“What’s new?” It is one of the basic human questions. Whether through curiosity, or boredom, or because they think it will help them, people have always been eager to learn the latest developments.
—John Gross, New York Times, 1988
One way to find out the answer to the question “What’s new?” among the educated ancients whether Egyptian, Greek, or Roman was to write a letter, usually on single sheets or small rolls of papyrus paper. This was a reality for thousands of years. We know this from seeing what came to light after researchers combed through the mountain of papyrus paper found in the trash heaps at Oxyrhynchus. That cache, according to Parsons, produced “a huge random mailbag of letters.”
Another interesting collection is described by Roger Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore, professors of history and classics at New York University.1 They examined women’s letters dating from 300 B.C. to 800 A.D., including several letters from the Zenon Archive (260–256 B.C.) mentioned earlier. They make the point that the letters are the one genre in which women are definitely expressing themselves on their own behalf and not through some male acting on their behalf. The immediacy and sense of direct access to the personal lives of the letter writers who lived several millenia ago account for part of their appeal.
Since Egyptian women always had a strong social position—and were better off than women in any other major civilization of the ancient world—it is not surprising that the earliest letters dealt with petitions and they complained forcefully about entitlements due to them and their families. The women involved were not shy about how their concerns could be addressed. One letter from a woman beekeeper implored an official for the return of a donkey, while another, Mrs. Haynchis, who operated a village beer concession wrote to Zenon, pleading for the return of her daughter. She complained about Dimetrios, a local who prunes, tends, and cultivates grapevines. He has decieved her daughter into thinking they will be living together. In reality he already has a wife and children. Before she left, her daughter managed the shop and was a great help to Haynchis in her old age. She therefore asked Zenon’s help.
While most of the letters were from women of the top part of society, people of modeate or substantial wealth who discussed problems relating to estate management, property issues, hiring servants and stewards, and money matters, some letters were from women of modest means. The most common reason for writing was to assure people that you care about, and who care about you, that you were alive and well. Next in importance were announcements of arrivals and transfers of goods or people, then followed queries regarding the state of domestic affairs and petitions. Less often was there any warmth of emotion or personality in these letters. Scandal, sex, romance, as well as politics, and major historical events were rarely mentioned.2 Often written by a third party or scribe and signed by the sender, they are a far cry from the meaty, prosaic, and often-florid letters of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Still, the letters show us what people thought was most appropriate and important in their lives. The fact that they were written on papyrus was the one thing they had in common, along with the fact that but for the letter itself, we would never have heard of the writer.
Once written, the sheet of papyrus was folded or rolled, then squashed flat and tied and sometimes sealed; following which it was addressed and sent off. Officials sending letters by imperial post could expect prompt service. Suetonius tells us that young men, in the time of Augustus, were stationed at short intervals along the military roads, and later were sent in post-chaises to speed dispatches along.3 On good roads in Italy, messengers in a vehicle supported by changes of animals could achieve speeds between fifty and eighty miles a day, deliverymen on horseback rather more. Cases of same-day delivery are recorded even when the distance covered was over 120 miles.4
Private mail, by far the most common type of post, was sent by letter carrier. These carriers were active and trusted messengers functioning as the representative of the sender; often they were expected to answer questions about the letter or its content, thus they had to be people who could, if necessary, expand on the author’s meaning, a practice that was honed to a fine degree by the followers of Christ.5 In the days when letters from the disciples and Apostles were sent out, the carrier became even more important as he was a means by which the Word could be spread and conversions made, while maintaining a degree of security and secrecy, often needed in the early days of the church. Oral reading and additional oral messages publicized and confirmed that the message was bona fide and also confirmed the sender’s authority. In which case, the recipients would be more likely to carry out any church directives contained in the letter.
Those with an education often relied on form letters found in manuals on how to write letters. One such book, a papyrus scroll by Demetrius, appeared in 270 B.C. and described four different kinds of writing that could be used, plain, grand, elegant, and forceful.
Most letters required only a single sheet of papyrus paper. Single sheets could be had from scribes who would cut a piece from a roll or would even write the letter on the roll and cut it afterward. In their book, Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt, Bagnall and Cribiore noted that ancient letters sometimes mentioned the author paying for sheets, even half sheets, so retailers must have cut up rolls in order to have sheets available for sale. It was possible to use pottery, shells, or bone for a letter, but, of the just over 7,500 published letters from Egypt from between the third century B.C. and seventh century A.D., about 90 percent are preserved on papyrus.6
The “multiple letter” evolved in order to economize, in which case several letters were inscribed on the same sheet or roll to be delivered in the same neighborhood by a letter carrier who was charged with delivery of each in turn. Perhaps he did this by cutting off each letter or reading out the message much like the singing telegram is delivered nowadays, while the hard copy would be given to the last, perhaps most prestigious, person on the recipient list.
These early letters provide us with many examples of how papyrus paper helped establish two-way systems that passed information horizontally from one person to another along social networks. Information could also be delivered vertically from an impersonal central source such as the Acta Diurna literally a “daily gazette” that acted as the first newspaper. It appeared around 131 B.C. during the Roman Republic and was originally carved on stone or metal and mounted in public places like the Forum Romano. At that time the Acta published the results of legal proceedings and outcomes of trials. Then in 59 B.C. Julius Caesar was elected consul, at which point Suetonius tells us his first act was to order that the proceedings of the Senate should be compiled day by day and posted in the Acta. This was a masterstroke that resulted in a large change in the way news was handled.
The Senate . . . met behind closed doors and released the details of debates, speeches, or votes only when it wanted to. Mandating the publication of a brief summary of its proceedings each day was therefore a handy way for Caesar to highlight the aristocratic senators’ opposition to his populist policies and subtly undermine the Senate’s mystique and authority. Caesar’s aim was not to make Roman politics more open and democratic, but to undermine the Senate and further his own ambition to become Rome’s absolute ruler. Only by concentrating authority in the hands of one man, he believed, could Rome’s chaotic politics be tamed. (Tom Standage, “Writing on the Wall: Social Media—The First 2,000 Years.”)
Mark Pack, on his blog The Dabbler, pointed out that Caesar, by converting the Acta into a tool for his own use, created a communications marvel; well before traditional newspapers, the Internet, before computers, before even electricity, the Acta delivered the news! In the process it showed the world how Caesar could make use of available technology to get the right information into the right hands.
First, he allowed the Acta to mix dry official news, such as the latest election of magistrates, with news of human interest, such as notable births, marriages, and deaths, or strange omens. Second, he spiced it up with interesting human color. In our day, we’d use a cat video; in Caesar’s day the Acta reported an unusually loyal dog that refused to abandon the corpse of its executed master. When his corpse had been thrown into the Tiber, the dog swam to it and tried to keep it afloat, a great crowd assembled along the river to view the animal’s loyalty.
Caesar also learned early that if you want to influence what people think about, you don’t leave it to others to do all the communication; or as Mark Pack put it, “when someone tries to dazzle you with the wondrous newness or fiendish technicalities of a communications medium, remember that the basic principles remain much the same.”
Another large innovation that helped Caesar make better use of the Acta was the availability of papyrus paper. The state took care of the initial publication of the Acta and posted it in the Forum on wooden boards but made no attempt to copy or distribute it. That was left instead to the Acta’s readers and it wasn’t long before scribes made it their business to copy the latest issue and deliver multiple copies on papyrus to paying customers within the city and the provinces, where they were further copied, eagerly sought after and extensively read. This avidity to read the news reminded some that keeping in the loop for them had become a matter of life or death. Not knowing what was happening on a day-to-day basis among the Roman power elite might bring you to the point of committing an irreversible error of judgment.
The power of social gossip to kill can be seen in the death of the illustrious, politically savvy, orator and insatiable letter writer, Cicero. He came from a wealthy municipal family and all his life viewed it as a dangerous thing to be out of the loop, but he was completely taken by surprise when Caesar was assassinated in March of 44 B.C. He wasn’t present, but during the assassination Marcus Brutus called out Cicero’s name, asking him to restore the republic.
As an enemy of Antony, Cicero became a popular leader during the period of instability that followed. He was looked upon as a spokesman for the Senate, while Antony, as consul, remained leader of the Caesarian faction, and unofficial executor of Caesar’s will.
Cicero began to play Octavian against Antony by praising Octavian, declaring that Octavian would not make the same mistakes as his father. Cicero’s plan to drive Antony out failed. Antony and Octavian reconciled and allied with Lepidus to form the Second Triumvirate. Cicero was caught in 43 B.C. leaving his villa in a litter going to the seaside where he hoped to embark on a ship destined for Macedonia. They cut off his head and, on Antony’s instructions, his hands; the very hands that had penned on papyrus paper the fiery, damning tirades against Antony called The Philippics.
Cicero’s hands were nailed, along with his head, to the platform called the Rostra in the Forum. Then, according to Cassius Dio, Antony’s wife Fulvia (the third of his five wives) took Cicero’s head, pulled out its tongue, and jabbed it repeatedly with her hairpin in final revenge against Cicero’s power of speech. But, even as the executioners struck, they must have realized that Cicero would live on after death. His over 900 letters on papyrus paper assured his immortality. Years later it was clear that many of these for one reason or another had vanished. In the spring of 1345 the scholar and poet, Petrach, discovered a collection of Cicero’s letters that is often credited with initiating the fourteenth century Renaissance. These same letters provided the impetus for researchers looking for ancient Greek and Latin writings, but more importantly Cicero’s letters provided an example. Letter writing became perhaps the most popular medium of Humanist literature.7 Why? Because Cicero’s letters contained such a wealth of detail regarding the leading lights of his time, the follies of the politicians, the weaknesses of the generals, and the machinations of the government so that little was left to the imagination. His command of Latin prose and his humanist reputation brought him many illustrious admirers among the Catholic Church Fathers such as Augustine of Hippo. Thomas Jefferson named him as one of a few major figures who shaped American understandings of the common-sense basis for the right of revolution.
In his letters he typically did not mince words; in a letter to Cassius in the spring of 43 B.C., eight months before his death, he exults, “With what zeal I have defended your political position, both in the Senate and before the people . . . and although we have not yet had any intelligence either of where you are or what forces you have, yet I have made up my mind that all the resources and troops in that part of the world are in your hands, and feel confident that by your means the province of Asia has been already recovered for the Republic. Take care to surpass yourself in promoting your own glory. Good-bye.”8
If we skip ahead to the sixth century A.D. to the time of Cassiodorus, who was another prolific letter writer, we see he also used papyrus paper. In his case, he applied his talents to help promote himself during the bloody and murderous period of the 520s, a time when a split occurred between the ancient senatorial aristocracy centered in Rome and the new adherents of Gothic rule at Ravenna, and continued to worsen. That was also the period when Boethius, the reigning magister officiorum, or head of all the government and court services, was sent to prison and later executed. By some accounts he was beheaded; by others, he was clubbed to death. According to another version a rope was tied around his head and tightened till his eyes bulged out, then his skull was cracked. In addition, for good measure, his father-in-law’s head was put on the block within a year.
Throughout all of this, Cassiodorus survived. He accepted advancement in 523 A.D. as the immediate successor of Boethius, who fell from grace after less than a year as magister officiorum. Cassidorus went on to become praetorian prefect for Italy, effectively the prime ministership of the Ostrogothic civil government. He kept his head and used his letters to protect himself and promote his ideas and work. The forthright style and brash, honest manner of Cicero was not for him. Cassiodorus adopted a chatty, friendly style of writing; he mixed homilies, anecdotes, and parables with business topics. Papyrus paper and pen always at hand, his voluminous correspondence lacked the historical information people hope for today: dates, figures, names of men, and places were frequently omitted, perhaps sacrificed in order to preserve an elegant, open style.9
Proof of the value of his approach lies in the fact that he did not die until aged ninety, whereas Cicero was assassinated at sixty-four. Anyone reading Cassiodorus’s letters today would have no trouble identifying him as a man born before his time. He is the epitome of the blog writer, the spinmeister who has mastered the art of writing a chatty web page, in which he carefully avoids all concrete details of the troublous time in which he lived. Cassiodorus left out anything that might in any way offend Goths, Romans, or Byzantines, while lavishing praise on those princes who were killing one another. He also polished and elaborated his monarch’s thoughts, leading some to suppose that the king’s nobler sentiments about his rule are all attributable to Cassiodorus.
In his case his letters were not meant for a general audience or, like Cicero’s, for a circle of close friends and relatives. Cassiodorus directed his to people employed like himself in the civil service, or government agents and managers appointed by the king. He intended his letters to be models for the future, his aim being to demonstrate how to avoid pitfalls and dangers, and above all, how to get by. So in one case, we have Cicero trying to restore the republic and change the world; and in the other, Cassiodorus is showing us how to survive by hacking the system. Both were abetted and supported by papyrus paper, the medium on which Cassiodorus wrote his letters and the medium that provided for the newspapers, books and numerous handwritten documents in circulation that kept him and everyone else in the loop.
The Holy Internet
Standage notes that early Christians were unusual in their heavy reliance on written documents. In addition to preaching, teaching, instructing, and debating, they wrote letters on papyrus paper by the thousands, and they eagerly sought out and treasured the collected works that came their way that eventually made up some of the books of the New Testament.
Compared to the other Apostles and disciples writing letters, Paul was the most masterful. He recognized the value and usefulness of the social media system of his day, and he took advantage of his status as both a Jew and a Roman citizen to minister to both Jewish and Roman audiences. In the process, he founded several churches and traveled a great deal as an official, an entrepreneur, a preacher, and a pilgrim. Along the way, he left countless directives, comments, arguments, and advisories to guide the flock when he was not there. He also sent letters by the thousands in all directions by trusted letter carriers. His letters are the earliest surviving Christian literature. A large part of the New Testament, fourteen of the twenty-seven books and seven of the epistles are ascribed to him or his followers. He became “the most influential letter writer of antiquity, overshadowing even Cicero.”
The Reverend Michael Thompson, lecturer in New Testament at Cambridge University, points out that Paul made use of the closest thing to an information superhighway in the ancient world: the grid of Roman roads and shipping lanes that made travel far safer and easier than it had ever been. Thompson calls it the Holy Internet and credits Paul with seeing the potential in it for bringing disparate elements of the church together. Standage also makes the point that Paul’s influence was such that “his letters are still read out in Christian churches all over the world today—a striking testament to the power of documents copied and distributed along social networks.”
About 9,000 letters written by Christians survive from antiquity, proof that they were a community of letter-sharers and also proof that Paul’s methods were working and their prayers of support had been answered.
As a young man, Paul was an avid Christian hater. He probably cheered while standing in the crowd watching Saint Stephan being stoned to death. “At last,” he must have thought, “someone is taking action against these tiresome Jesus-followers.”
Saul, as he was originally called, was a tentmaker, a Pharisee, and an educated man. He spent years in Jerusalem and was on his way to Damascus when he experienced the vision of Jesus that drove him to convert to the new religion. From then on he was known as Paul the Apostle, and he became as avid a Christian as he had been against Christ. He set the tone, completely embodying the concepts of celibacy, divine grace, salvation, and rejection of circumcision in place of baptism. Above all, he espoused the written word—especially the gospel and epistle—to spread the word and the teachings of Christ. After he met James, the brother of Jesus, and Peter the Apostle, he went out and converted Gentiles. This helped make Christianity a universal religion. He was beheaded in Rome, under Nero, in about 67 A.D.
Thompson reminds us that written messages to a Christian community in those days were delivered with a power and immediacy that was far more gripping than text on a computer monitor’s screen or on a printed page of today. Thus the news of Mark’s Gospel, the first of the four to appear, would have moved even faster once Paul picked it up and passed it on. The hubs of his networks in Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch, and elsewhere were ideal for spreading the Word the way he wanted it spread.
But, one may ask, what would have happened if papyrus paper were not there? Suppose in the first century a disease attacked the papyrus plantations and the plant ceased to be available to the papermakers. Where would the early Christians have been without papyrus paper?
“Parchment,” someone might suggest. Possibly. According to Herodotus parchment, made from untanned sheep skin, had been used since the fifth century B.C., but even in the early years of the Roman Republic, it would have required great skill to come up with a consistently high-grade product. If Christians had turned to parchment to help drive the spread of their good news, it would have required a sizable outlay of money, which was never in large supply among the early believers. And the question looms why didn’t people turn to animal skins earlier? The answer of course was that a cheaper alternative was available in papyrus. Farmers killed their animals for meat. Their skins, horns, hooves, etc., were looked upon as frosting on the cake and sold for what they could get. What would have happened if they were forced to reverse the process and slaughter animals for their skins? The classical scholars Colin Roberts and T. C. Skeat thought a parchment industry on a scale adequate to serve the needs of the ancient world would have required many years, perhaps even centuries, to work out the details by trial and error.
To build up and train a sufficient labor force that was spread over the length and breadth of the world and eventually provide for the uses of the early Christians would have cost much time and money. An interesting point is the fact that Paul, for one, would probably not have been affected by such things; as a partner in a tentmaking business he seems to have had connections in the business world where the cost of paper or parchment would be viewed as simply another necessary business expense. He also seems to have been quite capable of raising funds whenever money was needed, whether it was for famine relief or to help the poor.
All the while papyrus paper was being used for letter writing, it was also used in other ways, some of which were to have great effects on the movement of news in the future. One item in this regard was the advent of pigeon post, the earliest forerunner of airmail.
Pigeon Post, the Twitter of the Ancient World
The carrier pigeon has been used for short messages since the time of the Egyptians. Since a bird was used, the text had to be kept within limits; thus it was writ small using a fine-pointed reed pen on a small scrap of papyrus paper. The process smacks of the original form of Twitter with its 280-character limit.
Serial messages could be sent by carrier pigeons much as they are today on Twitter: short posts that made up a longer text once the individual messages were put in final order. In ancient days, however, serial messages could be a risk as one or more birds might be intercepted by hawks along the way.
The earliest reference to the pigeon being used to carry messages dates back to 2500 B.C. in Egypt.10 Later in the New Kingdom, pigeons were routinely being used to deliver military communications. They also sent birds in the four cardinal directions to announce the ascension of a new pharaoh and the arrival of the Nile flood.
In the time of the Greeks, pigeons were used to announce the results of the Olympic games to the various city-states and later, Julius Caesar utilized them to relay messages back to Rome from his military campaigns. During the Roman Empire, they helped ships alert their homeport of the ship’s arrival. The role of papyrus paper was crucial in that the very first bird sent aloft could not be loaded with anything but a lightweight, highly portable medium that could be easily cut into small pieces.
In 43 B.C. Aulus Hirtius, a consul and friend of Cicero, set out to help Decimus Brutus, one of Caesar’s assassins, to fight his way out of Mutina (now Modena) in northern Italy. Though Hirtius died in the effort, he succeeded in making Antony retreat. During the battle, according to Pliny, Hirtius used carrier pigeons in order to communicate with Decimus Brutus who “in that way was informed of everything, especially after he set food in certain spots and taught the pigeons to alight there.”11
Once again small pieces of papyrus paper were the key.
By the time of the late Crusades, pigeon-post papyrus paper had been replaced by a thin, light rag paper called waraq al-tayr, or “bird paper” used by the Mamluk sultans and attached to the pigeons’ rigid feathers that were not used in flight. In this way the Saracen rulers in Cairo could receive daily reports from their far-flung provinces.12
Illuminated Scrolls and Illustrated Books, Newspapers, and Magazines
Another item of interest in which papyrus paper played a key role involves the evolution of the illustrated manuscript, the illustrated newspaper, and the magazines of our times.
In his essay on Herculaneum and the books that the Victorians found there, Porter commented on the disbelief of some scholars in the eighteenth century that the scrolls found in ashed form were books. They thought that unless the object was in codex or volume form, it could hardly be anything more than say, a contract or deed, or more likely some sort of ancient census roll, which meant that the Villa dei Papyri would prove to be nothing more than an ancient public records office. It came as a shock to such people to find out, as we have seen, that not only did early books exist in scroll form, but that they contained illustrations, drawings, and even catchwords written in colored ink, all of which can be traced back to the Egyptians. Later, copyists in Alexandria (mostly Greek artists), were exposed daily to illustrations drawn in bright colors by Egyptian artists and scribes, and they couldn’t help but be influenced.
The illustrated manuscript therefore evolved in the same way that Greek columns evolved, from early Egyptian papyriform models. In the case of the scrolls and later codices, the Egyptians used red ink to highlight important names and dates and they incorporated drawings and colorful figures directly onto the papyrus paper surface, a surface that lent itself to the use of colored ink, paint, and freehand drawing. It was easier to do this on this new medium than on other media available in ancient times. Thus, the copyists of Alexandria, producing illustrated scrolls using these ancient papyri as prototypes, started a trend that eventually led to the popular tradition of illuminated manuscripts in the West and East from the time of Constantine onwards.
The oldest extant colored illustrations in a book are appropriately drawn on a fragment of papyrus paper from a fifth century A.D. Greek codex. This painted page was discovered in Egypt in 1904 by J. de M. Johnson, while he was working for the Egypt Exploration Fund in Antinoe, a town 125 miles south of Fayum. The plants shown are lifelike images of two common herbs: comfrey, Symphytum offinale, with its black, turnip-like tuber, and mullein, Verbascum thapsus, with its green rosette of wooly leaves. The anonymous artist of this page, which is now referred to as the Johnson Herbal, has been much maligned by modern authors, blogsters, and Wikipedia, who all mistook the rosette of mullein on the facing side for the common herb comfrey. Comfrey with its black, turnip-like tuber does appear, but on the reverse of the page where it showed up in a very life-like painting.13
It is even suggested that illuminations first done on papyrus paper and inspired by the Egyptians’ Books of the Dead, evolved into the drawings, etchings and art paintings on canvas of later times. “Only fragments of such illustrated texts remain, principally from the early centuries of Christianity. Because classical literature was depicted in Hellenistic and Roman mosaics and wall paintings, it is assumed that illustrated scrolls were the prototypes, or models for painting and sculpture, as well as for later Byzantine and European illuminated manuscripts.”14
In other words, papyrus and the Egyptian scribe conspired to be the forerunners of the illustrated book and many other art forms of the Western world. As a model, the Book of the Dead must seem like a far-fetched forebear of the world’s first illustrated weekly news magazine, the Illustrated London News, which appeared in May, 1842; but the fact is that illustrated news had to start somewhere. Why not the ancient Egyptian scroll? Or, as Sir Francis Bacon once said, “In conjecturing what may be, men set before them the example of what has been, and divine of the new with an imagination preoccupied and colored by the old.”
For the next part of our story we must shift again to the Christians who were the last major users of papyrus. It was their search for a new and better way of keeping their early Bibles safe and sound, yet available to their target audience, the masses, that led to the evolution of the papyrus codex and eventually, the modern book.
