Paper Trail: On the Cross-Cultural Evolution of the Notebook

The oldest item that looks to modern eyes like a notebook sits in a display case in a castle in a Turkish city, thousands of years ago a thriving commercial and intellectual hub and now an equally busy holiday resort. In exemplary displays, the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology shows off items recovered from the bottom of the Mediterranean. The Ulu Burun shipwreck is one of its glories, and its gallery dedicates a display case to a small wood-and-ivory item: a hinged writing tablet which, when folded shut, would sit nicely on the palm of your hand.

Like many items in the museum, this tablet—or diptych—was pieced together from many broken parts, but the restorers did an excellent job and it’s easy to picture what it looked like before it was carried to the sea bed off Ulu Burun, a sharp headland on Turkey’s rocky southern coast. Recesses were cut into two boxwood leaves and these were filled with a layer of soft beeswax, in which the owner could write with a stylus. When they needed to reuse the diptych, its wax could be smoothed over again. The wood in the recesses was scored, to help the beeswax adhere and that wax may have been mixed with orpiment, a bright yellow compound of arsenic and sulphur which would have given it a rich yellow color, making it easier to read from, though poisonous. The fine woodwork and ivory hinges suggest that the diptych had once been a prized possession. But whose?

The wreck is the oldest shipwreck yet excavated: it went down in about 1305 BCE, and its other contents confirm that we inherit the diptych from a sophisticated trading network. Divers recovered 506 hefty copper ingots, probably from Cyprus; a ton of tin, probably from Sardinia; amber beads from the Baltic; jars filled with beads, olives and orpiment; tortoise shells; ebony logs; elephant ivory; hippopotamus teeth; thirty-seven pieces of gold; arrowheads, spearheads, daggers, and maces; almonds, figs, cumin and sumac; and so on. The tablet survived in such good condition because it sank in a clay jar, along with a chisel, a razor and some pomegranates. Together, the ship carried goods from no fewer than ten cultures—a cargo as varied as any on one of today’s container ships. We can deduce, therefore, that the tablet’s owner was probably some kind of sailor, trader or diplomat, and cosmopolitan in experience.

The Ulu Burun discovery, from c.1305 BCE: wax tablets like this were Europe’s notebooks for two thousand years. Photo: Roland Allen.

We know that they used the tablet for writing, but we can’t know exactly what they wrote. Diptych tablets were limited by their capacity; one might scratch a couple of hundred words into the wax before running out of space. This made them extremely useful for a things-to-do-list, the draft of a letter, or a phrase that you wanted to remember, but no good if you had anything more complicated in mind. And your words were vulnerable: the wax could be wiped smooth in a second. So what did our forebears write on when they needed more space, or permanence?

In this part of the world, for five hundred years or more before this time, people had written in cuneiform on clay tablets. These make an impressively permanent, tamper-proof record, and survivals from Mesopotamia and Anatolia include tax receipts, payments for goods received, and similarly weighty transactions. But there were no clay tablets on the Ulu Burun ship.

During the same period, the ancient Egyptians made papyrus from a tall reed which thrives by the Nile but is surprisingly difficult to cultivate elsewhere. Papyrus was cheap, and—unlike clay tablets—practical. It can be rolled up into long scrolls, and therefore used for longer texts than clay or wax tablets, and what’s written on the page lasted as long as the papyrus. So it’s likely that the Ulu Burun ship carried documents on papyrus sheets or scrolls—maybe letters, and paperwork to do with its valuable cargo, like a bill of lading. But papyrus doesn’t hold together well, even if it isn’t submerged in fifty meters of seawater; it cracks when folded, frays easily, and over time disintegrates in almost any other conditions than arid desert air. So the anonymous owner of the Ulu Burun tablet had a choice of ways to write, each with their own pros and cons. But none were both durable and portable.

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About a century after the Ulu Burun shipwreck, the complex economy which had sustained the unlucky ship’s cargo disintegrated. Historians argue over the causes of the late Bronze Age collapse, but its results can clearly be read in the archaeological record: a series of wars and other disasters saw every city from Greece to the Levant—hundreds in total—destroyed. Settlements were depopulated, entire cultures and trading networks evaporated, and there must have been much less demand for writing materials.

The Romans, when they eventually succeeded the Bronze Age and Hellenic civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, adopted small Ulu Burun-style tablets, which they called pugillares or ‘handhelds.’ They made them more capacious, either by making the leaves larger (and calling the results tabellae) or adding more leaves: tablets with three (and therefore four, not two, faces to write on) became common, and one survivor from Pompeii has eight. Many paintings on the walls of Pompeii and Herculaneum depict them and—as usual in Rome—their usage seems to have been firmly gendered.

When Roman men are shown with their tablets, the context is always one of business, or the “sober management of the family’s wealth;” for women, the picture is more complicated. The enticingly ambiguous mural (opposite) is often said, without cause, to represent the poet Sappho, which it certainly doesn’t. The subject may, possibly, have been a Roman wife keeping her accounts or writing a letter, but recent scholarship argues that she is in fact one of the muses, the divine sources of scientific and artistic knowledge. “Men could aspire to the literary life,” concludes Elizabeth Meyer’s study of the Pompeian tablets, “but their companions—Muses or women portrayed as Muses—could only aspire to inspire it.” In any case, the artist wasn’t looking too closely: the tablet is depicted without hinges, and in real life would have fallen apart.

The Romans solved one of the medium’s problems, finding a way to protect the writing on a wax tablet, making it suitable for legal documents or contracts. They drilled holes through its frame, tied it shut with a cord, and applied wax seals—up to seven, depending on the seriousness of the document. You couldn’t then read what was written inside, but you could trust that it hadn’t been interfered with. Traders used similar systems to close their diptychs and make them tamper-proof.

The so-called Sappho fresco from Pompeii, showing a woman, or perhaps a divine muse, with her pugillare, or ‘handheld’ tablet. Photo: Naples National Archaeological Museum/Wikimedia Commons.

When Romans wanted a legible permanent record, they usually used papyrus, and if they couldn’t lay their hands on that, they would write on strips of wood: but the most durable substrate they had was parchment, invented in a Greek kingdom, Pergamon, in northwestern Anatolia. Tough as old boots, for the excellent reason that it’s made of the same stuff, parchment is hard work to make, and expensive: an entire animal hide (goat, sheep and cow-hide will all do the job) will only yield a few pages. The Greeks wrote on it, as did the Romans, either on single sheets or scrolls, until around the year 80 CE, when someone in Rome created the first bound book of papyrus pages folded within a protective parchment cover.

This innovative format—the codex—proved useful, and it grew in size and scope over time, particularly with the spread of Christianity, which—unlike earlier religions—came with its own holy book. You can see the result in the British Library, where the formidable Codex Sinaiticus, 694 pages of calf- and sheep-skin parchment, represents the finest in fourth-century bookbinding. It shows off the codex’s main advantages over the scroll: you can easily move around the text, jumping from page to page, you don’t need a flat table to unroll it on, you can write on both sides of the sheet, and you can use it for extremely long texts. A scroll version of the Sinaiticus codex, written in the same hand, would have been a quarter of a mile long. So despite its punishing expense, the parchment codex represented a huge step forward.

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A cheaper material had already been invented, but it would take hundreds of years to arrive in the West. Cai Lun, a Han dynasty eunuch, is said to have been responsible for the invention of paper, discovering that pulp vegetable fibers drained over a fine mesh dried into a durable, versatile and affordable material. Although the Chinese didn’t immediately think of it as a writing material (preferring split bamboo for everyday use, and silk for high-status texts) paper found a multitude of applications across the Chinese empire while the codex spread across the Roman Mediterranean and Near East. Usefully, it could be made from a variety of raw materials; hemp, mulberry bark and old fishing nets all made good paper, and linen fibers, readily available in the form of worn-out underwear, worked particularly well.

Over the middle centuries of that first millennium, as the Roman empire waned and the Chinese empire grew, their respective innovations approached each other along the silk roads. The codex moved east, as paper moved west, until finally, around the year 800, they met in the middle at the Abbasid Caliphate’s capital, Baghdad, which was rapidly becoming the world’s largest and richest city. Paper supplanted papyrus, having “a transformative effect,” as Jonathan Bloom, the leading historian of the subject, puts it. For the following four centuries, Persian, Arabic and other Muslim intellectuals raced ahead of their rivals and counterparts in Christian Europe. In law, medicine, mathematics, philosophy, art, trade, literacy, in all the enterprises of civilization, the Caliphates enjoyed a cosmopolitan golden age while Europe receded. Islamic cities boasted million-volume libraries and streets of booksellers: administrators, students, teachers, and thinkers of all kinds relied on relatively cheap, plentiful paper to do their work.

Even as paper revolutionized the spread of thought and culture in the Islamic world, a number of cultural barriers blocked its adoption in western Europe. Protectionism, for one: although the Caliphs were happy to see paper mills spread across their sphere of influence, they did not let papermakers take their skills elsewhere. Neither did merchants in the Maghreb or Levant export paper in significant quantities to Europe, where the most literate section of the population, the clergy, were committed to the use of parchment.

They didn’t like paper’s suspiciously infidel origins, its novelty, or its recycled origins: one opponent fulminated against the idea that the word of God could be written on menses-stained rag. This clerical resistance was matched by that of most of the continent’s rulers: in 1221, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who ruled Europe from Sicily to northern Germany, decreed that parchment, not paper, was the only material an official document could be written on. Christendom was aware of paper, but skeptical.

Events in Spain, where a struggle rumbled between the Almohad Caliphs and the ambitious Christian monarchs of the north, would change that for good. The town of Xátiva was the prize. Located on a fertile plain inland from Valencia, where abundant water flowed from the surrounding mountains of the Serra de Crevillent, this had been an Islamic possession for five centuries and had been famed for the quality of its linen cloths for centuries before that.

The easy availability of flax and fresh water encouraged Muslim papermakers to establish themselves there, and by 1150 Xátivan paper was known across the Islamic world for its quality. Temptingly close to the borders of his expanding realm, this industry appealed to King Jaume of Aragon, also ruler of Catalonia, who spent nearly twenty years attempting to take Xátiva, finally succeeding in 1244. A gifted administrator and military campaigner, Jaume was obsessed by paper, and when he finally had control of the town’s workshops, he made every effort to sustain and grow their trade. Muslim papermakers were allowed to keep their businesses, and when their demand for linen outstripped local supply, permitted to import shipments of rags from overseas duty-free.

Jaume’s own government was their largest customer: historians note that during his long reign (he came to the throne in 1213 and ruled until his death in 1276) the amount of official paperwork and documentation doubled each decade, as he imposed his rule on his expanded kingdom, taxed it and encouraged the rule of law. Like the bureaucrats in faraway Baghdad, he created an administration that demanded deeds, writs, regulations, notarized statements, official correspondence and other paperwork in ever greater quantities. Paper exports also grew exponentially. Xátivan paper retained its reputation for excellence, and was shipped to customers as far away as Byzantium, and the industry spread across Jaume’s realm, to Majorca and Provence, whose workshops were the first to brand their product with watermarks.

Paper bolstered Jaume’s administration and helped him solidify the rule of law across his territories, but it also transformed the way commoners lived and worked. For the Mediterranean’s trade routes were becoming busier with each passing year: not yet as busy as they had been during the glory days of Rome, but getting that way. A new breed of merchants were learning to trade in increasingly sophisticated ways; building companies, investing in partnerships, transporting commodities across Europe, amassing huge fortunes.

And they did it with notebooks.

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From The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. Copyright © 2024. Available from Biblioasis.