptian representative of A. So L, the first letter of lab, a lion; M the first letter of mowlad, an owl. The Israelites never required an interpreter in contact with Moab, which shows the identity of language in the main. The Moabite stone also shows 'Aleph ( א ), He[h] ( ה ), and Vav ( ו ) or Waw supplied the place of vowels before the invention of vowel points; the 'Aleph ( א ) and He[h] ( ה ) express "a" at the end of a word. The He[h] ( ה ) expresses the final "o"; Vav ( ו ) or Waw expresses "o" and "u"; Yod[h] ( י ) expresses "i".
The Moabite alphabet in the use of these vowel representatives harmonizes with the Hebrew, and differs from the Phoenician. Rawlinson (Contemporary Review, August 20, 1870) believes the Moabite stone letters to be the same as were used in the Pentateuch 500 years before. The Hebrew 'Aleph ( א ) and Greek Alpha ( Α α ) are one; so, Hebrew Bet[h] ( ב ) / Beta ( Β β ); Hebrew Daleth ( ד ) / Delta ( Δ δ ); Hebrew He[h] ( ה ) / Greek Epsilon ( Ε δ ); Hebrew Vav ( ו ) or Waw / Greek F bau or digamma; Hebrew Zayin ( ז ) / the ancient Greek san; Hebrew Tet[h] ( ט ) / Greek Theta ( Θ θ ); Hebrew Yod[h] ( י ) / Greek Iota ( Ι ι );
Hebrew Kaf ( כ ) or Kaph / Greek Kappa ( Κ κ ); Hebrew Lamed[h] ( ל ) / Greek Lamda ( Λ λ ); Hebrew Mem ( מ ) / Greek Mu ( Μ μ ); Hebrew Nun ( נ ) / Greek Nu ( Ν ν ); Hebrew Samek[h] ( ס ) / Greek Sigma ( Σ σ ); Hebrew 'Ayin ( ע ) / Greek Omicron ( Ο ο ); Hebrew Pe ( פ ) / Greek Pi ( Π π ); Hebrew Tsade ( צ ) / Greek Zeta ( Ζ ζ ); Hebrew Qoph ( ק ) / Greek Kappa ( Κ κ ) ... on coins of Crotona; Hebrew Resh ( ר ) / Greek Rho ( Ρ ρ ); Hebrew Shin ( ש ) / Greek Xi ( Ξ ξ ); Hebrew Tav ( ת ) (Eze_9:4) a "mark"; so Greek Tau ( Τ τ ).
MATERIALS. Stone, as the tables of the law. Plaster (lime or gypsum) with stone (Jos_8:32; Deu_27:2). Lead was either engraven upon or poured into the hollow of the letters, or used as the hammer, lead being adapted to make the most delicate incisions (Job_19:23-24). The "tablet" (luwach), inscribed with the stylus or pen of iron (Job_19:24; Jer_17:1), and the roll (megillah), were the common materials latterly. The roll of skins joined together was rolled on a stick and fastened with a thread, the ends of which were sealed (Isa_29:11; Dan_12:4; Rev_5:1; Rev_6:14). Small clay cylinders inscribed were the repository of much of Assyrian history. After being inscribed and baked, they were covered with moist clay, and the inscription repeated and baked again.
Papyrus was the common material in Egypt; the thin pellicles are glued together in strips, other strips being placed at right angles. Leather was substituted sometimes as cheaper. Probably the roll which Jehoiakim burned was of papyrus (Jeremiah 36); the writing there was with ink (deyo), and arranged in columns (literally, doors; delathot). The only passage in which papyrus (as chartes means) is expressly mentioned is 2Jn_1:12. Both sides were often written on (Eze_2:20). Parchment of prepared skins is mentioned (2Ti_4:13); the paper and ink (2Co_3:3; 2Jn_1:12; 3Jn_1:13); the pens made of split reed; ink of soot water; and gum, latterly lampblack, dissolved in gall.
In Isa_8:1, "write with a man's pen," i.e. in ordinary characters such as common "men" (nowsh) can read (Hab_2:2), not in hieroglyphics; cheret (an engraver, Isa_8:1) is connected with chartumim, the Egyptian sacred scribes. Scribes in the East, anciently as now, carried their inkhorn suspended by a girdle to their side. The reed pen, inkhorn, and scribes are sculptured on the tombs of Ghizeh, contemporaneous with the pyramids. The Hebrew knew how to prepare skins for other purposes (Exo_25:5; Lev_13:48), therefore probably for writing. Josephus (Ant. 3:11, Section 6; 12:2, Section 10) says the trial of adultery was made by writing the name of God on a skin, and the 70 sent from Jerusalem by the high priest Eleazar to Ptolemy, to translate the law into Greek, that with them the skins on which the sin was written in golden characters.
Fausset's Bible Dictionary
By Andrew Robert Fausset, co-Author of Jamieson, Fausset and Brown's 1888.

Writing. There is no account in the Bible of the origin of writing. That the Egyptians in the time of Joseph were acquainted with writing, of a certain kind, there is evidence to prove, but there is nothing to show that, up to this period, the knowledge extended to the Hebrew family. At the same time, there is no evidence against it.
Writing is first distinctly mentioned in Exo_17:14 and the connection clearly implies that it was not then employed for the first time, but was so familiar as to be used for historic records. It is not absolutely necessary to infer from this, that the art of writing was an accomplishment possessed by every Hebrew citizen.
If we examine the instances in which writing is mentioned in connection with individuals, we shall find that, in all cases, the writers were men of superior position. In Isa_29:11-12, there is clearly a distinction drawn between the man who was able to read, and the man who was not, and it seems a natural inference that the accomplishments of reading and writing were not widely spread among the people, when we find that they are universally attributed to those of high rank or education — kings, priests, prophets and professional scribes.
In the name, Kirjathsepher (book-town), Jos_15:15, there is an indication of a knowledge of writing among the Phoenicians. The Hebrews, then, a branch of the great Semitic family, being in possession of the art of writing, according to their own historical records, at a very early period, the further questions arise, what character they made use of, and whence they obtained it.
Recent investigations have shown that the square Hebrew character is of comparatively modern date, and has been formed from a more ancient type by a gradual process of development. What then was this ancient type?
Most probably the Phoenician. Pliny was of opinion that letters were of Assyrian origin. Dioderus Siculus (v. 74) says that the Syrians invented letters, and from them, the Phoenicians, having learned them, transferred them to the Greeks. According to Tacitus (Ann. Xi. 14), Egypt was believed to be the source whence the Phoenicians got their knowledge.
Be this as it may, to the Phoenicians, the daring seamen and adventurous colonizers of the ancient world, the voice of tradition has assigned the honor of the invention of letters. Whether it came to them from an Aramean or an Egyptian source can at best be but the subject of conjecture. It may, however, be reasonably inferred that the ancient Hebrews derived from or shared with the Phoenicians, the knowledge of writing and the use of letters.
The names of the Hebrew letters indicate that they must have been the invention of a Shemitic people, and that they were, moreover, a pastoral people may be inferred from the same evidence. But whether or not the Phoenicians were the inventors of the Shemitic alphabet, there can be no doubt of their just claim to being its chief disseminators; and, with this understanding, we may accept the genealogy of alphabets as given by Gesenius, and exhibited in the accompanying table. The old Semitic alphabets may he divided into two principal classes:
1. The Phoenician as it exists in the inscriptions in Cyprus, Malta, Carpentras, and the coins of Phoenicia and her colonies. From it are derived the Samaritan and the Greek character.
2. The Hebrew-Chaldee character; to which belong the Hebrew square character; the which has some traces of a Cursive hand [that is, written in a running hand]; the Estrangelo, or ancient Syriac; and the ancient Arabic or Cufic. It was probably about the first or second century after Christ, that the square character assumed its present form; though in a question involved in so much uncertainty, it is impossible to pronounce with great positiveness.
The alphabet. — The oldest evidence on the subject of the Hebrew alphabet is derived from the alphabetical Psalms and poems: Psalms 25; Psalms 34; Psalms 37; Psalms 111; Psalms 112; Psalms 119; Psalms 145; Pro_31:10-31; Lam_1:1-4. From these, we ascertain that the number of the letters was twenty-two, as at present.
The Arabic alphabet originally consisted of the same number. It has been argued by many that the alphabet of the Phoenicians, at first, consisted of only sixteen letters. The legend, as told by Pliny (vii. 56), is as follows;
Cadmus brought with him into Greece, sixteen letters; at the time of the Trojan war, Palamedes added four others, theta, epsilon, phi, chi, and Simonides of Melos, four more, dzeta, eta, psi, omega.
Divisions of words. — Hebrew was originally written, like most ancient languages, without any divisions between the words. The same is the case with the Phoenician inscriptions, The various readings in the Septuagint (LXX) show that, as the version was made, in the Hebrew manuscripts which the translators used, the words were written in a continuous series.
The modern synagogue rolls and the manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch have no vowel-points, but the words are divided, and the Samaritan, in this respect, differs but little from the Hebrew.
Writing materials, etc. — The oldest documents which contain the writing of a Semitic race are probably the bricks of Nineveh and Babylon, on which are impressed the cuneiform Syrian inscriptions. There is, however, no evidence that they were ever used by the Hebrews.
It is highly probable that the ancient, as well as the most common, material which the Hebrews used for writing was dressed skin in some form or other. We know that the dressing of skins was practiced by the Hebrews, Exo_25:5; Lev_13:48, and they may have acquired the knowledge of the art from the Egyptians, among whom if had attained great perfection, the leather-cutters constituting one of the principal subdivisions of the third caste.
Perhaps the Hebrews may have borrowed, among their other acquirements, the use of papyrus from the Egyptians, but of this, we have no positive evidence. In the Bible, the only allusions to the use of papyrus are in 2Jn_1:12 where chartes (Authorized Version, "paper") occurs, which refers especially to papyrus paper, and 3Ma_4:20, where charteria is found in the same sense.
Herodotus, after telling us that the Ionians learned the art of writing from the Phoenicians, adds that they called their books, skins, because they made use of sheep-skins and goat-skins when short of paper. Parchment was used for the manuscripts of the Pentateuch, in the time of Josephus, and the membranae of 2Ti_4:13 were skins of parchment.
It was one of the provisions in the Talmud, that the law should be written on the skins of clean animals, tame or wild, or even of clean birds. The skins, when written upon, were formed into rolls (megilloth). Psa_40:7. Compare Isa_34:4; Jer_36:14; Eze_2:9; Zec_5:1. They were rolled upon one or two sticks and fastened with a thread, the ends of which were sealed. Isa_29:11; Dan_12:4; Rev_5:1; etc.
The rolls were generally written on one side only, except in Eze_2:9; Rev_5:1. They were divided into columns, (Authorized Version, "leaves"), Jer_36:23, the upper margin was to be not less than three fingers broad, the lower margin was to be not less than four; and a space of two fingers breadth was to be left between every two columns.
But besides skins, which were used for the more permanent kinds of writing, tablets of wood covered with wax, Luk_11:63, served for the ordinary purposes of life. Several of these were fastened together and formed volumes. They were written upon with a pointed style, Job_19:24, sometimes of iron. Psa_45:1; Jer_8:8; Jer_17:1. For harder materials, a graver, Exo_32:4; Isa_8:1, was employed. For parchment or skins, a reed was used. 3Jn_1:13 3Ma_5:20.
The ink, Jer_36:18, literally "black", like the Greek melan, 2Co_3:3; 2Jn_1:12; 3Jn_1:13, was of lampblack dissolved in gall-juice. It was carried in an inkstand which was suspended at the girdle, Eze_9:2-3, as is done at the present day in the East. To professional scribes, there are allusions in Ezr_7:8; Psa_45:1 2Es_14:24.
Smith's Bible Dictionary
By Dr. William Smith.Published in 1863

In regard to alphabetic writing, all the ancient writers attribute the invention of it to some very early age, and some country of the east; but they do not pretend to designate precisely either the time or the place. They say, farther, that Cadmus introduced letters from Phenicia into Greece, if we may credit the Parisian Chronicle, B.C. 1519, that is, forty- five years after the death of Moses. Anticlides asserts, and attempts to prove, that letters were invented in Egypt fifteen years before Phoroneus, the most ancient king of Greece; that is, four hundred and nine years after the deluge, and in the one hundred and seventeenth year of Abraham. On this it may be remarked, that they might have been introduced into Egypt at this time, but they had been previously invented by the Phenicians.
Epigenes, who, in the estimation of Pliny, is weighty authority, informs us that observations, made upon the heavenly bodies for seven hundred and twenty years at Babylon, were written down upon baked tiles; but Berosus and Critodemus, also referred to by Pliny, make the number of years four hundred and eighty. Pliny from these statements draws the conclusion that the use of letters, as he expresses it, must have been eternal, that is, beyond all records. Simplicius, who lived in the fifth century, states, on the authority of Porphyry, an acute historian, that Callisthenes, the companion of Alexander, found at Babylon a record of observations on the heavenly bodies for one thousand nine hundred and three years. Of course the record must have been begun B.C. 2234, that is, the eighty-ninth year of Abraham. This statement receives some confirmation from the fact that the month of March is called Adar in the Chaldaic dialect; and at the time mentioned, namely, the eighty-ninth year of Abraham, the sun, during the whole month of March, was in the sign of the zodiac called Aries, or the Ram. The word Adar means the same with Aries. But, as letters would be unquestionably first used for the purposes of general intercourse, they must have been known long before they were employed to transmit the motions of the stars. Of this we have an evidence in the bill of sale, which, as we have reason to suppose from the expressions used in Gen_23:20, was given to Abraham by the sons of Heth. Hence it is not at all wonderful that books and writings are spoken of in the time of Moses, as if well known, Exo_17:14; Exo_24:4; Exo_28:9-11; Exo_32:32; Exo_34:27-28; Num_33:2; Deu_27:8. Nor is it a matter of surprise that long before his time there had been public scribes, who kept written genealogies: they were called by the Hebrews שוטרים , Exo_5:14; Deu_20:5-9. Even in the time of Jacob, seals, upon which names are engraved in the east, were in use, Gen_38:18; Gen_41:42; which is another probable testimony to the great antiquity of letters.
Letters, which had thus become known at the earliest period, were communicated by means of the Phenician merchants and colonies, and subsequently by Egyptian emigrants, through all the east and the west. A strong evidence of this is to be found in the different alphabets themselves, which betray by their resemblance a common origin. That the posterity of the Hebrew patriarchs preserved a knowledge of alphabetical writing during their abode in Egypt, where essentially the same alphabet was in use, is evident from the fact, that the Hebrews while remaining there always had public genealogists. The law, also, was ordered to be inscribed on stones; a fact which implies a knowledge of alphabetical writing. The writing thus engraven upon stones is designated by its appropriate name, namely, חרות , Exo_32:16; Exo_32:32. Not a few of the Hebrews might be unable to read and write, Jdg_8:14; but those who were capable of writing wrote for others, when necessary. Such persons were commonly priests, who, as they do to this day in the east, bear an inkhorn in their girdle, Eze_10:2-3; Eze_10:11. In the ink-horn were the materials for writing, and a knife for sharpening the pen, Jer_36:23. The rich and noble had scribes of their own, and readers also; whence there is more frequent mention made of hearing than of reading, 1Ki_4:3; 2Ki_12:10; Isa_29:18; Jer_36:4; Rom_2:13; Jam_5:11; Rev_1:3. The scribes took youth under their care, who learned from them the art of writing. Some of the scribes seem to have held public schools for instruction; some of which, under the care of Samuel and other prophets, became in time quite illustrious, and were called the schools of the prophets, 1Sa_19:16, &c; 2Ki_2:3; 2Ki_2:5; 2Ki_4:38; 2Ki_6:1. The disciples in these schools were not children or boys, but young men, who inhabited separate edifices, as is the case in the Persian academies. They were taught music and singing, and without doubt writing also, the Mosaic law and poetry. They were denominated, in reference to their instructers, the sons of the prophets; teachers and prophets being sometimes called fathers. After the captivity there were schools for instruction either near the synagogues or in them.
The materials and instruments of writing were,
1. The leaves of trees.
2. The bark of trees, from which, in the process of time, a sort of paper was manufactured.
3. A table of wood, πιναξ, לוח , Deu_9:9; Eze_37:5; Luk_1:63. In the east, these tables were not covered with wax as they were in the west; or at any rate very rarely so.
4. Linen was first used for the object in question at Rome. Linen books are mentioned by Livy. Cotton cloth also, which was used for the bandages of Egyptian mummies, and inscribed with hieroglyphics, was one of the materials for writing upon.
5. The paper made from the reed papyrus, which, as Pliny has shown, was used before the Trojan war.
6. The skins of various animals; but they were poorly prepared for the purpose, until some improved methods of manufacture were invented at Pergamus, during the reign of Eumenes, about B.C. 300. Hence the skins of animals, prepared for writing, are called in Latin pergamena, in English parchment, to this day, from the city Pergamus. They are sometimes denominated in Greek, μεμβρανα, 2Ti_4:13.
7. Tables of lead, עפרת , Job_19:24.
8. Tables of brass, δελτοι χαλκαι. Of all the materials, brass was considered among the most durable, and was employed for those inscriptions which were designed to last the longest, 1Ma_8:22; 1Ma_14:20-27.
9. Stones or rocks, upon which public laws, &c, were written. Sometimes the letters engraved were filled up with lime, Exo_24:12; Exo_31:18; Exo_32:19; Exo_34:1; Deu_27:1-9; Jos_8:32; Job_19:24.
10. Tiles. The inscriptions were made upon the tiles first, and afterward they were baked in the fire. They are yet to be found in the ruins of Babylon; others of later origin are to be found in many countries in the east. 11. The sand of the earth, in which the children in India to this day learn the art of writing, and in which Archimedes himself delineated his mathematical figures, Joh_8:1-8. If in Eze_3:1, and in Rev_10:9, we are informed that books were eaten, we must remember that the descriptions are figurative, and that they were eaten in vision; and consequently we are not at liberty to draw the conclusion from these passages, that any substance was used as materials for writing upon, which was at the same time used for food. The representations alluded to are symbolic, introduced to denote a communication or revelation from God.
As to the instruments used in writing, when it was necessary to write upon hard materials, as tables of stone and brass, the style was made of iron, and sometimes tipped with diamond, Jeremiah 17.
1. The letters were formed upon tablets of wood, (when they were covered with wax,) with a style sharpened at one end, broad and smooth at the other; by means of which the letters, when badly written, might be rubbed out and the wax smoothed down.
2. Wax, however, was but rarely used for the purpose of covering writing tables in warm regions. When this was not the case, the letters were painted on the wood with black tincture or ink.
3. On linen, cotton cloth, paper, skins, and parchment, the letters were painted with a very small brush, afterward with a reed, which was split. The orientals use this elegant instrument to the present day instead of a pen. Ink, called ריו , is spoken of in Num_5:23, as well known and common, Jer_36:18, and was prepared in various ways, which are related by Pliny. The most simple, and consequently the most ancient, method of preparation was a mixture of water with coals broken to pieces, or with soot, with an addition of gum. The ancients used other tinctures also; particularly, if we may credit Cicero and Persius, the ink extracted from the cuttle fish, although their assertion is in opposition to Pliny. The Hebrews went so far as to write their sacred books in gold, as we may learn from Josephus compared with Pliny.
Hieroglyphics, that is, sacred sculptures or engravings, received that appellation, because it was once, and indeed till very lately, thought, that they were used only to express, in a manner hidden from the vulgar, what was exclusively religious; and which it was thought proper to conceal from all but the learned. The fact, however, is, that the hieroglyphic was a kind of picture writing, which passed through various modifications, and was applied alike to sacred and to civil purposes; to the emblazonment of the attributes of idols, the exploits of warriors, and the events of illustrious history. Rudiments of the same art have been found among almost all savages. Among the semi-civilized Mexicans history was pictorial: and in Ceylon and Continental India the same vehicle of instruction is made use of on the walls of their temples, to convey moral lessons, or to indicate the character and exploits of their deities. In Egypt, however, the art was carried into a more perfect system, and was more ostensibly set before the public eye on the massive and almost eternal monuments which cover the country. There, too, it ascends to ages of the world, with which the Scriptures have made us familiar, and stands associated with royal dynasties, and vicissitudes of conquest, more intimately blended with that stream of civil history, along the margin of which European education conducts us. These mystic characters have acquired an adventitious interest also, from the circumstance that the key to them was for so many ages lost. This knowledge perished among that people themselves, the records of whose kings and conquests lay hid under the inexplicable symbol, or the fanciful representation of letters and sounds which were still familiar to the lips of those to whom the signs had become wholly unmeaning. Age after age they were gazed at by the curious; conjectures respecting their nature and use were offered by the learned, some absurd and some approaching the truth, but all failing to throw light upon a mystery, which at length was surrendered, by common consent, to the receptacle of lost and irrecoverable knowledge. Whether the hieroglyphics were symbols only, or words, or picturesque alphabetical characters, or expressed the popular tongue, or one known only to the priests, were questions answered at random by the prompt and dogmatic; and even the more modest and probable solutions of the cautious had so little collateral evidence to support them, that they led to no result. As to their intent, one thought that they involved the mysteries of magic; another, that they were a form of the Chinese language; a third, that they veiled the doctrines of the true patriarchal religion; a fourth, that they enveloped the dogmatic arcana of the Egyptian priesthood. The great point, however, to be determined was, whether the hieroglyphics were the signs of a language; that is, of the sounds of any language; and, if so, whether the language was now known, or knowable, from books still extant. Each of these points was of equal importance; for in vain would it have been ascertained that these signs represented the sounds of a tongue once spoken, if that tongue had perished from the earth. Clement of Alexandria, who lived about the end of the second century, asserted that the Egyptians had three modes of writing,—the epistolo-graphic, or common characters; the hieratic, or sacerdotal, employed chiefly by the priesthood in writing books; and the hieroglyphic, used on public monuments. The symbolical he again distributes into imitative, which represent the plain figure of an object, as a circle to express the sun, and a half-circle the moon; tropical,—which have recourse to analogy for the representation of the object; and enigmatical,— as “a serpent, to signify the oblique course of the stars.” This writer could not so accurately have expressed the truth of the case, unless he had known much more than he has written; and we may presume, that if he had been more liberal in his communications, the present age would not have had the honour of throwing open the gate to this branch of ancient learning. The notion which has generally prevailed, that by whatever rule the hieroglyphics were composed, they were invented by the Egyptian priests to conceal their wisdom from the vulgar, was combated by Bishop Warburton, with his usual acuteness. According to him, the first kind of hieroglyphics were mere pictures; because the most natural way of communicating our conceptions by marks or figures was, to trace out the images of things. But the hieroglyphics invented by the Egyptians were an improvement on this rude and inconvenient essay toward writing; for they contrived to make them both pictures and characters. He proceeds to other observations, which have lost their interest in consequence of the recent discoveries; but he argues conclusively, that hieroglyphics could not, in a vast number of cases, have been resorted to for purposes of secresy, since they were employed to record openly and plainly their laws, history, and all kinds of civil matters. This, as a general view, has been proved to be correct; but still no key to the reading of these characters was found. The figures of deities might, in many instances, be deciphered by their attributes; other symbols were not difficult to explain, as they spoke a universal language. Thus two hands, one holding a bow, and another a shield, suggested a battle; an eye and a sceptre, a monarch of intelligence and vigilance; a ship and a pilot, the governor of a state if associated with a man, the ruler of the universe if associated with a deity. A lion was a natural emblem of strength and courage; a bullock, of agriculture; a horse, of liberty; a sphynx, of subtlety. But still those hieroglyphics were in the greatest number which appeared to represent letters; and many might prove, at the same time, both emblematic and alphabetical. Approaches to the truth of the case had been, indeed, made. Warburton, from an attentive perusal of what Clemens Alexandrinus had said on the subject, had, in fact, concluded, in a way highly creditable to his acuteness, that hieroglyphics were a real written language, applicable to the purposes of history and common life, as well as to those of religion; and that, among the different sorts of hieroglyphics, the Egyptians possessed those which were used phonetically, or alphabetically, as letters; but, till recently, the means of following out this ingenious and correct conjecture were wanting to the learned. The first effectual step was taken by M. Quattermere, who proved, in his work Sur la Langue et Litterature de l'Egypte, [Concerning the Language and Literature of Egypt,] that the Coptic, a language of easy attainment, at least to a considerable extent, was the language of the ancient Egyptians. The second favouring circumstance of modern times was, the publication of the researches made as to the monuments of Egypt by the literary men and artists who accompanied the French expedition to that country. Previous to this, the specimens which had been brought to Europe were few, and the impressions and the fac similes of them incorrect. Some, too, were imitations, and others spurious. In the works published in France after this expedition, the representations of Egyptian monuments were numerous; and the inscriptions were given with perfect exactness and fidelity. Still, however, those would have remained as unintelligible as the originals but for the discovery of the Rosetta stone, now among the Egyptian antiquities in the gallery of the British museum. This stone was dug up by the French, near Rosetta, and contained an inscription in three sets of characters: one in hieroglyphics; a second in a sort of running hand, called enchorial, that is, in the common characters of the country; and a third in Greek. The latter appearing, from the disposition of the whole, to be a translation of the enchorial inscription, as that was of the hieroglyphic, the importance of this stone was at once seen by the French savans; but by the fortune of war, it was taken, with other valuables, by the British troops, and was sent to this country. The Antiquarian Society had it immediately engraved; and the fac similes, which were circulated through Europe, attracted great attention. Dr. Young has, however, the honour of being the discoverer of the nature and use of the hieroglyphical inscription. M. de Sacy, and more especially Mr. Ackerblad, a Danish gentleman, made some progress in identifying the sense of several parts of the second inscription, or that in demotic or enchorial characters, but made no progress in the hieroglyphics; and it was left for British industry to convert to permanent profit a monument which had been a useless, though a glorious, monument of British valour. The inscription upon this celebrated stone proved to be a decree of the Egyptian priests, solemnly assembled in the temple, to record upon a monument, as a public expression of their gratitude, all the events of the reign of Ptolemy Epiphanes; his liberality to the temples and to the gods; his success against his rebellious subjects; his clemency toward some of the traitors; his measures against the fatal consequences of excessive inundations of the Nile; and his munificence toward the college of the priests, by remitting the arrears of several years' payment of taxes. It was an important circumstance, that the whole concludes by ordering that this decree “shall be engraved on a hard stone in sacred characters, in common characters, and in Greek.” By this it was ascertained that the second and third inscriptions were translations of the first; and that the second inscription was in the common character of the country. It was this that led Ackerblad to the investigation of the enchorial text, in order to discover its alphabet; in which he partially succeeded. His labours were, however, for some time unnoticed; but in 1814, Dr. Young published, in the Archaeologia, an improvement on the alphabet of Ackerblad, and a translation of the Egyptian inscription. Difficulties of no ordinary kind, beside those arising from the mutilated state of the stone, presented themselves to all who had applied to make out even the second, or enchorial inscription.
“The method,” says the Marquis Spineto, “pursued by our learned men in this Herculean task of deciphering the Rosetta stone, deserves to be noticed; it may serve to give you a proper idea of the infinite labour to which they have been obliged to submit; a labour which at first seemed calculated to deter the most indefatigable scholar. Figure to yourself, for a moment, the fashion introduced of writing the English language with the omission of most of its vowels, and then suppose our alphabet to be entirely lost or forgotten, a new mode of writing introduced, letters totally different from those we use, and then conceive what our labour would be, if, after the lapse of fifteen hundred years, when the English language, by the operation of ages, and the intercourse with foreigners, was much altered from what it now is, we should be required, by the help of a Greek translation, to decipher a bill of parliament written in this old, forgotten, and persecuted alphabet, in every word of which we should find, and even this not always, the regular number of consonants, but most of the vowels left out. And yet this is precisely what our learned antiquarians have been obliged to do. The Egyptians, like most of the orientals, left out many of the vowels in writing. The enchorial, or demotic alphabet, which they used, has been laid aside since the second or third century of our era. From that time to this, that is, for nearly sixteen hundred years, the Coptic alphabet has been used; and yet in this Coptic language, and in these very enchorial or demotic characters, was engraved on the Rosetta stone the inscription which they have deciphered.”
The steps of this interesting process are given by Dr. Young, in the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The substance is as follows: “As the demotic characters showed something like the shape of letters, it was shrewdly suspected that they might have been used as an alphabet. By comparing, therefore, its different parts with each other, and with the Greek, it was observed that the two groups in the fourth and seventeenth lines of the Greek inscription, in which Alexander and Alexandria occur, corresponded with two other groups in the second and the tenth line of the demotic inscription. These two groups, therefore, were considered as representing these two names, and thus not less than seven characters, or letters, were ascertained. Again: it was observed that a small group of characters occurs very often in almost every line. At first it was supposed that this group was either a termination, or some very common particle; and after some words had been identified, it was found to mean the conjunction and. It was then observed, that the next remarkable collection of characters was repeated twenty-nine or thirty times in the enchorial inscription; and nothing found to occur so often in the Greek, except the word king, which with its compounds, is repeated about thirty-seven times. A fourth assemblage of characters was found fourteen times in the enchorial inscription, agreeing sufficiently well in frequency with the name of Ptolemy, which occurs eleven times in the Greek, and generally in passages corresponding to those of the enchorial text, in their relative situation; and, by a similar comparison, the name of Egypt was identified. Having thus obtained a sufficient number of common points of subdivision, the next step was to write the Greek text over the enchorial, in such a manner that the passages ascertained should coincide as nearly as possible; taking, however, a proper care to observe that the lines of the demotic or enchorial inscription are written from right to left, while those of the Greek run in a contrary direction from left to right. At first sight this difficulty seemed very great; but it was conquered by proper attention and practice; because, after some trouble, the division of the several words and phrases plainly indicated the direction in which they were to be read. Thus it was obvious that the intermediate parts of each inscription stood then very near to the corresponding passages of the other.”
By means of the process above mentioned, Ackerblad, De Sacy, and Dr. Young, among whom a correspondence had been carried on, obtained a sort of alphabet from the enchorial characters, which might aid them in future researches. This result was published by Dr. Young in 1814. The examination of another stone at Menoup, containing an inscription in enchorial and in Greek characters, enabled Dr. Young to confirm the accuracy of former discoveries, and to add several new characters to the enchorial or demotic alphabet. Dr. Young next turned his attention to the hieroglyphics; and, though not with equal success, yet so as to demonstrate that they were phonetic or alphabetical, and to spell several proper names. The difficulty here, indeed, was how to begin; but his success opened a certain way to future progress; and it was upon Dr. Young's discovery that Champollion afterward engrafted his system, and was enabled to carry his researches into Egyptian antiquities and Egyptian hieroglyphics, to an extent which is now deeply engaging the attention of the literary world.
Two practical ends appear to have been answered already by the deciphering of the mystic monuments of Egypt. The first is, that the inscriptions which have been read by Champollion, afford assistance in settling some questions of ancient chronology; the other is, that important collateral proof has been afforded of the historical accuracy of the Old Testament, and the antiquity of its books. It is presumptive in favour of the genuineness and antiquity of the writings of Moses, that such proper Egyptian names as are found in no other ancient writings beside his own, such as On, and Rameses, and Potipherah and Asenath, should now be read in hieroglyphic characters on monuments still standing in the same country. But the confirmatory evidence goes still farther. In one inscription the names of two of the Pharaohs, Osorgon and Scheschonk, are exhibited. Of the characters which compose this legend some are phonetic, some figurative, and some symbolic. The whole reading in Coptic, is, “Ouab an Amon-re soten annenoute Osorchon pri (or pre) ce or ci an ouab an Amon-re Souten Scheschonk-re Soten Nebto, (Amonmai Osorchon,)” &c. The meaning of which is, “The pure by Amon-re, king of the gods, Osorchon deceased, son of the pure, by Amon-re, king of the gods, Scheschonk deceased, son of king of the world, (beloved by Amon-re, Osorchon,) imparting life, like the sun, for ever.” This Osorchon seems to have been the Zarah, or Zarach, the king of Ethiopia, recorded in the Second Book of Chronicles, who, with a host of a thousand thousand and three hundred chariots, came to make war against Asa, the grandson of Jeroboam, and was defeated at Mareshah. Although the Greek historians have never mentioned either the name or exploits of Osorchon, this fact is attested by an hieroglyphical manuscript, published by Denon. It is a funeral legend, loaded with figures, on and round which there are several hieroglyphical inscriptions. With respect to the other Pharaoh, Champollion, speaking of the temple of Karnac, says, “In this marvellous place I saw the portraits of most of the ancient Pharaohs, known by their great actions. They are real portraits, represented a hundred times on the basso-relievos of the outer and inner walls. Each of them has his peculiar physiognomy, different from that of his predecessors and successors. Thus, in colossal representations, the sculpture of which is lively, grand, and heroic, more perfect than can be believed in Europe, we see the Pharaoh Mandouei combating the nations hostile to Egypt, and returning triumphant to his country. Farther on, the campaigns of Rhamses Sesostris; elsewhere Sesonchis, or Shishak, dragging to the feet of the Theban Trinity, Ammon, Mouth, and Khous, the chiefs of thirty conquered nations, among which is found, written in letters at full length, the word Joudahamalek, that is, the kingdom of the Jews, or the kingdom of Judah.
This is a commentary on the fourteenth chapter of the First Book of Kings, which relates the arrival of Shishak at Jerusalem, and his success there. Thus the identity between the Egyptian Sheschonk, the Sesonchis of Manetho, and the Sesac, or Schischak of the Bible, is confirmed in the most satisfactory manner.”
Biblical and Theological Dictionary by Richard Watson
PRINTER 1849.

As ancient nations and communities developed, people became increasingly aware of the benefits that writing brought. Over the centuries they used a variety of materials and methods in their efforts to develop the art and improve their skills.
An early practices was to engrave letters on a smooth surface of bare stone, clay, or stone covered with plaster. The writing was done with a sharp-pointed instrument, usually on rectangular tablets of a size that people could easily handle (Exo_32:15-16; Deu_27:2-3; Job_19:24; Isa_8:1). A more common practice for writings and records of lesser importance was to write in ink on pieces of pottery (technically known as ostraca).
Engraved tablets of stone or clay effectively preserved the writing, but their size and weight limited their usefulness. A more convenient material was developed from a reed known as papyrus (from which we get the English word ‘paper’) or byblos. Dried flat strips of papyrus were stuck together to form a flat sheet, which a person wrote upon using a pen and ink. The pen also was made from a papyrus reed (2Jn_1:12; 3Jn_1:13).

Papyrus writing sheets were often joined to form a long strip, which was then rolled into a scroll (Jer_36:2; Rev_5:1). The Greeks called a scroll a biblion (after the byblos, or papyrus, plant). From this word we get the word ‘Bible’ as a name for that collection of scrolls, or books, that Christians acknowledge as the Scriptures. Since papyrus did not last well, writers sometimes used specially dried animal skin (parchment) instead. Parchment was much more expensive than papyrus, and usually people used it only for those writings that were more important or in more constant use (Luk_4:17; Luk_4:20; 2Ti_4:13).
Although the word ‘book’ sometimes appears in English translations of the Old and New Testaments, the article referred to was not a book in the sense that we understand today (i.e. a collection of sheets bound together). It was most likely a scroll. The book form developed early in the second century AD. Christians found this form particularly useful, not simply because books were easier to read than scrolls, but because the sacred writings could be kept together more conveniently. A few books could contain the writings of many scrolls. This kind of book has become known as a codex. (See also MANUSCRIPTS.)
Bridgeway Bible Dictionary by Don Fleming
PRINTER 1990.

rı̄t?ing:
I. GENERAL
1. Definition
2. Inward Writing
3. Outward Writing
II. THE SYMBOLS
1. Object Writing
2. Image Writing
3. Picture Writing
4. Mnemonic Writing
5. Phonetic Writing
III. METHODS
IV. INSTRUMENTS
V. MATERIALS
1. Clay
2. Stone
3. Lead
4. Bronze
5. Gold and Silver
6. Wood
7. Bones and Skins
8. Vellum
9. Papyrus
10. Paper
11. Ink
VI. FORMS
1. The Roll
2. The Codex
VII. WRITING
1. Writers
2. The Writing Art
VIII. HISTORY OF BIBLICAL HANDWRITING
1. Mythological Origins
2. Earliest Use
3. Biblical History
LITERATURE

I. General.
1. Definition:
Writing is the art of recording thought, and recording is the making of permanent symbols. Concept, expression and record are three states of the same work or word. Earliest mankind expressed itself by gesture or voice and recorded in memory, but at a very early stage man began to feel the need of objective aids to memory and the need of transmitting a message to a distance or of leaving such a message for the use of others when he should be away or dead. For these purposes, in the course of time, he has invented many symbols, made in various ways, out of every imaginable material. These symbols, fixed in some substance, inward or outward, are writing as distinguished from oral speech, gesture language, or other unrecording forms of expression. In the widest sense writing thus includes, not only penmanship or chirography, but epigraphy, typography, phonography, photography, cinematography, and many other kinds of writing as well as mnemonic object writing and inward writing.
Writing has to do primarily with the symbols, but as these symbols cannot exist without being in some substance, and as they are often modified as to their form by the materials of which they are made or the instrument used in making, the history of writing has to do, not only with the signs, symbols or characters themselves, but with the material out of which they are made and the instruments and methods by which they are made.

2. Inward Writing:
The fact that memory is a real record is well known in modern psychology, which talks much of inward speech and inward writing. By inward writing is commonly meant the inward image or counterpart of visual or tangible handwriting as distinguished from the inward records of the sound of words, but the term fairly belongs to all inward word records. Of these permanent records two chief classes may be distinguished: sense records, whether the sense impression was by eye, ear, finger-tip or muscle, and motor records or images formed in the mind with reference to the motion of the hand or other organs of expression. Both sense records and meter records include the counterparts of every imaginable kind of outward handwriting.
We meet this inward writing in the Bible in the writing upon the tablets of the heart (Pro_3:3; Pro_7:3; Jer_17:1; 2Co_3:3), which is thus not a mere figure of speech but a proper description of that effort to fix in memory which some effect by means of sound symbols and some by the sight symbols of ordinary handwriting.
It has also its interesting and important bearing on questions of inspiration and revelation where the prophet ?hears? a voice (Exo_19:19; Num_7:89; Rev_19:1, Rev_19:2) or ?sees? a vision (2Ki_6:17; Isa_6:1-13; Amo_7:1-9) or even sees handwriting (Rev_17:5). This handwriting not only seems ?real? but is real, whether caused by external sound or vision or internal human or superhuman action.

3. Outward Writing:
Outward writing includes many kinds of symbols produced in various ways in many kinds of material. The commonest kind is alphabetical handwriting with pen and ink on paper, but alphabetic symbols are not the only symbols, the hand is not the only means of producing symbols, the pen is not the only instrument, and ink and paper are far from being the only materials.
The ordinary ways of human expression are voice and gesture. Corresponding to these there is an oral writing and a gesture writing. For the recording of vocal sounds various methods have been invented: direct carving or molding in wax or other material, or translating into light vibrations and recording these by photograph or kymograph. Both phonographic and photographic records of sounds are strictly oral writing.
The record of gestures by making pictures of them forms a large fraction of primitive picture writing (e.g. the picture of a man with weapon poised to throw) and the modern cinematography of pantomime is simply a perfected form of this primitive picture writing.
Handwriting is simply hand gesture with a mechanical device for leaving a permanent record of its motion by a trail of ink or incision. In the evolution of expression the imitation of human action tends to reduce itself to sign language, where both arms and the whole body are used, and then to more and more conventionalized hand gesture. This hand gesture, refined, condensed and adapted to mechanical conditions, and provided with pencil, chisel, or pen and ink, is handwriting. Its nature is precisely analogous to that of the self-registering thermometer or kymograph.
Nearly all the great body of existing written documents, save for the relatively few modern phonographic, kymographic and other visible speech records, is handwritten, the symbols being produced, selected, arranged, or at least pointed out, by the hand. Even the so-called phonetic writing, as usually understood, is not sound record but consists of hand-gesture symbols for sounds. _

II. The Symbols.
Among the many kinds of outward signs used in writing the best known are the so-called Phoenician alphabet and its many derivatives, including the usual modern alphabets. Other well-known varieties are the wedge system of Assyria and Babylonia, the hieroglyphic systems of Egypt and Mexico, the Chinese characters, stenographic systems, the Morse code, the Braille system, the abacus, the notched stick, the knotted cord, wampum and twig bundles. These, however, by no means exhaust the list of signs which have been used for record or message purposes; e.g. colored flags for signaling, pebbles, cairns, pillars, flowers, trees, fishes, insects, animals and parts of animals, human beings, and images of all these things, have all served as record symbols in writing.
The various symbols may be grouped as objects and images, each of these classes divided again into pictorial or representative signs and mnemonic or conventional signs, mnemonic signs again divided into ideographic and phonetic, and phonetic again into verbal, syllabic (consonantal), and alphabetic. This may be represented graphically as follows:
(A) OBJECTS
(1) Pictorial
(2) Conventional (Mnemonic)
(a) Ideographic (Eye Images)
(b) Phonetic (Ear Images)
(i) Verbal
(ii) Syllabic
(iii) Consonantal
(iv) Alphabetic
(B) IMAGES
(1) Pictorial
(2) Conventional (Mnemonic)
(a) Ideographic
(b) Phonetic
(i) Verbal
(ii) Syllabic
(iii) Consonantal
(iv) Alphabetic
Objects may be whole objects (a man) or characteristic parts (human head, arm, leg) or samples (feather or piece of fur). The objects may be natural objects or artificial objects designed for another purpose (arrow), or objects designed especially to be used as writing symbols (colored flags). Images include images of all these objects and any imaginary images which may have been invented for writing purposes.
Pictorial or representative signs are distinguished from mnemonic or conventional signs by the fact that in themselves they suggest the thing meant, while the others require agreement beforehand as to what they shall mean. The fact, however, that the symbol is a picture of something does not make it pictorial or the writing picture writing. It is pictorial, not because it is a picture, but because it pictures something. The fact, e.g., that a certain symbol may be recognized as an ox does not make of this a pictograph. If it stands for or means an ox, it is a pictograph; if it stands for ?divinity,? it may be called an ideograph, or if it stands for the letter a it is phonetic, a phonogram.
The key to the evolution of writing symbols is to be found in a law of economy. Object writing undoubtedly came first, but man early learned that the image of an object would serve as well for record purposes and was much more convenient to handle. True picture writing followed. The same law of economy led to each of the other steps from pictorial to alphabetic, and may be traced in the history of each kind and part. Every alphabet exhibits it. The history of writing is in brief a history of shorthand. It begins with the whole object or image, passes to the characteristic part, reduces this to the fewest possible strokes which retain likeness, conventionalizes these strokes, and then, giving up all pretense of likeness to the original symbol, and frankly mnemonic, it continues the process of abbreviation until the whole ox has become the letter ?a? or perhaps a single dot in some system of stenography.
Object writing is not common in the phonetic stage, but even this is found, for example, in alphabetical flags for ship signaling. The actual historical evolution of writing seems to have been object, image-picture, ideogram. phonogram, syllable, consonant, letter. All of these stages have some echoes at least in the Bible, although even the syllabic stage seems to have been already passed at the time of Moses. The Hebrew Old Testament as a whole stands for the consonantal stage and the Greek New Testament for the complete alphabetic - still the climax of handwriting, unless the evolution of mathematical symbols, which is a very elaborate evolution of ideographic handwriting, is so regarded.
Although probably not even a single sentence of the Hebrew Bible was written in ideographic, picture, or object handwriting, many documents which are used or quoted by Biblical writers were written by these methods, and all of them are repeatedly implied. In a number of cases full exegesis requires a knowledge of their nature and history. A certain number of scholars now believe that the Pentateuch was originally written in cuneiform, after the analogy of the circumstances shown by the Tell el-Amarna Letters. In this case of course there would still be traces both of the syllabic and ideographic, but theory is improbable.

1. Object Writing:
The most primitive writing was naturally pictorial object writing. When the hunter first brought home his quarry, this had in it most of the essential elements of modern handwriting. Those who remained at home read in the actual bodies the most essential record of the trip. When, further, the hunter brought back useless quarry to evidence his tale of prowess, the whole essence of handwriting was involved. This was whole-object record, but object abbreviations soon followed. Man early learned that skins represented whole animals (the determinative for ?quadruped? in Egyptian is a hide), and that a reindeer's head or antlers, or any characteristic part, served the simple purpose of record just as well as the whole object, and this method of record survives in a modern hunting-lodge. The bounty on wolves' scalps and the expression ?so many head of cattle? are similar survivals. In war, men returning hung the dead bodies of their enemies from the prows of their triumphal ships or from the walls of the city, and, in peace, from the gibbet, as object lessons. They soon learned, however, that a head would serve all practical purposes as well as a whole body, and the inhabitants of Borneo today practice their discovery. Then they discovered that a scalp was just as characteristic and more portable, and the scalp belt of the American Indian is the result. The ancient Egyptians counted the dead by ?hands? carried away as trophies. Both objects and images tend thus to pass from the whole object to a characteristic part, then to the smallest characteristic part: from the tiger's carcass or stuffed tiger to the tiger's claw or its picture. The next or mnemonic step was taken when the simplest characteristic part was exchanged for a pebble, a twig, a notched stick, a knot, or any other object or image of an object which does not in itself suggest a tiger.
The pictorial object writing had an evolution of its own and reached a certain degree of complexity in elaborate personal adornment, in sympathetic magic, the medicine bag, the prayer stick, pillars, meteoric stones, etc., for worship, collections of liturgical objects, fetishes, votive offerings, trophies, etc.
It reached a still higher order of complexity when it passed into the mnemonic stage represented by the abacus, the knotted cord, the notched stick, the wampum, etc. The knotted cord may be recognized in the earliest hieroglyphic signs, is found still among primitive people, and its most famous example is the, Peruvian quipu. It still survives in the cardinal's hat and the custom of knotting a handkerchief for mnemonic purposes. It is found in the Bible in a peculiarly clear statement in the mnemonic ?fringes? of Num_15:37-41 (compare Deu_22:12). The notched stick is equally old, as seen in the Australian message stick, and its best-known modern example is the tally of the British Exchequer. The abacus and the rosary are practically the lineal descendants of the pebble heap which has a concrete modern counterpart in the counting with pebbles by Italian shepherd boys. It is possible that the notched message stick has its echo in Jdg_5:14 (military scribe's staff); Num_17:1-10 (Aaron's inscribed rod), and all scepters (rods of authority) and herald's wands.

2. Image Writing:
It was a very long step in the history of handwriting from object to image, from the trophy record to the trophy image record. The nature of this step may perhaps be seen in the account of the leopard-tooth necklace of an African chief described by Frobenius. In itself this was merely a complex trophy record - the tribal record of leopards slain. When, however, the chief took for his own necklace the actual trophy which some members of the tribe had won, while the hunter made a wooden model of the tooth which served him as trophy, this facsimile tooth became an image record. This same step from object to image is most familiar in the history of votive offerings, where the model is substituted for the object, the miniature model for the model, and finally a simple written inscription takes the place of the model. It is seen again in sympathetic magic when little wax or clay images are vicariously buried or drowned, standing for the person to be injured, and taking the place of sample parts, such as the lock of hair or nail-parings, etc., which are used in like manner by still more primitive peoples.

3. Picture Writing:
It was another long step in the evolution of symbols when it occurred to man that objects worn for record could be represented by paint upon the body. The origin of written characters is often sought in the practice of tattooing, but whatever truth there may be in this must be carried back one step, for it is generally agreed and must naturally have been the fact that body painting preceded tattooing, which is a device for making the record permanent. The transition from the object trophy to the image on the skin might easily have come from the object causing a pressure mark on the skin. There is good reason to believe that the wearing of trophies was the first use of record keeping.
It is of course not proved that body ornaments or body marks are the original of image writing or that trophies are the earliest writing, nor yet that models of trophies or votive offerings were the first step in image writing. It may be that the first images were natural objects recognized as resembling other objects. The Zuni Indians used for their chief fetishes natural rock forms. The first step may have been some slight modification of natural stone forms into greater resemblance, such as is suggested by the slightly modified sculptures of the French-Spanish caves. Or again the tracks of animals in clay may have suggested the artificial production of these tracks or other marks, and the development of pottery and pottery marks may have been the main line of evolution. The Chinese trace the origin of their symbols to bird tracks. Or again smear marks of earth or firebrand or blood may have suggested marks on stone, and the marked pebbles of the Pyrenean caves may have reference to this. Or yet again the marks on the animals in the Pyrenean caves may have been ownership marks and point back to a branding of marks or a primitive tattooing by scarification.
Whatever the exact point or motive for the image record may have been, and however the transition was made, the idea once established had an extensive development which is best illustrated by the picture writing of the American Indians, though perhaps to be found in the Bushmen drawings, petroglyphs, and picture writing the world over. It is almost historic in the Sumerian and the Egyptian, whose phonetic symbols are pictographic in origin at least and whose determinatives are true pictographs.

4. Mnemonic Writing:
The transition from pictorial to conventional or mnemonic takes place when the sign ceases to suggest the meaning directly, even after explanation. This happens in two ways: (1) when an object or image stands for something not directly related to that naturally suggested, e.g., when a stuffed fox stands for a certain man because it is his totem, or an ox's head stands for divinity or for the sound ?a,? or when the picture of a goose stands for ?son? in the Egyptian because the sounds of the two words are the same; (2) when by the natural process of shorthanding the object or image has been reduced beyond the point of recognition. Historically, the letter a is ox (or goat?); actually it means a certain sound.
When this unrecognizable or conventional sign is intended to suggest a visual image it is called an ideogram, when an ear picture, a phonogram. Anybody looking casually over a lot of Egyptian hieroglyphics can pick out kings' names because of the oval line or cartouche in which they are enclosed. This cartouche is ideagraphic. On the other hand the pictures of a sun, two chicks, and a cerastes within the cartouche have nothing to do with any of these objects, but stand for the sounds kufu - who is the person commonly known as Cheops. This is phonetic.
Both old Babylonian and Egyptian show signs of picture origin, but the earliest Babylonian is mainly ideographic, and both developed soon into the mixed stage of phonetic writing with determinatives.

5. Phonetic Writing:
Phonetic writing seems to have developed out of the fact that in all languages the same sound often has many different meanings. In English ?goose? may mean the fowl or the tailor's goose. In Egyptian the sound sa or s, with a smooth breathing, means ?goose? or ?son,? and the picture of a goose means either.
Whether the word-sign is an ideogram or a phonogram is a matter of psychology. Many modern readers even glimpse a word as a whole and jump to the visual image without thinking of sounds at all. To them it is an ideagram. Others, however, have to spell out the sounds, even moving their lips to correspond. To them as to the writer it is a phonogram. The same was true of the ancient picture or ideagraphic sign. The word-sign was ideagram or phonogram according to intention or to perception.
With the transition to syllabic writing, record became chiefly phonetic. The transition was made apparently by an entirely natural evolution from the practice of using the same word-sign for several different objects having the same sound, and it proceeded by the way of rebus, as shown in Mexican and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Syllabic writing implies a symbol for every monosyllable. It was a great step therefore when it was discovered that the number of sounds was small and could be represented by individual symbols, as compound words could by syllable signs. At first only consonants were written. In the Semitic languages vowels were at first not written at all - possibly they were not even recognized, and one might use any vowel with a particular combination of consonants. However that may be, what many prefer to call consonantal writing seems to have existed for 2,000 years before the vowels were recognized and regularly introduced into the Phoenician alphabet. It is at this stage that alphabetic writing, as usually reckoned, began. See ALPHABET.
Phonetic consonantal writing has now been in use some 5,000 years and strict alphabetic writing some 3,000 years, almost to the exclusion of other forms. The characters in use today in several hundred alphabets are probably the historical descendants, with accumulation of slight changes through environment, of characters existing from near the beginning.
Alongside the development of the historic system of symbols, there has been, still within the field of alphabetic writing for the most part, a parallel line with multitudes of shorthand and cryptographic systems. An equally great multitude of code systems are in effect phonetic words or sentences and cryptographically or otherwise used for cable or telegraph, diplomatic letters, criminal correspondence and other secret purposes.

III. Methods.
Roughly speaking, the ways of making symbols, apart from the selection of the ready-made, may be reduced to two which correspond to art in the round or in three dimensions and art in the flat or in two dimensions. The former appeals to eye or touch, affording a contrast by elevation or depression, while the latter produces the same effect by contrasting colors on a flat surface.
Written symbols in three dimensions are produced either by cutting or by pressure. In the case of hard material superfluous matter is removed by sculpture, engraving or die cutting. In the case of plastic or malleable material, it is modeled, molded, hammered or stamped into the required form. To the first form belongs the bulk of stone inscriptions, ancient metal inscriptions, scratched graffiti, wax tablets, etc., to the later clay tablets, votive figurines, seal impressions, hammered inscriptions, minted coins, also molded inscriptions, coins and medals, etc. Several of the Hebrew and Greek words for writing imply cutting (ḥāḳaḳ,ḥāraṭ,ḥārash, etc.; gráphō).
Symbols in two dimensions are produced either by drawing or printing, both of which methods consist in the applying of some soft or liquid material to a material of a contrasting color or cutting from thin material and laying on. Drawing applies the material in a continuous or interrupted line of paint, charcoal, colored chalk, graphite, ink or other material. Its characteristic product is the manuscript. This laying on is implied, as some think (Blau, 151), in the commonest Hebrew word for writing (kāthabh). Tattooing (Deu_14:1; Lev_19:28, etc.), embroidery (embroidered symbolic figures, Exo_28:33, Exo_28:34) and weaving belong in this class (embroidered words in Palestine Talmud 20a, quoted by Blau, 165).
Printing consists in laying the contrasting color on by means of stencil or pressure, forming symbols in two dimensions at one stroke. Perhaps the most primitive form of printing is that of the pintadoes, by which the savage impresses war paint or other ceremonial forms on his face and body. Branding also belongs in this class (Gal_6:17, figuratively; 3 Macc 2:19; branding on the forehead, Code of Hammurabi, section 127; branding a slave, Code of Hammurabi, sections 226, 227).
These processes of cutting, molding, drawing and printing roughly correspond with inscriptions, coins, medals, seals, manuscripts, and printed documents - epigraphy, numismatics, sigillography, chirography, typography.

IV. Instruments.
The commonest instruments of ancient writing were the pen, brush and style. Other instruments are: the various tools for modeling, molds, stencils, dies, stamps, needles, engraving tools, compass, instruments for erasure, for the ruling of lines, vessels for ink or water, etc. Several of these are mentioned and others are implied in the Bible. The chisel which cuts and the stylus which scratches are both called stylus or simply the ?iron? (the iron pen). The graving tool of Exo_32:4, the iron pen of Job_19:24, the pen of Isa_8:1, the pen of iron of Jer_17:1, and, with less reason, the pencil of Isa_44:13, are all commonly interpreted as stilus or style, but they are sometimes at least cutting rather than scratching tools. References to wooden tablets also imply the style, and references to clay tablets either the style proper or a similar instrument for pressure marks. The point of a diamond in Jer_17:1, whether it is joined with the pen of iron or not, seems to refer to the use of corundum in the engraving of precious stones. The passages which refer to blotting out (see below) or writing on papyrus (see below) or refer to an ink-horn or ink (see respective articles) imply a pen or brush rather than style, and presumably the writing of the New Testament implied in general a reed pen. The wide house ?painted with vermilion? (Jer_22:14) implies the brush, but there is no direct evidence of its use in writing in the Bible itself. The existing ostraca from Ahab's palace are, however, done with the brush. The pencil (seredh) mentioned in Isa_44:13 certainly means some instrument for shaping, but is variously translated as ?line? (the King James Version), ?red ochre? (Revised Version margin), and even ?stilus,? or ?line-marking stilus? (paragraphis Aquila). The compass, often referred to in classical times, is found in Isa_44:13. The line ruler (paragraphis), referred to by Aquila (Isa_44:13), and the simple plummet as well were probably used, as in later times, for marking lines. The needle is referred to in late Hebrew and needlework in the Bible (see III, above). The ink-horn or water vessel for moistening the dry inks is implied in all papyrus or leather writing. See INK, INK-HORN.
The Hebrew term translated ?weight of lead? in Zec_5:8, and ?talent of lead? is precisely equivalent to the Greek term for the circular plate of lead (kuklomólibdos) used for ruling lines, but something heavier than the ruling lead seems meant.
Erasure or blotting out is called for in Num_5:23, and often figuratively (Exo_32:32, Exo_32:33; Rev_3:5, etc.). If writing was on papyrus, this would call for the sponge rather than the penknife as an eraser, but the latter, which is used for erasure or for making reed pens, is referred to in Jer_36:23. For erasing waxed surfaces the blunt end of the style was used certainly as early as the New Testament times. Systematic erasure when vellum was scarce produced the palimpsest.

V. Materials.
The materials used in writing include almost every imaginable substance, mineral, vegetable, and animal: gold, silver, copper, bronze, clay, marble, granite, precious gems, leaves, bark, wooden planks, many vegetable complexes, antlers, shoulder-blades, and all sorts of bones of animals, and especially skins. The commonest are stone, clay, metal, papyrus, paper and leather, including vellum, and all of these except paper are mentioned in the Bible. Paper too must be reckoned with in textual criticism, and it was its invention which, perhaps more even than the discovery of printing with movable type, made possible the enormous multiplication of copies of the Bible in recent times.

1. Clay:
Whatever may be the fact as to the first material used for record purposes, the earliest actual records now existing in large quantities are chiefly on clay or stone, and, on the whole, clay records seem to antedate and surpass in quantity stone inscriptions for the earliest historical period. After making all allowances for differences in dating and accepting latest dates, there is an immense quantity of clay records written before 2500 BC and still existing. About 1400 or 1500 BC the clay tablet was in common use from Crete to the extreme East and all over Palestine, everywhere, in short, but Egypt and it seems perhaps to have been the material for foreign diplomatic communications, even in Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of these tablets have been dug up, and undoubtedly millions are in existence, dug or undug. These are chiefly of Mesopotamia. The most famous of these tablets were for a long time of the later period from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. See LIBRARY OF NINEVEH. Recently, however those from Tell el-Amarna in Egypt, Boghaz-keui in the Hittite country, and a few from Palestine itself vie with these in interest. Most of these tablets are written on both sides and in columns ruled in lines. They measure from an inch to a foot and a half in length and are about two-thirds as wide as they are long. Many of these tablets, the so-called ?case tablets,? are surrounded with another layer of clay with a docketing inscription. See TABLETS. Other clay forms are the potsherd ostraca; now being dug up in considerable quantities in Palestine Ezekiel (Eze_4:1) and perhaps Jeremiah (Jer_17:13) refer to this material. See OSTRACA.

2. Stone:
Stones were used for record before image writing was invented - as cairns, pillars, pebbles, etc. Many of the early and primitive image records are on the walls of caves or on cliffs (Bushmen, American Indians, etc.). Sometimes these are sculptured, sometimes made by charcoal, paint, etc. The durability rather than the more extensive use of stone makes of these documents the richest source for our knowledge of ancient times. Besides natural stone objects, stone pillars, obelisks, statues, etc., stone-wall tablets, the sides of houses and other large or fixed surfaces, there are portable stone-chip ostraca and prepared tablets (tablets of stone, Exo_24:12; Exo_31:18). These latter might be written on both sides (Exo_32:15). Job seems to refer to stone inscriptions (Job_19:24). The famous trilingual inscription of Behistun which gave Rawlinson the key to the Assyrian was on a cliff and refers to King Darius (Rawlinson, Life, 58 ff, 142 ff). Two of the most famous of stone inscriptions are the Rosetta Stone, which gave the key to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the Moabite Stone (W. H. Bennett, Moabite Stone, London 1911), and both have some bearing on Jewish history. An especially interesting and suggestive stone inscription is the Annals of Thutmose III of Egypt, about 1500 BC, inscribed on the walls of the temple at Karnak. This gives a long account of campaigns in Syria and Palestine (Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, 163-217). The Siloam Inscription, and in general all the recently discovered inscriptions of Palestine, have their more or less important bearings on Biblical history (Lidzbarski, Handb. and Ephem.). Moses provided (Deu_27:2-8) for writing the Law on stone (or plaster), and Joshua executed the work (Jos_8:21, Jos_8:32).
Another form of record on stone is the engraving of gems, which is referred to in Exo_28:9, Exo_28:11, Exo_28:21; Exo_39:6, Exo_39:14, etc., and possibly Zec_3:9.

3. Lead:
One of the commonest materials, on account of the ease of engraving, probably, is lead. Used more or less for inscriptions proper, it is also used for diplomatic records and even literary works. It was very commonly used for charms in all nations, and is referred to in Job (Job_19:24), where it perhaps more likely means a rock inscription filled with lead, rather than actual leaden tablets. For the text of Ps 80 on lead see Gardthausen, p. 26. Submergence curses were usually of lead, but that of Jer_51:62 seems to have been of papyrus or paper (compare W. S. Fox in American Journal of Phil., XXXIII, 1912, 303-4).

4. Bronze:
Bronze was used for several centuries BC, at least for inscribed votive offerings, for public records set up in the treasuries of the temples and for portable tablets such as the military diplomas. In the time of the Maccabees public records were engraved on such tablets and set up in the temple at Jerusalem (1 Macc 14:27). There were doubtless many such at the time when Jesus Christ taught there.

5. Gold and Silver:
Gold and silver as writing material are most commonly and characteristically used in coins and medals. References to money, mostly silver money, are numerous in the Old Testament, but these are not certainly coins with alphabetic inscriptions. In New Testament times coins were so inscribed, and in one case at least the writing upon it is referred to - ?Whose is this image and superscription?? (Mat_22:20). The actual inscription and the actual form of its letters are known from extant specimens of the denarius of the period. See MONEY.
The use of the precious metals for ordinary inscriptional purposes was, however, frequent in antiquity, and the fact that rather few such inscriptions have survived is probably due to the value of the metal for other purposes. The Hittite treaty of Khetasar or Chattusil engraved on silver and sent to the king of Egypt, has long been known from the Egyptian monuments (translation in Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, III, 165-74), and recently fragments of the Hittite version of this treaty have been discovered at Boghaz-keui (Winckler, MDOG, XXXV, 12 ff). This has very close relations to Biblical history, whether it was made before or after the Exodus. The famous Orphic gold tablets (Harrison, ?Orphic Tablets,? in Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 573-600, 660-74) have a bearing on a comparative study of Biblical doctrine. Direct reference to engraving on gold is found in the account of the inscription on the high priest's miter (Exo_28:36). Writing on the horns of the altar is referred to in Jer_17:1, and these horns too were of gold (Exo_30:3). Queen Helena of Adiabene is said to have presented an inscribed gold tablet to the temple at Jerusalem (Blau, 67). The golden shrines of Ptolemy V - with their inscribed golden phylacteries - are mentioned on the Rosetta Stone.
Silver, and more especially gold, have also been very extensively used for the laying on of contrasting colors, either furnishing the background or more often the material laid on. The history of chrysography is a long and full one (Gardthausen, I, 214-17; Blau, 13, 159-63). The standard copy of the Old Testament at Jerusalem, which was loaned to Alexandria, was apparently in gold letters (Josephus, Ant., XII, ii, 10) (see SEPTUAGINT), and many of the famous Biblical manuscripts of the Middle Ages were written wholly or in part with gold, either laid on as gold leaf or dissolved and used as an ink or paint (Gardthausen, 216).

6. Wood:
Leaves of trees were early used for charms and writing. Some of the representations of writing on the Egyptian monuments show the goddess of writing inscribing the leaves of growing trees. Jewish tradition (Tōṣephtā' Giṭṭı̄n 2 3-5; Mishna, Gittin 2 3, etc., quoted by Blau, 16) names many kinds of leaves on which a bill of divorcement (Deu_24:1, Deu_24:3) might or might not be written. Reference to the use of leaves is found in early Greek, Latin, and Arabic sources - and they are still used in the East.
Bark also has often been used: both liber in Latin and ?book? in English, according to some, are thought to refer to the bark of the lime or beech tree, and birch bark was a common writing material among the American Indians. It is in the form of wrought wood, staves, planks or tablets however, that wood was chiefly known in historical times. These wood tablets were used in all early periods and among all nations, especially for memorandum accounts and children's exercises. Sometimes the writing was directly on the wood, and sometimes on wood coated with wax or with chalk. See TABLETS. Writing on staves is referred to in Num_17:2. Mar_15:26 seems perhaps to imply that the ?superscription? of the cross was on wood, unless Joh_19:19 contradicts this.
Woven linen as a writing substance had some fame in antiquity (libri lintei), and many other fibers which have been used for woven or embroidered writing are, broadly speaking, of wood. So too, in fact, when linen or wood is pulped and made into paper, the material is still wood. Most modern writing and printing is thus on wood. See 10, below.

7. Bones and Skins:
Diogenes Laertius (vii. 174) tells that Cleanthes wrote on the shoulder-blades of oxen, but he was preceded by the cave-dwellers of the Neolithic age, who wrote on reindeer horns and bones of many kinds (Dechelette, Archeological Prehistory, 1908, 125, 220-37, et passim). Ivory has often been used and was a favorite material for tablets in classical times. The Septuagint translates ?ivory work? of Son_5:14 as ?ivory tablets.? Horns are given in late Hebrew (Tōṣephtā', quoted by Blau, 16) as a possible material for writing. They have been used at all times and are well illustrated in modern times by the inscribed powder horns.
The hides of living animals have served for branding, and living human skin for painting, branding and tattooing extensively in all lands and all times. The literature of ceremonial painting and tattooing is very extensive, and the branding of slaves was common in many lands. See PRINTING.
The use of skins prepared for writing on one side (leather) was early and general, dating back as far at least as the IVth Dynasty of Egypt. The Annals of Thutmose III in Palestine were written on rolls of leather. Its use was common also in Persia (Diodorus ii. 32; Herodotus v. 58; Strabo xv. 1), and it was a natural universal material. It has been much used by modern American Indians. It was the usual material of early Hebrew books, and the official copies at least of the Old Testament books seem always to have been written on this material (Blau, 14-16), and are so, indeed, even to the present day.

8. Vellum:
Vellum is simply a fine quality of leather prepared for writing on both sides. The autographs of the New Testament were most likely written on papyrus, rather than leather or vellum, but most of the earliest codices and all, until recent discoveries, were on this material, while very few of the long list of manuscripts on which the New Testament text is founded are on any other material. This material is referred to as parchment by Paul (2Ti_4:13). Almost every kind of skin (leather or vellum) has been used for writing, including snake skin and human skin. The palimpsest is secondhand or erased vellum, written upon again. See PARCHMENT; PARCHMENTS.

9. Papyrus:
Papyrus was not only the chief of the vegetable materials of antiquity, but it has perhaps the longest record of characteristic general use of anything except stone. The papyrus was made from a reed cultivated chiefly in Egypt, but having a variety found also in Syria, according to Theophrastus. The papyrus reed grows in the marshes and in stagnant pools; is at best about the thickness of one's arm, and grows to the height of at most from 12 to 15 feet. It was probably a pool of these papyrus reeds (?flags?) in which Moses was hidden (Exo_3:3), and the ark of bulrushes was evidently a small boat or chest made from papyrus reeds, as many of the Egyptian boats were. These boats are referred to in Isa_18:2.
Papyrus was made by slicing the reed and laying the pieces crosswise, moistening with sticky water, and pressing or pounding together. The breadth of the manufactured article varied from 5 inches, and under, to 9 1/4 in., or even to a foot or a foot and a half. The earliest Egyptian papyrus ran from 6 to 14 in. Egyptian papyri run to 80, 90 and even 135 ft. in length, but the later papyri are generally from 1 to 10 ft. long. The use of papyrus dates from before 2700 BC at latest.
Many Bible fragments important for textual criticism have been discovered in Egypt in late years. These, together with the light which other papyri throw on Hellenistic Greek and various paleographical and historical problems, make the study of papyri, which has been erected into an independent science, one of very great importance as to Biblical history and Biblical criticism (compare Mitteis u. Wilcken, Grundzuge ... d. Papyruskunde, Leipzig, 1912, 2 volumes in 4). It has been argued from Jer_36:23 that the book which the king cut up section by section and threw on the fire was papyrus. This argument is vigorously opposed by Blau (14, 15), but the fact of the use of papyrus seems to be confirmed by the tale that the Romans wrapped the Jewish school children in their study rolls and burned them (Ta‛ănı̄th 69a, quoted by Blau, 41). Leather would have been poor burning material in either case. Certainly ?papyrus? is freely used by the Septuagint translators and the word biblı́on is (correctly) translated by Jerome (Tobit 7:14) by charta. It is referred to in 2Jo_1:12, ?paper and ink,? as the natural material for letter-writing. See PAPYRUS, PAPYRI.

10. Paper:
The introduction of paper was from Western Asia, possibly in the 8th century, and it began to be used in Europe commonly from the 13th century. While few Western manuscripts of any importance are on paper, many of the Eastern are. It was the invention of paper, in large measure, which made possible the immense development in the multiplication of books, since the invention of printing, and the enormous number of Bibles now in existence.

11. Ink:
Of the many materials used in order to lay one contrasting color on another, the flowing substances, paint and ink, are the most common. In general throughout antiquity the ink was dry ink and moistened when needed for writing. Quite early, however, the liquid inks were formed with the use of gall nut or acid, and many recipes and formulas used during the Middle Ages are preserved. See INK, INK-HORN. The reading of a palimpsest often depends on the kind of ink originally used and the possibility of reviving by reagents.

VI. Forms.
The best known ancient forms of written documents are the tablet or sheet, the roll, the diploma and the codex. These may be analyzed into one-face documents and many-faced documents - page documents and leaf documents. The roll, the diploma and the usual folding tablet or pleated document are forms of the one-page document, while the codex or bound book (English ?volume?) is the typical leaf document. The roll is the typical form of the Old Testament, the codex of the New Testament, extant manuscripts.
A book as regards its material form consists of a single limited surface suited for writing, or a succession of such surfaces. This single surface may be the face of a cliff or house wall, a broken piece of pottery, a leaf, a sheet of lead, papyrus, vellum or paper, a tablet of clay, stone or wood, a cylinder, prism, cone, pyramid, obelisk, statue or any one of the thousands of inscribed objects found among votive offerings. The typical form is the flat surface to which the term ?tablet? or ?sheet? is applied, and which is called ?page? or ?leaf? according as one or both surfaces are in mind.
These single flat leaves are characteristically quadrilateral, but may be of any shape (circular, oval, heart-shaped, etc.) or of any thickness, from the paper of an Oxford Bible or equally thin gold foil up to slabs of stone many inches thick.
When the document to be written is long and the sheet becomes too large for convenient handling, space may be gained by writing on both sides or by making still larger and either folding or rolling, on the one hand, or breaking or cutting up into a series of smaller sheets, on the other. This folding or rolling of the large sheet survives still in folded or rolled maps and the folded or rolled documents (diplomas) of medieval and modern archives. The use of the tablet series for long works instead of one overgrown tablet was early - quite likely as early as the time of actual writing on real ?leaves.?
These smaller tablets or sheets were at first, it would seem, kept together. by numbering (compare Dziatzko, Ant. Buchw., 127), catchwords, tying in a bundle, or gathering in a small box (capsa). This has indeed its analogy with the mnemonic twig bundle of object writing. The Pentateuch gets its name from the five rolls in a box, jar, or basket (Blau, 65; Birt, Buchrolle, 22).
The next step in the evolution of book forms was taken when the various leaves or sheets were fastened to each other in succession, being strung, pasted or hinged together.
The stringing together is as early and primitive as the leopard-tooth trophy necklace of the African chief or the shell and tooth necklaces of quaternary Europe (Dechelette, Arch., 208-9). It was perhaps used with annual tablets in the first dynasties of Egypt and is found in oriental palm-leaf books today.

1. The Roll:
The roll consists normally of a series of one-surface sheets pasted or sewed together. Even when made into a roll before writing upon, the fiction of individual tablets was maintained in the columns (deleths, Jer_36:23 = ?doors?). It was the typical book form of antiquity. It was commonly of leather, vellum, papyrus, and sometimes of linen, It might rarely be as much as 135 ft. long X 1 1/2 ft. wide for papyrus, and leather rolls might be wider still. It was the form traditionally used by the Hebrews, and was undoubtedly the form used by our Lord in the synagogue. It is still used in the synagogue. It was possibly the form in which the New Testament books also were written, but this is much more doubtful.
The roll form is rounded on the one-surface tablet, and, as a matter of fact, neither leather nor papyrus was well suited to take ink on the back; it developed from the sewing together of skins and the pasting together of sheets of papyrus. Although papyrus is found written on both sides, it is in general not the same document on the back, but the old has been destroyed and utilized as waste paper. This writing on both sides of the roll (opisthography) is referred to in Eze_2:10 (Rev_5:1), where the roll is written within and without.

2. The Codex:
Wood and metal tablets, not being flexible, could not be rolled, but were hinged and became diptychs, triptychs, polyptychs. The typical method of hinging these tablets in Roman times was not the codex or modern book form proper, where all are hinged by the same edge, but a folding form based on a series of one-surface tablets hinged successively so as to form a chain (Gardthausen, Greek Palestine, I, 129, figure 12). They were strictly folding tablets, folding like an accordion, as in some Far Eastern manuscripts of recent times. The modern hinging was used but rarely.
It is commonly said that it was this folding or hinged wooden tablet which produced the codex of the Latins and the ?book? of modern Germanic races. Some, however, prefer to trace the origin to the folded document. The wood or waxed tablet was commonly used in antiquity for letters, but even more commonly the sheet of papyrus or vellum. It is quite natural to fold such a sheet once to protect the writing. Whether this was suggested by the diptych, or vice versa, the form of a modern sheet of note paper was early introduced. Either the diptych or the folded single sheet may have suggested the codex.
Whether the first codices were wood and metal or papyrus and vellum, the hinging at one edge, which is the characteristic, is closely connected with the double-face (or multiple-face) tablet. With suitable material the simplest way of providing space, if the tablet is too small, is to turn over and finish on the back. The clay tablets lend themselves readily to writing on both sides, but not to hinging. It developed, however, to a certain degree the multiple-face idea by use of prisms, pyramids, hexagonal and other cylinders, but it was early forced into the numbered series of moderate-sized tablets.
Wood and metal tablets would be hinged, but the wood tablets were too bulky and metal tablets too heavy for long works, and the ring method of joining actually led away from the book to the pleated form. Papyrus and leather, however, while they might be used (as they were used) as single tablets were thin enough to allow of a long work in a single codex. They soon developed, therefore, perhaps through the folded sheet, into the codex proper and the modern bound book. The codex, as Thompson remarks, was destined to be the recipient of Christian literature, as the papyrus roll had been the basis of the pagan literature, and there is some evidence to show that the form was, historically, actually developed for the purposes of the Christian writings, and in papyrus, while the pagan papyri continued to be in roll form. Since the invention of the codex is placed at the end of the 1st century, and the earliest codices were especially the New Testament writings, there is a certain possibility that at least the historical introduction of the codex was in the New Testament books, and that its invention comes perhaps from combining the New Testament epistles on papyrus into a volume. In the West at least the roll is, however, the prevailing form of the New Testament until the 3rd or 4th centuries (Birt, Buchrolle, passim).

VII. Writing.
1. Writers:
The chief Hebrew words for the professional ?writer? are ṣōphēr and shōṭēr, both akin to Assyrian words for ?writing? and used also for kindred officers. The word ṣōphēr seems closely connected with the ṣēpher, ?book,? and with the idea of numbering. This official is a military, mustering or enrolling officer (Jdg_5:14; 2Ch_26:11; 2Ki_25:19), a numbering or census officer for military purposes or for taxation (Isa_33:18) - and a royal secretary (2Sa_8:17).
The shōṭēr appears as a herald (Deu_20:5, Deu_20:8; Jos_1:10; Jos_3:2), as overseer of the brick-making in Egypt, and as overseer of the outward business of Israel (1Ch_26:29). He is associated with the elders (Num_11:16; Deu_29:10 (Hebrew 9); Deu_31:28; Jos_8:33; Jos_23:2; Jos_24:1) or with the judges (Jos_8:33; Jos_23:2; Jos_24:1; Deu_16:18).
The two terms are often, however, used together as of parallel and distinct offices (2Ch_26:11; 2Ch_34:13). If any such distinction can be made, it would seem that the ṣōphēr was originally the military scribe and the shōṭēr the civil scribe, but it is better to say that they are ?evidently ... synonymous terms and could be used of any subordinate office which required ability to write? (Cheyne in EB). There seem to have been at least 70 of these officers at the time of the Exodus, and by inference many more (Num_11:16), and 6,000 Levites alone in the time of David (1Ch_23:4) were ?writers.?
Another kind of professional scribe was the ṭiphṣār (Jer_51:27, ?marshal?; Nah_3:17 margin), or tablet writer, a word apparently directly borrowed from the Assyrian. This too seems to be a real synonym for both of the other words. In brief, therefore, all three terms mean scribe in the Egyptian or Assyrian sense, where the writer was an official and the official necessarily a writer.
Still another word, rendered in the Revised Version (British and American) as ?magicians,? is rendered in its margin as ?sacred scribe? (ḥarṭōm). This word being derived from the stilus recalls the close connection between the written charm and magic. None of these words in the Old Testament refers directly to the professional copyist of later times whose business was the multiplication of copies.
Sayce argues from the name Kiriath-sepher that there was a university for scribes at this place, and according to 1 Chronicles (1Ch_2:55) there were Kenite families of professional scribes at Jabez.
The professional scribe, writing as an amanuensis, is represented by Baruch (Jer_36:4) and Tertius (Rom_16:22), and the calligraphist by Ezra (Ezr_7:6). In later times the scribe stood for the man of learning in general and especially for the lawyer.
It would seem that Moses expected that kings should write with their own hands (Deu_17:18; Deu_31:24), and the various letters of David (2Sa_11:15), Jezebel (1Ki_21:9), the king of Aram (2Ki_5:5), Jehu (2Ki_10:2, 2Ki_10:6), Jeremiah (chapter 29), Elijah (2Ch_21:12-15), the letters of the Canaanite and Hittite princes to one another in the Tell el-Amarna Letters and Boghazeui tablets, etc., while they may sometimes have been the work of secretaries, were undoubtedly often by the author. For the prevalence of handwriting in Biblical times and places see LIBRARY. Its prevalence in Old Testament times may be compared perhaps to the ratio of college graduates in modern life. In New Testament times the ratio was probably much greater, and it appears not only that Zacharias, the priest, and the educated Paul and Luke could write, but even the poorer apostles and the carpenter's Son. It is assumed that all of a certain rich man's debtors could write (Luk_16:7). This general literacy was due to the remarkable public-school system of the Jews in their synagogues, which some good Jewish scholars (Klostermann, quoted by Krauss, Talmudic Archaeology, III, 336, note 1) trace as far back as Isaiah. In Vespasian's time it is said there were in Jerusalem alone 480 synagogues each with its school, and the law that there must be primary schools in every city dates at latest (63-65 AD) from this time and more likely from 130 BC. The compulsory public-school law of Simeon ben Setach (circa 70 BC), although it has been labeled mythical, is nevertheless entirely credible, in view of the facts as they appear in New Testament times and in Josephus. The tale that there were in Bether, after the fall of Jerusalem had crowded full this seat of learning, ?400 synagogues each with 400 teachers and 400 pupils,? carries fiction on its face, but there is little doubt that there were public schools long before this in nearly every town of Palestine and compulsory education from the age of 6 or 7 (compare Krauss, III, chapter xii, ?Schule,? 119-239, 336-58).

2. The Writing Art:
Writing in the Hebrew as in Semitic languages in general except Ethiopic is from right to left and in Greek from left to right as in modern western usage. On the one hand, however, some Sabean inscriptions and, on the other hand, a number of early Greek inscriptions are written alternately, or boustrophedon, and suggest the transition from Semitic to western style. The earlier Greek manuscripts did not separate the words, and it is inferred from text corruptions that the earliest Hebrew writing did not. As early as the Mesha and Siloam inscriptions, the dot was used to separate words, and the vertical stroke for the end of a sentence. Vowel points were introduced somewhere from the 5th to the 8th centuries AD by the Massoretes, but are not allowed even now in the synagogue rolls. Some of the inscriptions employ the Palestinian or Tiberian system of vowel points, and others the Babylonian (above the line). Accents indicate not only stress but intonation and other relations. Very soon after Ezra's day, and before the Septuagint translation, the matter of writing the Biblical books had become one of very great care, the stipulations and the rules for careful correction by the authorized text being very strict (Blau, 185-87). The manuscripts were written in columns (doors), and a space between columns, books, etc., was prescribed, as also the width of the column. All books were ruled. Omitted words must be interlined above. The margins were frequently used for commentaries. For size, writing on the back, etc., see above, and for the use of abbreviations, reading, punctuation, etc., see Blau, Gardthausen, Thompson, the Introductions to textual criticism and the articles on textual criticism in this Encyclopedia.

VIII. History of Biblical Handwriting.
1. Mythological Origins:
Mythologically speaking the history of handwriting dates from the beginning when the Word created the heavens. The firmament is a series of heavenly tablets, the hand writing of God, as conceived by the tablet-using Babylonians, or a scroll in the thought of prophets, the New Testament writers, and the rabbis. Whether the idea that ?the heavens declare the glory of God,? etc. (Psa_19:1-4), refers to this notion or not, it was one extensively developed and practiced in the science of astrology. In any event the doctrine of the Creator-Word reaches deep into the psychology of writing as a tangible record of invisible words or ideas, and this philosophizing stretches some 3,000 years or so back of the Christian era.
For writing among the gods in the mythologies of non-Biblical religions, see BOOK; LIBRARY.

2. Earliest Use:
When and why the very simplest kind of writing began to be used has been the subject of much conjecture. The Encyclopedia Britannica (11th edition) (XVI, 445) suggests that ?the earliest use ... of inscribed or written signs was for important religious and political transactions kept by priests in temples,? but the memorial pillar is older than the temple, and the economic or social record is perhaps older than the sacred, although this is less clear. Three things seem rather probable: (1) that the first records were number records, (2) that they concerned economic matters - although it is not excluded that the occasion for first recording economic matters was religious, (3) that they were not used memorially for important transactions, but rather as utilitarian or business records.
The original mnemonic record was probably a number record. The Hebrew words for ?book? and ?word? both seem to mean a setting down of one thing after another, and various words in various other languages point in the same direction, as do also in a general way the nature of the primitive situation and the evidences of history. Many of the oldest records are concerned with numbers of animals. Immense quantities of very old Sumerian records are simply such lists, and the still earlier cave drawings (whether they have numbers or not) are at least drawings of animals. One use of the primitive quipu was for recording sales of different kinds of animals at market, and the twig bundle and notched records are in general either pure number records or mnemonic records with a number base. What these animal records were for is another matter. If they were records of ownership for mere tally purposes (a natural enough purpose, carrying back even to hunting trophies) the use was purely economic, but as a matter of fact the early Babylonian lists seem generally to have been temple records, and even the cave records are commonly thought to be associated with religion. The early Egyptian lists too have religious associations, and the somewhat later records are largely concerned with endowment of temples or at least temple lists of offerings - votive offerings or sacrifices. This points perhaps to a religious origin and possibly leads back to the very first felt need of records for a tithing for religious purposes. But it may equally lead to the sharing of spoils socially rather than religiously, although the history of the common meal and sacrifice shared by worshippers points to a very early religious sanction for the problem of equitable sharing of spoils, and it may have been precisely at this point and for this purpose that number record was invented. However that may be, the evidence seems to point to a number-record origin even back of the cave drawings (which are said to be chiefly of domestic rather than wild animals) at a period variously figured as from 6,000 or 8,000 years ago, more or less, to millions of years ago.

3. Biblical History:
The pseudepigraphic books of the Old Testament variously represent writing as invented and first practiced by Yahweh, Adam, Cain, or Seth. Taking the Biblical narrative as it stands, the earliest allusion to true writing is the sign of Cain (Gen_4:15), if indeed this refers to a body mark, and particularly if it has analogy with the ?mark upon the forehead? of the Book of Revelation (Rev_17:5; compare Rev_13:16; Rev_14:1) and the tattoo marks of ownership or tribal marks of primitive tribes, as is thought by many.
The setting of the rainbow as a permanent sign (Gen_9:12-17) for a permanent covenant is quite in line with the recognized mnemonic writing. Noah's building of an altar had the same character if it was built for a permanent memorial. More obviously akin to this primitive form of writing was, however, the dedication of a memorial altar or pillar as a memorial of a particular event in a particular place, as in Jacob's pillar (Gen_28:18, Gen_28:22).
For perhaps 2,000 years before Abraham, image writing had been practiced in both Babylonia and Egypt, and for more than 1,000 years a very highly developed ideographic and phonetic writing had been in use. There were millions of cuneiform documents existing in collections large and small in Babylonia when he was there, and equal quantities of hieroglyphic and hieratic papyri, leather and skin documents in Egypt when he visited it. See BOOK; LIBRARY; HAMMURABI, CODE OF.
Abraham himself presumably used cuneiform writing closely parallel to the writing on Hammurabi's statue. A similar script was presumably also used by his Hittite allies. In Egypt he met with the hieroglyphics on the monuments, but for business and common use the so-called hieratic cursive forms were already developed toward, if not well into, the decided changes of the middle hieratic period (circa 2030-1788 BC; compare Moller, Hierat. Palaeog., VI, 1909, 3, etc.). It is a question whether the boundary heap, which Laban ?called? the heap of witness in Aramaic and Jacob by the same name in Hebrew, was inscribed or not, but, if inscribed, both faces or lines of the bilingual inscription were presumably in cuneiform characters. The cuneiform remained, probably continuously, the prevailing script of Syria and Palestine until about 1300 BC, and until, some time well before 1000, the old Semitic alphabet began to be employed.
The question of the relation of the writing in Mosaic times and in the time of the Judges to the cuneiform or the hieratic on the one side and the alphabet on the other is too much mixed up with the question of the Pentateuch to allow of much dogmatizing. Some scholars are convinced that the Pentateuch was written in cuneiform characters if not in the Babylonian language. The old Semitic-Greek, ?Phoenician,? alphabet was, however, probably worked out in the Palestinian region between 1400 and 1100 BC (wherever the Hebrews may have been at this time), and it remained the Hebrew writing until the introduction of the square characters. See ALPHABET.
At the beginning of the Christian era there had been a long period of the use of Greek among the educated, and long before the New Testament was written there was a large body of Palestinian-Greek and Egyptian-Greek literature. Latin for a time also had been used, more or less, officially, but the Aramaic, development of whose forms may be well traced from about 500 BC in the inscriptions and in the Elephantine papyri, was the prevailing popular writing. Greek remained long the language of the educated world. It was after 135 AD that R. Simeon ben Gamaliel was said to have had 500 students in Hebrew (New Hebrew) and 500 in Greek (Krauss, III, 203).
Latin, Greek, and Aramaic (New Hebrew) characters were all needed for the inscription on the cross. Hebrew had at this time certainly passed into the square form long enough ago to have had yōdh pass into proverb as the smallest letter (jot) of the alphabet (Mat_5:18). Through the abundance of recent papyrus and inscriptional discoveries, it is now possible to trace the history of the varying forms of the bookhand and cursive Greek letters, and even of the Latin letters, for several centuries on either side of the year of our Lord and up to the time of the longer known manuscripts (see works of Gardthausen and Thompson). One may get in this way a good idea of how the most famous of all trilingual inscriptions may have looked as to its handwriting - how in fact it probably did look, jotted down as memorandum by Pilate, and how transcribed on the cross, assuming that Pilate wrote the Roman cursive (Thompson, facsimile 106 (AD 41), 321), and the clerks a fair epigraphic or rather for this purpose perhaps bookhand Greek (Thompson, facsimile 8 (AD 1), 123; Latin, facsimile 83 (AD 79), 276). See TITLE.

Literature.
General:
Edward Clodd, Story of the Alphabet, New York, 1912 (popular); Fritz Specht, Die Schrift u. ihre Entwicklung, 3. Ausg., Berlin, 1909 (popular); I. Taylor, History of the Alphabet, London, 1899, 2 volumes, 8vo; H. Wuttke, Geschichte der Schrift, Leipzig, 1874-75 (rich and comprehensive on primitive writing); Philippe Berger,
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia
PRINTER 1915.

Writing is an art by which facts or ideas are communicated from one person to another by means of given signs, such as symbols or letters. It has been a generally received and popular opinion that writing was first used and imparted to mankind when God wrote the Ten Commandments on the tables of stone; but the silence of Scripture upon the subject would rather suggest that so necessary an art had been known long before that time, or otherwise the sacred historian would probably have added this extraordinary and divine revelation to the other parts of his information respecting the transactions on Mount Sinai.
After the gift of language (which was indispensable to rational creatures), it would seem that writing was the most highly beneficial and important boon which could be conferred on men possessed of intellect and understanding, who from their circumstances must divide and spread over the whole earth, and yet be forced from various necessities to maintain intercourse with each other. Even in the first ages of the world writing was requisite to transmit and receive accurately intelligence from the scattered communities, to convey to posterity events which were destined to act upon all time, and especially to preserve unimpared the knowledge of God. Is it then too much to believe that God by revelation immediately imparted to mankind the power of writing? For it does not appear that any person ever invented an alphabet who had not previously heard of or seen one; and every nation which possessed the art always professed to have derived its knowledge from a God.
It was a matter of the utmost consequence that the most exact accounts should have been preserved of the creation, the fall of man, and many prophecies of deepest interest to unborn generations. The ages and genealogies of the patriarchs; the measures of the ark; the first kingly government in Assyria; the history of Abraham and his descendants for 430 years, including minute circumstances, changes, and conversations, in many different countries; could scarcely have been perfectly preserved by oral descent for twenty centuries, unless the antediluvians and their immediate posterity did not partake of the failings of Christians in the defects of forgetfulness and exaggeration; but allowing the art of writing to have been given with language, there is no difficulty, and it becomes obvious that each transaction would be recorded and kept exactly as it was either revealed or happened.
It is evident from the allusions made to the subject in the sacred Scriptures, that the knowledge of writing was possessed by the human family at a very early period. In Genesis 5 it is said, 'This is the book of the generations.' If there had been merely a traditional recollection of 'the generations of Adam,' preserved only by transmission from one memory to another for more than a thousand years, the term book would have been most inapplicable, and could not have been used.
In the book of Job, which is considered to be the most ancient written document extant, it is said (Job_19:23-24), 'Oh, that my words were now written! Oh, that they were printed in a book! that they were graven with an iron pen!' Also Job_31:35, 'mine adversary had written a book.' Such expressions could not have been used, and would have had no meaning, if the art of writing had been unknown; nor could there have been such terms as book and pen, if the things themselves had not existed.
If, then, it be granted that the book of Job was written, and such expressions were current before the Exode, it becomes evident from sacred history that writing was not only in use before the law was given on Mount Sinai, but that it was also known among other patriarchal tribes than the children of Israel.

Fig. 350?Ancient Writing materials
Before the law was given by God to Moses, he had been commanded to write the important transactions which occurred during the progress of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan; for in Exo_17:14 it is recorded, 'And the Lord said unto Moses, Write this for a memorial in a book.' An account of the discomfiture of the Amalekites is the first thing said to have been written by Moses. This battle was fought before the people left Rephidim (Exo_17:13), from whence they departed into the wilderness of Sinai (Exo_19:2), and therefore that writing was drawn up before the events on the mount took place. The law was 'written by the finger of God' (Exo_31:18) B.C. 1491, and since that time there is no question as to the existence of the art of writing.
Books and writing must have been familiar to Moses, 'who was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians' (Act_7:22), for at the time of his birth that people had arrived at a high pitch of civilization; and now that the mysterious hieroglyphics have been deciphered, it has been found that from the earliest era Egypt possessed a knowledge of writing, and that many of the inscriptions were written before the Exodus of the Hebrews.
Letters are generally allowed to have been introduced into Europe from Phoenicia, and to have been brought from thence by Cadmus into Greece, about fifteen centuries before Christ, which time coincides with the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty; but while none may deny such to have been the origin of European alphabetical characters, it does not prove the Phoenicians to have been the inventors of writing. That people occupied Phoenicia in very early times after the Deluge; and if the patriarch and his sons possessed the knowledge of letters, their posterity would doubtless preserve the remembrance and practice of such an invaluable bequest, which would be conveyed by their colonists into Greece and Africa. In the New World it was found that the Peruvians had no system of writing, while the Mexicans had made great advances in hieroglyphical paintings. The Aztecs, who preceded the Mexicans, had attained much proficiency in the art, such as was adequate to the wants of a people in an imperfect state of civilization.
Various have been the materials and implements used for writing. Paper made from the papyrus is now in existence which was fabricated 2000 years B.C. Moses hewed out of the rock two tables of stone on which the Commandments were written (Exo_34:1). After that time the Jews used rolls of skins for their sacred writings. They also engraved writing upon gems or gold plates (Exo_39:30).
Before the discovery of paper the Chinese wrote upon thin boards with a sharp tool. Reeds and canes are still used as writing implements among the Tartars; and the Persians and other Orientals write for temporary purposes on leaves, or smooth sand, or the bark of trees. The Arabs in ancient times wrote their poetry upon the shoulder-blades of sheep.
The Greeks occasionally engraved their laws on tables of brass. Even before the days of Homer table-books were used, made of wood, cut in thin slices, which were painted and polished, and the pen was an iron instrument called a style. In later times these surfaces were waxed over, that the writing might be obliterated for further use. Table-books were not discontinued till the fourteenth century of the Christian era.
At length the superior preparations of paper, parchment, and vellum, became general, and superseded other materials in many, and all entirely civilized, nations.




The Popular Cyclopedia of Biblical Literature
by John Kitto.


(some form of כָּתִב, kathab, γραφή) is the art of expressing thought by letters or other marks. SEE LETTER.
I. Origin and Various Kinds of Writings. — Language expresses thought, preserves thought, and also suggests or creates thought. But it is obvious that, so long as language is unwritten, it can accomplish these ends only in a very imperfect measure. Hence we may well suppose that, at a very early stage of man's history, attempts were made to present in some way to the eye the thought which spoken language conveyed to the ear, and thus give it visible form and permanence. But we cannot wonder that no record remains of the origin of an art, the beginnings of which must be placed in the political infancy of mankind. Pliny speaks of the "aeternus literarum usus" (N.H. 7:56).
The various kinds of writing which have been in use in different ages and in different parts of the world may be classified in two great divisions, according as the object of their inventors was to present the ideas to which they wished to give visible expression directly and immediately to the mind, or indirectly, through the medium of spoken language. Each of these methods the ideographic and the phonographic or phonetic has its attendant advantages and disadvantages; but the advantages of the latter method greatly preponderate. The principal recommendation of the former method, in which the depicted idea is caught up immediately by the mind, is that it addresses itself to a much wider circle than the latter, being intelligible, so far as it is intelligible, alike by all classes and in all countries; whereas the latter, in which the word is depicted, not the idea, is of course intelligible only to those who are acquainted with the language to which the depicted word belongs.
On the other hand, the very serious drawbacks attendant upon the direct method are (1) that it is capable of giving distinct expression only to a very limited range of ideas, viz. the ideas of sensible objects and qualities, and if it attempts to go beyond that range at once becomes arbitrary and obscure; and (2) that in its representation even of the limited class of ideas to which it is capable of giving distinct expression, it is cumbrous and altogether unfitted for general use. The sacred writing of the Egyptians may be regarded as forming a stage of transition between the two sorts of writing just described. Regarding the Mexican writing, see Robertson's America, book 7, and Prescott's Mexico, 1:86. See also Kopp's remarks on the Chinese writing in Bilder u. Schriften, 1:66, 76, 87. Till the present century it was the received opinion that the ancient Egyptian was an exclusively ideographic writing, and to this conclusion the testimonies of those ancient writers who have given any account of it seemed to point (Kenrick, Anc. Egypt, 1:285- 292). But the labors of Young, Champollion, Wilkinson, Lepsius, and others, during the last half-century, have thrown new light on those ancient and mysterious characters; and it is now agreed that, though very possibly a picture writing originally, the hieroglyphic, in the form in which it appears on the most ancient monuments, and which it retains unchanged down to the early centuries after, Christ, bears a composite character, being in part ideographic, in part phonetic.
According to Mr. Kenrick (1:300, etc.), "the characters are used in three different ways." There is first of all the pictorial use, in which ' the character is designed to convey to the mind the idea of the object it represents, and nothing more.... This pictorial representation sometimes stands instead of a phonetic name for the object, but the most common use of it is to make the phonetic group of characters more intelligible by being subjoined to them. Thus, to the names of individuals the figure of a man is subjoined." Such characters Champollion calls deternzinatives. "The second use of the hieroglyphical writing is the symbolical, in which the object delineated is not meant to convey to the mind the idea of itself, but of something associated with it and suggested by it. Thus, a crescent denotes a month,... a stretched-out hand the act of giving, etc." "The last class, the phonetic, is really by far the most extensive. The greater part of the characters are as truly letters as if the language were English or Greek;… syllabic characters are the exception, not the rule." Mr. Kenrick adds that "in every inscription of any length we find these three modes of writing in use together, but with a great predominance of phonetic." SEE HIEROGLYPH.
Thus, in the hieroglyphic, we find the point of meeting between the two great classes of written characters, the ideographic and phonetic, and, as it seems, we have some light thrown on their mutual relation, and the manner in which the one arose, or, at least may have arisen, out of the other. It has been affirmed, indeed, that the two kinds of writing are so entirely distinct that it is impossible. to entertain the idea of a historical relationship between them (Kopp, 2:62). But the fact is, that in the hieroglyphic, and to a certain extent also in the Chinese, such a relationship is already established. No nation which has made any considerable advances towards civilization can remain satisfied with a pictorial or symbolic writing, more particularly if it be disposed to cultivate to any extent intercourse with other nations. To represent by means of such a method of writing foreign words and names is a matter of the utmost difficulty; and it is not improbable that the origin of the phonetic writing may be traced to the intercourse of nations speaking different languages. Thus the Chinese are compelled to employ their ideographic characters phonetically in writing foreign words; and something of the, same kind may, it is said, be discovered even in the Mexican writing. In the hieroglyphic the process had advanced much further. In Chinese, the name of the patriarch Shem is represented in writing by the ideograph for "life," sem being the Chinese for life (Kopp, 2:80, 81). Here, consequently, we have an example of the same character used in two ways: (1) ideographically, to represent the idea of life, and (2) phonetically, to represent the sound sem.
From this there is but a step to the discovery of an alphabet, viz. the employment of the same sign to represent not the combination of sounds forming the word sem, but the initial sound s. That this step was actually taken by the Egyptians we appear to have sufficient evidence. "Thus, an eagle stands for A, and its Coptic name is ahom; a leaf of an aquatic plant, Coptic achi, stands for the same letter; a lion for L, Coptic labo; an owl for M, Coptic moulad, etc." (Kenrick, 1:305, 306). It is true, as Mr. Kenrick remarks, this correspondence cannot be traced through the whole of the phonetic alphabet. But when we consider how very imperfect is the knowledge which even the most distinguished Egyptologists possess of the ancient Egyptian language, we are fully warranted in putting aside this negative evidence, and receiving the hypothesis just mentioned (which was that of Champollion), as furnishing a very probable explanation of the origin of what may be called the Egyptian alphabet. Passing now to the purely phonetic system of writing, it is of two sorts, viz. syllabic and alphabetic, in the former of which each character represents a combination of sounds, in the latter a simple sound.
The most ancient alphabet is the Hebrew, or Phoenician, which, having its origin in the south-western corner of Asia, the home of the Shemitic nations, was at a very early period introduced by the Phoenicians into Greece, and perhaps at a somewhat later period even into India (Max Muller, Ancient Sanscrit Literature, page 521; Journal of Asiatic Society, 6:461, etc.; Zeitschrift d. D.M.G. 10:390, etc.), and thus became the medium through which almost all that is known of the ancient world has been preserved for the instruction of mankind. Who the person was who framed the first alphabet, and thus conferred upon his race a benefit of incalculable value, is unknown. It is the received opinion that in Southwestern Asia, as in Egypt, the alphabetic writing had for its precursor an ideographic, which, after passing through several stages of change, assumed at last the form in which it has come down to us.
This opinion is founded (1) on a comparison with the hieroglyphic and other forms of writing, in which, as has already been observed, we detect the process of transition from the ideographic to the phonographic; and (2) on the names of the letters. These names are all significant; and it is probable that each of the letters in its original form was an ideograph representing the object denoted by the name which the letter still bears. Thus aleph (א) in its original form would be the ideograph of ox, beth of house, etc. Afterwards, when the ideographic writing gave place to the alphabetic, each of the alphabetic sounds was represented by a character which had formerly been the picture or symbol of an object of whose name that letter was the initial sound. We admit that it is by no means easy in the case of several of the letters to trace the resemblance between the letter form and the object of which, according to this hypothesis, it was originally the picture.
But this need not excite our surprise, if we consider how great the change of form which these letters must have undergone as they passed from one country to another, or were transmitted from age to age (see Kopp, 2:157, 377-399). The ancient Shemitic stone-cutters and engravers were not always careful to preserve an exact uniformity in their delineation of the several characters; they were probably less expert than their Egyptian contemporaries; and, it may be, had no very fixed standard by which to test the accuracy and to correct the errors of their workmanship. Moreover, the wide diffusion of the Shemitic alphabet would naturally occasion still more extensive changes in the forms of the letters. Ewald (Lehrbuch, § 77, b) speaks of three main branches from the parent stem, a southern, western, and eastern, viz. (1) the Himyaritic, in Southern Arabia, and the Ethiopic, though the latter is by others brought into closer connection with the Greek form of the Shemitic alphabet; (2) the western, including the Phoenician writing, and the Samaritan, which closely resembles it; and (3) the Babylonian or Assyrian, of which it is generally agreed that the Hebrew square character is an offshoot. Now, it is impossible to say which of these different forms of the Shemitic alphabet approaches nearest to the original.
It is probable that all have deviated from it more or less. The original symbolic meaning of the characters having fallen into disuse, there was nothing to be gained by rigid adherence to all the details of the original forms. Some writers, admitting that a resemblance does exist between the letters and the objects denoted by their names, have attempted to account for it otherwise than by the hypothesis of an earlier ideographic use of the alphabetic forms. They are of opinion that letters were from the first arbitrary signs of sounds, never of objects; and that the names they have so long borne originated, like the names of the constellations, in some fancied resemblance between them and the objects denoted by these names (Zeitschrift d. D.M.G. 11:83). But, not to mention other objections to this view, when we consider that this resemblance in form is not the only point of correspondence, that there is the further correspondence between the sounds expressed by the letters and the initial sounds of the letter-names, it must appear improbable that whoever invented the latter should have been at the pains to search for names bearing to the letters this twofold correspondence, in initial sound and in form, and should not have been satisfied with a single point of correspondence. On the whole, the weight of argument, and also the weight of authority, are in favor of the other hypothesis.
It is impossible with any confidence to decide to which branch of the Shemitic family of nations the invention of the Shemitic alphabet is to be traced. From the names of the letters one might expect to have some light thrown upon this point; but this expectation is not realized. For, though the names are certainly Shemitic, there is no single language of the Shemitic family (so far as these languages are known) in which they all find explanation. But, in truth, of the Shemitic languages in their ancient form, with scarcely the exception of the Hebrew, our knowledge is very imperfect; and it would be extremely rash to say that such and such words did not exist in, for example, the old Phoenician language, because they have not been found in the few fragments of that language which have come down to us. SEE PHOENICIA.
It is the opinion of some that the idea of the alphabet was borrowed from Egypt. Hug (Die Erfindung der Buchstabenshrift, page 32, etc.) thinks the Phoenicians resident in Egypt were the inventors of the alphabet, the forms of the letters being Egyptian, the names Phoenician. But if the Shemitic nations did borrow the idea from Egypt, they certainly worked it out much more successfully than those with whom, according to this; hypothesis, it originated; and moreover, when we consider that there is no very marked correspondence between the Egyptian and Shemitic alphabets, except in the general idea, it is on the whole safer to conclude, in the absence of all historical evidence, that the two alphabets originated independently of each other, and were alike the offspring of that necessity which is the mother of invention. SEE ALPHABET.
II. The Hebrew Alphabet. — This consists of twenty-two letters. It has been conjectured that several of these letters did not belong to the alphabet in its original form; and there is a traditional statement found in some Greek writers of authority that the Phoenician alphabet (which, there is no question, was identical with the Hebrew) when first introduced into Greece consisted of not more than fifteen letters (see Hug, Erfindung ders Buchstabenschrift, page 12, etc). However this may be, it is certain that at a very early period the Hebrew alphabet included the same number of letters as at present. This is ascertained
(1) from those Scriptural songs and poems, the several lines or stanzas of which begin with the successive letters of the alphabet, SEE POETRY; and
(2) from the use of the letters as marks of number, particularly when compared with the corresponding use of the Greek letters.
With regard to these twenty-two letters various questions have been started, to some of the more important of which it is necessary briefly to advert.
1. Did these letters originally represent syllables or simple sounds? Some writers, as Lepsius (Paliographie, § 19), have maintained that originally one and the same sign stood for both vowel and consonant. They hold that after the ideographic writing comes not the alphabetic but the syllabic, our separation of vowels and consonants being entirely ideal, and never actually possible, inasmuch as consonants cannot find expression without the aid of a vowel sound; and vowels cannot be pronounced except in dependence on a preceding consonantal element more or less distinct. In all this these writers are probably theoretically correct. Of the phonetic writing the syllabic is naturally the earliest stage, and in the Assyrian cuneiform we have the example of such a writing in actual use among the Shemitic nations (Rawlinson, Ancient Monarchies, 1:84, 337). But how essentially different in their nature the Assyrian letters are from the Hebrew is evident from the fact that the former, according to Sir H. Rawlinson and M. Oppert, number from three to four hundred, the latter only twenty-two. Indeed,. it is impossible that a really syllabic alphabet should have fewer characters, except in the case of such a state of language as Lepsius presupposes, in which all the syllables are open, i.e., end with a vowel, and there is no variety of vowel sounds.
It is to be noted, however, that in the Ethiopic alphabet, in which each letter appears under seven different forms, according to the vowel sound associated with it, the simplest form is not that which the letter takes when no vowel follows, as we might expect, but that which it takes when followed by short a. When this sound follows, the original form of the letter is retained unchanged; when no vowel follows, a slight alteration is made in the form of the letter to indicate that it closes the syllable. SEE ETHIOPIC LANGUAGE.
2. Admitting that the Hebrew writing is alphabetic, is it purely consonantal, or does it contain sign to express vowel sounds as well as consonants? Some have held that the letters א, ו, י, were originally vowels, and that their use as consonants was of later introduction. It has been said that the alphabet of each language must contain a sufficient number of letters to represent all the sounds of the language, and that it is as easy to conceive of a language without vowel sounds as of an alphabet without vowel letters. And further, with regard to the Hebrew alphabet, Kopp (Bilder u. Schriften, 2:112, etc.) thinks it absurd to suppose that it originally contained separate forms for guttural breathings so little differing from one another as א, ה, ַand not a single sign to represent the vowels, which constitute the life of every language. Now, with regard to the letters וand י, it is certain they were used as vowels from a very ancient period; but there is no reason whatever to suppose that this use of these letters preceded their use as consonants, but every reason to suppose the contrary. At the beginning of a syllable only ו is ever used as a vowel, and in the few cases in which it is so used it has been softened from an original consonantal sound. In the middle of a word, וand יappear as vowels much less frequently in the earlier Hebrew books than in the later; and on the surviving monuments of the Phoenician language and writing they have uniformly a consonantal force. Besides, it is known that one of these letters, viz. ו, passed over from the Phoenicians to the Greeks as a consonant, though as a Greek letter it afterwards fell out of use. As for א, it is difficult to conceive how, if it originally stood for A in the Hebrew alphabet, it should, even at the date of the very earliest monuments of the language, have so entirely lost this power, and passed into a simple breathing. With regard to the alleged improbability of so ancient an alphabet distinguishing the closely allied sounds of א, ה, 2ְ2ַby the use of different characters, we are scarcely in a position to form a sound judgment on such a point, as the languages we speak differ so entirely from the Shemitic tongues, and our organs are consequently incapable of giving distinct expression to the variety of guttural sounds which characterized the ancient Hebrew, as it does the modern Arabic.
3. As to the origin of the Hebrew square characters, which appear in all extant MSS., as well as in our printed Bibles, the most diverse views have been propounded; some, especially among the older scholars, tracing them back to the age of Moses and the tables of the law; and others believing them to be of comparatively recent origin. The latter view is taken by Kopp (Bilder u. Schriften, 2:164), who places their introduction somewhere about the 4th century, chiefly on the ground that the Palmyrene characters, from which, in his opinion, they were derived, were in use, as appears from inscriptions yet extant, as late as the 3d century of our mera. But whatever may be the connection between the square character and the Palmyrene (and there is no doubt it is very intimate), the opinion of Kopp is quite untenable. We have direct testimony to the fact that the square character belongs to a much earlier age than that to which he assigns it. Jerome informs us that in his day the ineffable name Jehovah, יהוה, was sometimes introduced into Greek MSS. in its Hebrew form, and that readers of these MSS. unacquainted with Hebrew often by mistake read the name Pipi. IIIIII: from which it is quite certain that, in Jerome's age, the Hebrew Bible must have been written in the square character presently in use, for only on this supposition was such a mistake possible. But, if Kopp's hypothesis be well founded, the square character must then have been quite recently elaborated from the Palmvrene. Was it so? Let us turn to another passage of Jerome, in his celebrated Prologus Galeatus, in which he informs us that the Hebrew, character in use in his day had been introduced by Ezra, in place of a more ancient character which had passed over to the Samaritans. Is it credible that the square character was invented by the Jewish scholars, and introduced into MSS. for the first time in the 4th century, and yet that before the close of that same century its origin was completely forgotten, and had passed from the region of history to that of tradition or fable?
A similar testimony on the part of Origen carries us back a century earlier. He, too, mentions the Jewish tradition of a change of characters by Ezra, and speaks of MISS. in which the divine name was found even in his day written in the ancient characters (Montfaucon, Hexapla, 2:94). The expression in the sermon on the mount, "not one jot," carries us back a step further still, indeed, almost to the beginning of our era; for it is evident that the phrase was a proverbial one, and that the alphabet which gave rise to it must have been in use for a considerable time. Now, it is only in the square character (also, though not so decidedly, in the Palmyrene) that the letter yod is very much smaller than the others. Kopp, who not unfrequently makes up by strength of assertion for weakness of argument, declares the foregoing argument to be "indescribably weak." He points to the Greek iota (I), in the writing of those days by no means a small letter.
To all this we may now add the still more decisive evidence of monumental inscriptions, from which it appears that even before the period of the Maccabees the square character was in use among the Jews (Revue Archeol. 1864; Zeitschrift d. D.M.G. 19:637-641; comp. Chwolson, Achtzehn Grabschriften aus der Krim). That another character, more closely allied to the Phoenician and Samaritan, is found ou the extant coins of the Maccabees does not militate against this conclusion. Ancient forms and usages often survive in coins and official documents after they have fallen into disuse in common life. Besides, it is not impossible that the Maccabees, vindicating as they did the nationality of Israel against the tyranny of Syria, may have purposely revived the use of the old characters, regarding, it may be, those in common use, which had been introduced under foreign auspices, as a badge of national servitude. However this may be, it is pretty certain that the old Jewish tradition of a change of letters having taken place in the time of Ezra, however erroneous it may be in some of its details, is not without a solid foundation in fact. SEE HEBREW.
III. Progressive Diffusion of the Art among the Ancient Hebrews. — The art of writing is not mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures previous to the age of Moses. In the book of Genesis there is no allusion to documents of any sort. Abraham buys the field and cave of Machpelah, but there is no bill of purchase as in the case of a similar transaction in the history of Jeremiah (comp. Genesis 23 with Jeremiah 32). The cave and the field "were made sure unto Abraham for a possession in the presence of the children of Heth, before all that went in at the gate of his city" (Gen_23:18). There is no hint of any documentary proof of the purchase being given or asked. It does not, however, by any means follow from this absence of allusion to the art of writing in the book of Genesis that that art was altogether unknown in Palestine in the patriarchal age. It may have been unknown, or but rarely practiced, by the nomad and rural population, in the midst of which the scene of the patriarchal story is laid; and yet have been known and practiced in the great centres of population and civilization, as it certainly was in Egypt, and we can scarcely doubt in Mesopotamia also, even at that early period (Kenrick, Egypt, 2:101, 102). In confirmation of this we may refer to the story of Ruth, from which we find that even in a much later age it was not uncommon in Palestine to transact and complete purchases similar to Abraham's without the aid of writing materials, though no one .will now maintain that the art of writing was then unknown (Rth_4:7-11). Instances of the same sort might be adduced from the history of all nations at a similar stage of social advancement.
When we pass from the age of the patriarchs to that of Moses, from the family life of Palestine to the political life of Egypt, and afterwards of the desert; we first meet with distinct traces of the art of writing. It is probable that the shoterim, or "officers" subordinate to the taskmasters, mentioned in Exo_5:6-19, whose duty it was to see that the full amount of labor was performed by their enslaved countrymen, were so named from the use they made of writing in the discharge of their degrading functions (Arab. satara, to write). But, however this may be, we immediately afterwards read of the two tables of the law, and of the "book of the covenant" which "Moses read in the audience of all the people" (Exo_24:7; Exo_24:12); also of a book, in which was entered a record of the victory over Amalek in Rephidim, and which Moses was directed to "rehearse in the ears of Joshua" (Exo_17:14; this sepher or document may afterwards have formed part of the "Book of the Wars of the Lord," mentioned in Num_21:14); and at a later period mention is made of a written account of the journeyings of the Israelites in the wilderness (Num_33:2). We also read of the high-priest's breastplate with its four rows of stones, on which were engraven, "like the engravings of a signet," the names of the twelve tribes of Israel; and of the mitre with its plate of pure gold, on which was a "writing like to the engravings of a signet," Holiness to the Lord (Exo_39:14; Exo_39:30). Of the use of writing in legal transactions and processes mention is made in Num_5:23; Deu_24:1; Deu_24:3. Specially to be noted is the figurative use which is made of the word sepher in Exo_32:32-33 : "Blot me out of the book which thou hast written," in which we already meet with the idea of a memorial book kept by God, "for them that feared the Lord and that thought upon his name " (Mal_3:16; Psa_56:9 [8]). From all this it is evident that in the age of Moses the art of writing was commonly employed for the purpose of preserving the knowledge of important truths and the memory of important events. The assumption by some writers that the art of writing among the Hebrews is due to and dates from the delivery of the Law on Sinai, is negatived by the fact that it was evidently accepted at that time as a well-known art, and no hint is there given of it as a new invention.
We are not, however, to conclude from this that in that age, or for many ages after, writing was in common use among the body of the people. The knowledge of it was probably confined to the few who occupied an official position; the people being still dependent chiefly on oral instruction for their knowledge of what God had done for them, and what he required of them. Writing was in those days employed rather as a means of preserving than of circulating knowledge. The tables of stone were laid up in the ark. The book of the covenant (mentioned Exodus 24) was read to the people. The book of the law (mentioned Deu_31:24-26) was given to the Levites "to put it in the side of the ark;... for a witness against Israel." The song of Moses (chapter 32) was not circulated in writing among the people, but " was spoken in their ears" (31:30); and thus they were taught to repeat it and to transmit it to others (Deu_32:19; Deu_32:22). It is only the king who was expressly enjoined to have written out for his special use a copy of the law, and to read therein all the days of his life (17, 18, 19). Of the people in general it was required that they should learn God's statutes, and have them in their heart, and teach them diligently to their children (6:6, 7), plainly by word of mouth; for when it is added (Deu_32:9), "Thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates," the expression is probably to be understood figuratively, like the "binding on the hand, and as frontlets between the eyes" (Deu_32:8; comp. also Psa_44:2 [1], 78:3, with 101:19 [18]).
During the wars under Joshua no advancement in the art of writing is to be looked for. In the book of Joshua, accordingly, there is mention made but of one new document, viz., a geographical description and sevenfold division of the land west of Jordan, drawn up by delegates from the several tribes (Jos_18:9). The shoterin are likewise mentioned among the civil and military officers (1:10; 3:2; 8:23; 23:2; 24:1). In the same connection, also, frequent reference is made to the book of the law, which Joshua, in accordance with the injunction of Moses, wrote upon great stones on Mount Ebal, and afterwards read in the hearing of all the people. The book of Jasher (quoted 10:13) probably belongs to a somewhat later age (2Sa_1:18). SEE BOOK.
Important to our present purpose is the mention in Jos_15:15-16, and Jdg_1:11-12. of Kirjath-sepher (book-town), afterwards named Debir; and with this may be conjoined the allusion in the immortal song of Deborah to the mechokekiim (engravers) and sopherim (writers), who led the bands of Machir and Zebulon "to the help of the Lord against the mighty" (Jdg_5:14). As yet the art of writing was not only confined to certain classes, but would seem to have been cultivated Chiefly in certain localities (yet comp. 8:14).
The vicinity of Zebulon and Machir to Phoenicia and Damascus is to be noted (Gen_49:13).
Under Samuel the institution of the schools of the prophets must have conduced not less to the literary than to the religious advancement of Israel. The seed which was then sown ripened into an abundalnt harvest during the glorious reigns of David and Solomon, which were rendered not less illustrious by the literary achievements which distinguished them than by the successful cultivation of the arts of war and peace. During these reigns the art of writing must have been largely employed, not only for literary, but for political purposes. The sopher, or secretary, scribe, was a constant attendant upon the monarch's person (2Sa_8:17; 2Sa_20:25); so also the mazkir, or recorder. We also read of David himself writing a letter (sepher) to Joab (11:14, 15), though the fact that the reply of Joab was by messenger, and not by letter, would seem to indicate that the latter mode of communication was still rare and exceptional. In the age of Isaiah, in which (or not long before) the strictly prophetic literature may be said to commence, various circumstances contributed to the development of the art of writing, such as the commercial activity, of the reign of Uzziah; the closer relations and increased intercourse between Palestine and the great seats of civilization on the banks of the Euphrates and Tigris, on the one side, and of the Nile, on the other; and also the captivity of the ten tribes, and the breaking up of the local and geographical unity of Israel, which would necessitate a written intercourse between the widely separated branches of the nation.
Accordingly, in the book of Isaiah we find various notices illustrative of our present subject, one of which is specially interesting, as it would appear to indicate a wider diffusion than we have had any evidence of previously to this period, of the practice of reading and writing among the people. We refer to Isa_29:11-12, where the prophet, in describing the blindness of the people, compares the word of God to a sealed book (הִסֵּפֶר הֶחָתוּם), a document of any description, "which men deliver to one that is learned (lit. that knows writing, יֹדֵעִ סֵפֶר), saying, 'Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I cannot, for it is sealed; and the book is delivered to him that is not learned (who does not know writing), saying, Read this, I pray thee: and he saith, I am not learned (לֹא יָדִעְתּי סֵפֶר, I do not know books or writing)." Here we read of two classes of the population, those able to read a written document, and those not able; and 'though the latter were probably still much the larger class, it would seem from the form of the prophet's language that the knowledge of writing was no longer confined within the limits of an official class, but was diffused somewhat more widely among the people.
This was still more decidedly the case in the age of Jeremiah, as is evident from the frequency with which the art of writing is alluded to in his writings, as compared with those of the earlier prophets. In Jeremiah we read for the first time of a conveyance of property being drawn out in writing, and subscribed not only by the principal parties, but also by witnesses (Jer_32:10-12). That this was the common practice is evident from Jer_32:34 of the same chapter. Copies of the sacred writings appear also to have been multiplied (8:8). Letters are spoken of more frequently (29, 25, 29). The class of sopherin, or scribes, had become numerous (8:8; 36:10, 12, 23, 26; 37:15, 20; 52:25; Eze_9:2-3; Eze_9:11; 2Ch_34:13). On the whole, the state of matters, with respect to the art of writing at this period in Palestine, was very similar to that which we find delineated on the Egyptian. monuments (Kenrick, Egypt, 1:283, 284; 2:52). A still wider diffusion of the art of writing is indicated by, the notices in Ecc_12:12, and Sir_42:7; Luk_16:6. SEE SCRIBE.
IV. Materials of Writing. — We have no very definite statement in the Old Test. as to the material which was in most common use for the purpioses of writing. In all ages it has been customary to engrave on stone or metal, or other durable material, with the view of securing the permanency of the record; and accordingly, in the very commencement of the national history of Israel, we read of the two tables of the law written in stone, and of a subsequent writing of the law on stone (Deu_27:3; Jos_8:32). In the latter case there, is this peculiarity, that plaster (sid, lime or gypsum) was used along with stone, a combination of materials which Hengstchberg, in the valuable dissertation on the art of writing among the Hebrews, contained in his Genuineness of the Pentateuch, illustrates by comparison of the practice of the Egyptian engravers, who, having first: carefully smoothed the stone, filled up the faulty places with gypsum or cement, in order to obtain a perfectly uniform surface on which to execute their engravings (1:433, Clarke's transl.; comp. also Wilkinson, Anc. Egypt. 2:111).
The metals also are mentioned as a material of writing; as lead, in Job_19:23-24 (though whether the reference in that passage is to writing on lead, or filling up the hollow of the letters with lead, is not certain) (comp. Pliny, Nat. Hist. 13:11; Hengstenberg, 1:433); brass (1Ma_8:22; 1Ma_14:18; 1Ma_14:27; 1Ma_14:48); gold (Exo_39:30). Of stamped coins of the Hebrews there is no trace earlier than the age of the Maccabees (1Ma_15:6).
To the engraving of gems there is frequent reference in the Old Test., as in the account of the high-priest's breastplate (see also Isa_29:11-12; Isa_29:18; Jer_32:14; Dan_12:4). In Gen_38:18 we read of Judah's signet, and from the recent discoveries in the East we learn that it was the custom of the ancient Chaldaeans to carry about with them an engraved cylinder in agate or other hard stone, which was used as a seal or signet, and probably worn round the wrist; but the engraving on these cylinders was not always accompanied with an inscription. (For specimens, see Rawlinson, Anc. Mon. 1:87, 117, 118, 134, 211, 331; comp. also Heeren, Hist. Res. 2:203). SEE SEAL. The common materials of writing were the tablet (לוּח, luach) and the roll (מְגַלָּה, megillah), the former probably having a Chaldaean origin, the latter an Egyptian.
“The tablets of the Chaldaeans," says Rawlinson (Anc. Mon. 1:85-87), "are among the most remarkable of their remains.... They are small pieces of clay, somewhat rudely shaped into a form resembling a pillow, and thickly inscribed with cuneiform characters... What is most curious is that these documents have been in general enveloped, after they were baked, in a cover of moist clay, upon which their contents have been again inscribed, so as to present externally a duplicate of the writing within; and the tablet in its cover has then been baked afresh." The same material was largely used by the Assyrians, and many of their clay tablets still remain. "They are of various sizes, ranging from nine inches long by six and a half wide, to an inch and a half by an inch wide, and even less... Some thousands of these have been recovered; many are historical, some linguistic, some geographical, some astronomical" (comp. Pliny, Nat. Hist. 7:56; Heeren, Hist. Res. 2:185). For the similar use of hollow cylinders, or prisms of six or eight sides, formed of fine terra cotta, sometimes glazed, on which the characters were traced with a small stylus, in some specimens so minutely as to be capable of decipherment only with the aid of a magnifying-glass, see Rawlinson (Anc. Mon. 1:330, 478). SEE BRICK.
In Egypt the principal writing material was quite of a different sort. Wooden tablets are indeed found pictured on the monuments (Wilkinson, Anc. Egypt. 3:100); but the material which was in common use, even from very ancient times, was the papyrus. This reed, found chiefly in Lower Egypt, "had various economic uses; for writing, the pith was taken out, and divided by a pointed instrument into the thin pellicles of which it is composed; it was then flattened by pressure, and the strips glued together, other strips being placed at right angles to them, so that a roll of any length might be manufactured (Pliny's account, Nat. Hist. 13:23, is partly erroneous)" (Kenrick, Egypt, 1:89, 90). That this material was in use in Egypt from a very early period is evidenced by still existing papyrus MSS. of the earliest Theban dynasties (ibid. 1:283, 357, 485, 497; 2:102, 142; see also Wilkinson, Anc. Egypt. 2:99). As the papyrus, being in great demand, and exported to all parts of the world, became very costly, other materials were often used instead of it, among which Wilkinson mentions leather, a few leather rolls of an early period having been found in the tombs (ibid. page 152).
Now, as Palestine lay between Babylonia and Assyria on the one hand, and Egypt on the other, and formed the highway of union and commerce between them, we may expect to find the materials of writing very similar to those in common use in the two great centres of civilization, with which it was so intimately connected. Accordingly, we (do find mention made in the Old Test. both of the tablet (luach) and of the roll (megillah); but we are not distinctly informed of what substance either tablet or roll was composed. From the character of the soil of Palestine it is pretty certain that the tablet was not, as usually in Assyria and Babylonia, of baked clay, unless we are to suppose an importation of Assyrian tablets, which is scarcely possible, as the writing seems to have been inscribed on these tablets when the clay was fresh, which, of course, it could not be after the lapse of time occupied in its carriage from Assyria to Palestine. Accordingly, brick is mentioned in Scripture usually in connection with Babylonia or Egypt (Gen_11:3; Exo_5:7-19; Nah_3:14; Jer_43:9, Eze_4:1); rarely in connection with Palestine (Isa_9:9 [101); and we read of no tablet of clay, but either of stone (as in the case of the tables of the law), or of metal (1Ki_7:36; Isa_8:1; comp. 3:23), or of wood, which was probably the material commonly employed for writing on (Luk_1:63; comp. 2Es_14:24), where tablets of box-wood are mentioned.
The roll, מְגַלָּה (or מְגֵלִּת סֵפֶר, Psa_40:8 [7]; Jer_36:2; Jer_36:4; Eze_2:9), is not mentioned before the time of Jeremiah (unless Psalms 40 be earlier), and only in Jeremiah 36; Ezekiel 2, 3, and Zechariah 5 (comp. also Isa_34:4, "And the heavens shall be rolled up as a book;" also 1Es_6:23; Luk_4:17; Rev_6:14). Considering the close connection between Judaea and Egypt, especially in the later period of the kingdom, it is probable that the roll was of papyrus, though we have no actual statement to that effect in the Hebrew Scriptures. All we certainly know is that it was of a substance which might be torn and burned (Jer_36:23): that the writing was with ink, דְּיוֹ, deyo, and was arranged in columns, דְּלָתֹת, delathoth, lit. doors (ibid.); and that both sides of the material were sometimes written on (Eze_2:10). Mention is made of paper in 2Jn_1:12; also 2Es_15:2; Tob_7:14. SEE PAPER.
That prepared skins were used for writing on by the ancient Hebrews is probable, but we have no direct evidence of the fact. Whether the Hebrew sepher, book or document, was so called from its connection with a root meaning to "scrape," is very doubtful; it is certain that in Hebrew the root saphdr has no such meaning. The only Scriptural mention of parchment is found in the New Test. (2Ti_4:13). SEE PARCHMENT.
The tablet was inscribed with a stylus, which made an indentation in the substance of which the tablet was composed; the roll was written on with ink (2Co_3:3; 2Jn_1:12; 3Jn_1:13). In Eze_9:2-3; Eze_9:11, the inkstand, קֶסֶת הִסֹּפֵר, is mentioned. As to the stylus or pen, the Hebrew word for it is , עֵט, the derivation of which is obscure. It is found in four passages, in two of which it has attached to it the epithet "iron" (Job_19:24; Jer_17:1); in the other two (Psa_45:2 [1]; Jer_8:8) it denotes the pen in common use among the sopherim or scribes, of whatever sort that may have been. The word חֶרֶט, cheret, which is usually conjoined by writers upon this subject with עֵט, is mentioned only in one somewhat obscure passage (Isa_8:1) as an instrument of writing; it has probably some connection with chartummim, the name of the Egyptian sacred scribes. In Egypt the reed-pen seems to have been in use from the earliest times. It even forms part of one of the ancient alphabetic characters. "The reed-pen and linkstand, and scribes employed in writing, appear among the sculptures in the tombs of Gizeh, which are contemporaneous with the pyramids themselves" (Kenrick, Egypt, 2:102, 142). SEE PEN.



CYCLOPEDIA OF BIBLICAL, THEOLOGICAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL
press 1895.

FACEBOOK

Participe de nossa rede facebook.com/osreformadoresdasaude

Novidades, e respostas das perguntas de nossos colaboradores