File:Printing and writing materials - their evolution (1904) (14591093590).jpg

Identifier: printingwritingm00smit (find matches)
Title: Printing and writing materials : their evolution
Year: 1904 (1900s)
Authors: Smith, Adele Millicent
Subjects: Writing -- Materials and instruments Printing -- History Papermaking Bookbinding
Publisher: Philadelphia : Smith
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
PROCESSES A LTHOUGH in Europe printing from movable Babyloniaand Assyria. Clay tab-lets, cones,and cylin-ders. A types dates from the middle of the fifteenth century, the transfer of form by impression isone of the oldest of the arts. In Babylonia andAss5Tia, letters, pictures, and arbitrary signs werestamped on soft clay which was afterwards baked.In the ruins of the buildings of these ancientpeoples, there has been found scarcely a stoneor a kiln-burnt brick without an inscription or astamp. The inscriptions on the stone were prob-ably made with a chisel, but those on thebricks were made either from wooden stampscut in relief or by the separate impressions ofsome pointed instrument. The bricks show vari-ous shapes: square or oblong tablets, cones, andcylinders, the latter often of considerable size.Some of the tablets are not more than one inchlong; others found in the ruins of the palace ofNineveh measure 9 by 6i inches. The cuneiform(wedge-shaped or arrow-headed) characters on(6)
Text Appearing After Image:
BABYLONIAN I \ Size of the Original (2 x; 1.1 \i 1 I II I 1 NKIF(ll:M INSCRIPTION. , inches) ill the Museum of Drexel Institute. ANCIENT BELIEF PROCESSES most of the tablets are sharp and well-defined,but in some cases they are so minute as to bealmost illegible without the aid of a magnifyingglass. ^..iVTiole libraries were formed of such bricks. Libraries.These clay books, as they may be called, werearranged according to their subjects, numbered,catalogued, and placed in charge of librarians.The libraries were public property, and wereintended for the instruction of the people. Eachof the principal cities of Babylonia and Assyriapossessed a library of this kind, of which the greatnational library of Assur bani pal (Greek, Sardana-palus), at Nineveh, was the most famous. Largenumbers of the tablets found in Assur bani palspalace have been placed in the British Museum.Fragments of the catalogue have also been found,and show that the library contained: legal, math-ematical, and geograpprintingwritingm00smit

Note About Images