lets and placed in
jars, arranged on shelves and labelled by clay tablets attached by
straws. In the 7th century B.C. a library of literary works written on
such tablets existed at Nineveh, founded by Sargan (721-705 B.C.). As in
the case of the "Creation" series at the British Museum the narrative
was sometimes continued from one tablet to another, and some of the
tablets are inscribed with entries forming a catalogue of the library.
These clay tablets are perhaps entitled to be called books, but they are
out of the direct ancestry of the modern printed book with which we are
here chiefly concerned. One of the earliest direct ancestors of this
extant is a roll of eighteen columns in Egyptian hieratic writing of
about the 25th century B.C. in the Musee de Louvre at Paris, preserving
the maxims of Ptah-hetep. Papyrus, the material on which the manuscript
(known as the Papyrus Prisse) is written, was made from the pith of a
reed chiefly found in Egypt, and is believed to have been in use as a
writing material as early as about 4000 B.C. It continued to be the
usual vehicle of writing until the early centuries of the Christian era,
was used for pontifical bulls until A.D. 1022, and occasionally even
later; while in Coptic manuscripts, for which its use had been revived
in the 7th century, it was employed as late as about A.D. 1250. It was
from the name by which they called the papyrus, [Greek: bublos] or
[Greek: biblos], that the Greeks formed [Greek: biblion], their word for
a book, the plural of which (mistaken for a feminine singular) has given
us our own word Bible. In the 2nd century B.C. Eumenes II., king of
Pergamus, finding papyrus hard to procure, introduced improvements into
the preparations of the skins of sheep and calves for writing purposes,
and was rewarded by the name of his kingdom being preserved in the word
_pergamentum_, whence our "parchment," by which the dressed material is
known. In the 10th century the supremacy which parchment had gradually
established was attacked by the introduction from the East of a new
writing material made from a pulp of linen rags, and the name of the
vanquished papyrus was transferred to this new rival. Paper-mills were
set up in Europe in the 12th century, and the use of paper gained
ground, though not very rapidly, until on the invention of printing, the
demand for a cheap material for books, and the ease with which paper
could be worked on a press, gave it a practical mon