History is often presented as a story of swords and thrones.
We turn our eyes instead to a tale of manuscripts and libraries.
A modern reader can quickly access electronic or physical copies of many thousands, even millions of titles, from libraries or booksellers or websites or other friends in the community.
But the history we address is of an era when the only texts which existed were crafted by hand.
To understand the history of an ancient text like Almagest, we have to envision a scholar’s life before the invention of the printing press. A time when every particular copy of a work of poetry, science or scripture was recorded by a very particular hand. Works which survived were copied and recopied over and over again, in service to beauty, or to wisdom, or to dogma.
This was a very different time in many different ways. The only ways to travel were to cross the land on foot or on horseback, or to cross the sea by ship. Most people never traveled more than a few miles from where they were born, while some found their home along the road or upon the waves. There were no newspapers, no mass communication; local inns served as centers for news, transmitted by travelers and itinerants – workers and singers and tutors and other such riff-raff. News in need of spreading was spread, often in exchange for bread and board. There were some larger towns and cities, at times under the protection of a palace-center. Most people worked the land or fished the seas to feed themselves and their communities.
Even after the introduction of the alphabet in the 8th century BCE, very few Greeks could read or write; but tools for record-keeping were vital to merchants and traders. It’s fair to presume that some adepts kept alive the tradition of Linear B writing, or experimented with other scripts. We have no such records from the period; but if Greek scribes of this period used a papyrus-friendly script for recordkeeping purposes, we wouldn’t expect such records to survive – papyrus succumbs quickly to periods of humidity.
Peoples of other cultures had developed their own systems of writing, and we presume that the Greeks of Mycenae and the dark age experimented with these. The heiroglyphs of Egypt were powerfully evocative, but awfully fussy. The cuneiform of Mesopotamia was easy to use if you had ready supplies of good clay for tablet-making, and the peoples between and around the rivers had lots and lots of clay; some other places, not so much.
Papryrus became a significant Egyptian export in the late Bronze Age; Greek merchants would have favored papyrus or parchment for recordkeeping purposes. Few were literate, but those with a gift for written words might find employ in a wealthy house or palace.
In the early centuries of the first millennium BCE, the Greeks of the Dark Age adapted a writing system they’d encountered in Phoenicia, a simple script beginning with alpha and beta and gamma.
Sometime around 2000 – 1800 BCE, a script called proto-Canaanite emerged in the south Levant and Sinai. Just a few examples survive, mostly in the form of public inscriptions chiseled in stone, but it’s presumed that the same script was used for writing on papyrus. This set of glyphs was the forerunner of the aleph-beth-gimel of the later Hebrews.
Proto-Canaanite also influenced the merchant ports of the eastern Mediterranean. Alphabets derived from this early script came to be used for inventories and contracts of sale. Sometime around the 9th century BCE, Greek traders adopted and adapted such a script from the Phoenicians. By the middle of the 8th century, wealthy Greek houses began experimenting with this newfangled alpha-beta, using it not just for business, but also to record lessons for children, and entertainments from the public houses. The works ascribed to Homer and Hesiod date to this period.
These earliest surviving texts were not written by authors, in the modern sense. Instead, they appear to be transcripts of performances by non-literate singers, tutors, and storytellers. It took a few generations for early writers to develop style and technique suited to this newfangled written medium. There’s a big difference between listening to the chanted intonations of a classical storyteller, and reading – whether silently or aloud – the words displayed in ink upon papyrus.
Before the printing press, every copy of a particular work was distinct. In creating a new manuscript, a copyist might introduce changes to the text, accidentally or purposefully. Let’s consider the sorts of accidents we might expect in manuscript copies of technical material.
Certain errors are rooted in the mechanics of text creation. Writers and copyists of the past century have been prone to certain errors inherent to keyboard entry – typos. In the QWERTY world, one often finds misspellings confusing t for r, or m for n – it’s easy to accidentally hit the key next to what you were aiming for. Or sometimes it’s a left/right thing: l for s, or t for y, and so on.
We could go on, but let’s not. Instead of a typist’s errors, consider the process of copying a text by hand, and how errors might occur.
The copyist has to
a) read a phrase or sentence from the source text;
b) hold that text in short-term memory for a minute or so, long enough to
c) write these words in the new manuscript copy of the text.
(This is a rudimentary description. We could easily sketch out a process flowchart with several other steps and checkpoints. Kids – do try this at home!)
This process was susceptible to several sorts of errors. A parallel of the typist’s errors cited above is a sort of error of substitution that we’ll call a ‘brain fart’. A source text which reads ‘right hand’, might be erroneously copied as ‘left hand’, or ‘right foot’, or ‘right arm’. left/right or hand/foot or hand/arm – these are all associative errors we can easily understand. Brain farts.
As an illustration of this, our scrutiny of the starlines of Almagest VII.i reveals many instances of text which doesn’t match the sky – but which can be made to fit by a substitution of left/right, arm/leg, north/south, and such. (The presence and persistence of such brain farts in this section of text suggests that most students of Ptolemy’s work paid little attention to this experiment of Hipparchus. Had they studied these starlines, as we do at the Observation Hall LINK, they’d have certainly corrected most of these errors. For more on Ptolemy and Almagest, see LINK)
In addition to errors, ancient manuscripts often contained marginal annotations and corrections.
In the earliest days of manuscript texts, scribes sought to fill every bit of available surface, especially when writing on parchment or vellum. But scholars early adopted the practice of leaving some empty space on a page, a margin – room for the owner or reader of a text to make corrections, or add a bit of commentary. Such marginal notes, called scholia or marginalia, are a useful source of information about ancient texts and how they were interpreted by readers of earlier times. Many of these notes cite other works known to the scholiast; a number of lost historical texts are known to us today through a mention in somebody’s margin.
Scholia are not a focus of our inquiries here. But they’re a good reminder that for most of written history – in Europe, from roughly 800 BCE to 1500 CE – any history was, quite literally, written. Every volume in any library was created or reproduced from a source manuscript by hand, perhaps by the owner, perhaps by a hired scribe.
Consider the nuts and bolts of how this all worked. Where did one get parchment or papyrus? What was the source of ink? Who did the actual copying? What about the binding of a completed text, or the mounting of a scroll? Details, details. . . .
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Paper, pen, and ink
In looking at the early days of Greek literacy, we have to consider the matter of writing materials.
Paper: A surface to write upon. Clay tablets were widely used for recordkeeping in Mesopotamia and Egypt and Crete. Fine leathers – parchment, vellum – provided a surface on which to write using ink and pen. The Egyptians developed a process for creating sheets of papyrus using strips from cut reeds. With time, the manufacture of papyrus grew from a niche process undertaken to serve the needs of the palaces, to a large-scale industry producing papyrus for export, serving the needs of merchants and palaces around the Mediterranean.
We tend to think of ancient texts as recorded on sheets of parchment, but that’s an artifact of survival bias. Parchment texts last much longer than pages of papyrus; as a result, a disproportionate number of surviving ancient texts are written on parchment or vellum – church documents and holy books, palace records, and such.
(Papermaking from pulp slurries was developed in China around YYYY, and spread to the Mediterranean basin around ZZZZ.)
Ink: Writers of this period used two main types of ink – lampblack, and squid ink. A slurry of carbon particles derived from soot, suspended in water, serves as a versatile and long-lasting ink; but producing such ink is a tedious process. The ink of various species of squid and octopus common along the Mediterranean coast could also serve for writing, though such organic inks were prone to fading with time; still, they sufficed for inventories and bills of lading and other records of commerce. (The Greek name for Phoenicia refers to a purple dye derived from a coastal mollusc found in the region; this dye was much prized around the Mediterranean and beyond. In that context, the notion of an industry of squid ink harvesters doesn’t seem far-fetched at all.)
Pen: Early forms of writing were adapted to clay, a medium used long before the invention of paper. Early cuneiform writing was formed by poking a wedge-shaped stylus into wet clay. Other scripts, such as the Linear scripts of the Minoan / Mycenaean era, used a pointed stylus to scribe lines and shapes, glyphs and letters into the surface of a wet clay tablet. This latter style of writing was easily adapted to writing on parchment, papyrus or paper. All that was needed to make it work was a pen to put ink to paper. Humans being human, it’s no surprise that many different designs were tested in finely carved wood or hammered metal or plant thorns or brushes of fur or hair.
A simple solution was the quill pen. Bird feathers were plentiful, and with the quick slice of a sharp knife they can be transformed into a fine device for ink-delivery.
But this simple tool was dependent on the existence of other technologies. The widespread use of quill pens implies the ready availability of small, sharp knives; to this day, a small pocket-knife is called a pen-knife. The owner of such a blade would want to keep it sharp; to that end, any writer would have a good honing-stone.
In telling the history of science and technology, it’s convenient to focus on the work of particular scientists or entrepreneurs – it makes for a nice story. (The audience likes to have heroes to root for, and villains to boo.) But in practice, it’s often a complex interplay among disparate existing technologies which enables what (from our perspective) looks like an ‘aha!’ moment.
For instance, it’s been argued that steam engines and railroads would have been developed in the early 19th century; if not Watt, then still steam. Advances in metallurgy and machining were expanding the realm of the possible in manufacturing, while the science of thermodynamics was changing the way people thought about energy and work. The idea of engines transforming heat energy into kinetic energy was in the air, and many were experimenting and tinkering with various devices and designs. It was ‘steam engine time’.
In the 9th and 8th centuries BCE, conditions in the eastern Mediterranean were right for the emergence of a new form of writing – it was ‘alphabet time’. Paper and ink and styli were commonplace, and inventories and ledgers were becoming ever more complex. An alphabet – a script of sounds, instead of images – was readily adapted to this new medium.
And here we are. . . .
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