The Battle of the Talas River was just that, a battle. Some have tried to make it into a turning point in history, the point where the secret of making Chinese paper from rags or wood pulp was uncovered by the Arabs, who went on from that point to develop paper the way we know it today. The story goes that in the summer of 751 A.D. on the banks of the Talas River near the border of present-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, a Chinese army under the leadership of a Tang Dynasty general was defeated by the forces of As-Saffah, the founder of the Abbasid Caliphate. Some of the soldiers captured were found to be skilled in making Chinese paper and were thus spared. Thereafter papyrus paper met its death, along with 8,000 Chinese warriors.
Jonathan Bloom, the Boston College expert on the paper from this time tells us that too much is being read into the event.1 It wasn’t as if the Arabs were seeing or hearing about Chinese paper for the first time. In his great book, Paper Before Print: the History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World, he notes that Chinese paper was already present in the area before the time of the battle. In fact, Bloom feels that paper was already being used in Samarkand (in present-day Uzbekistan) and probably had been made there decades before the battle.
So, after winning the battle of the Talas River, the Arabs were undoubtedly more intent on other things, such as the development and use of the resources of the region that they had conquered. Following the death of the Prophet Mohammad and the rise of the caliphates, a vast empire had been created especially during the reign of the Sultan Umar who became the caliph of the Rashidun Dynasty in 634 A.D.
MAP 7:The world of Islam 750 A.D. (after The Muslimah Feed–WordPress.com).
At his death ten year later, this empire would include Iberia (most of Spain), present day Iran, Iraq, Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, the Caucasus, large parts of Turkey, much of Central Asia and Pakistan.
Sultan Umar was one of the most powerful and influential caliphs in history. We previously met him when he sent General Amr Ibn al-Asi to conquer Egypt. After arriving in Alexandria in 642 A.D., Amr sought guidance from Umar about what to do with the hundreds of thousands of papyrus scrolls in the Great Library. He ordered Amr to destroy them.2 Other than this disdain for the secular written word, he was an expert jurist known for his pious and just nature.
Thereafter Egypt was ruled by governors acting in the name of the righteous caliphs whose capital remained in Damascus. For our purposes, the most interesting aspect of Sultan Umar’s rule was that not only did he now control an enormous empire, but also, like Alexander and the Romans, he sat on top of the entire production of paper for the Western world, which was still a valuable commodity since papyrus paper exports continued unabated during the Arab takeover. It certainly filled a need in the Islamic world where, even before their Golden Age, the business of running an empire and the increased use of commercial paper, archives, and records meant that a large and growing market for papyrus was still there. The amount of paper needed was as great as it had been in the old Roman and Byzantine empires. By owning the source, the Arabs had not only cornered the market, but were also in an excellent position to meet any and all of their own needs.
This situation did not change when Umar’s Rashidun Dynasty gave way to the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750 A.D.), which allowed merchants and scholars to travel easily through western Eurasia, expanding their knowledge and commercial bases further. Also, Mohammed’s teachings insisted on literacy for all. In all these activities papyrus paper stood ready to help.
Then in 749 A.D. the Ummayads were overthrown by the Abbasids, and the first caliph of this new regime, as-Saffah, established Kufa as the new capital of Islam. This ended the dominance of Damascus, which had lasted for centuries. One of as-Saffah’s first undertakings was to confront the Chinese at the Talas River. Not long after the successful outcome of that battle, his brother al-Mansur came to power. Al-Mansur moved the capital again, this time about 110 miles north of Kufa to the new city of Baghdad. A few years into his reign he toured the royal stores and decided to keep an overabundance of papyrus paper on hand. He worried that if they ran out, his scribes would have to write on some material with which they were “unaccustomed.”3
After al-Mansur, the Islamic Golden Age arrived and was carried forward and magnified under the reign of al-Rashid from 786 to 809. His House of Wisdom in Baghdad became the active center of a global effort to gather and translate all of the world’s classical knowledge into Arabic. It especially targeted the sciences, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy. Some of this enlightenment had an unintended effect when it was transferred to the West and kindled a rebirth of learning that eventually led Christian Europe out of the dark ages and into the Renaissance.4
All this meant transcribing books onto parchment, but also it meant more and more use of papyrus in commerce and letter writing. Interestingly, parchment was used relatively little for early Islamic books. Johannes Pedersen, late professor of Eastern languages at the University of Copenhagen, felt that the reason why is that parchment was an expensive material. Papyrus was always a cheaper alternative, but it was not until after the conquest of Egypt by Islam when the papyrus industry was taken over by Muslims that papyrus became an article in everyday use by those writing Arabic. We know that papyrus paper was known in Arabia in the time of the Prophet (ca. 630s A.D.) because of a statement in the Koran that certain revelations were written on papyrus, and because Allah says to the Prophet that even if he sent down a book of papyrus for his adversaries to hold and feel, they would still reject the revelation (Koran–Sura 6: Ayat 7.91).5
Of the many thousands of Arabic papyri that have come to light since that time, Pedersen noted that the bulk consisted of official correspondence, legal documents, ledgers, tax receipts, and so forth. There were some literary fragments, but very few. He also tells us that there were caliphs who preferred papyrus to parchment for their correspondence because, although it was easy to scrape away writing on a parchment page, it was impossible to make erasures on papyrus if permanent ink was used, and by that time Arabic scribes were using inks made of vitriol and gallnuts, which was as permanent as you can get. This insured that the caliph’s missives remained true versions of the original.
The rapid growth of Arabic literature, which began to gain momentum from about 800 all over the far-flung world of Islam, generated a demand for writing materials in unprecedented quantities. During this time (ca. 900 A.D.) Pedersen tells us that parchment, papyrus, and rag paper were all in use. By this time also, Chinese paper was being made and became readily available. Under the Arabs this pulp paper was being made using their method, mainly with linen rags in place of plant fibers. Though its quality was being improved daily, its use was still limited. Perhaps al-Mansur’s reluctance to let go of papyrus reflected a more general feeling of “Let’s wait and see.”
So, throughout the world, from Anglo-Saxon England to Baghdad, and until the tenth century, papyrus still served an everyday need, and this situation did not change even after 794 A.D. when the first Arab paper mill was started up in Baghdad. During this time of transition, papyrus paper was still prized as a writing surface, so much so that al-Mu’tasim, the Abbasid caliph who founded his new capital of Samarra on the banks of the Tigris River in 836 A.D., went to great trouble to bring papyrus papermakers from Cairo to help establish the industry there. But after the decline of Samarra in 949 A.D. and the improvement in Arab rag paper, which was now cheap and in demand, the caliph’s effort became moot. Also by now, the Arabs had begun to give up on the propagation of papyrus as after four thousand years the manufacture of papyrus paper in Egypt, and the greater cost it now demanded compared to this new alternative, was no longer worth it.6
Chinese Paper
The process of making paper in China, like so many discoveries that changed the world, was based on a simple process; the process was so simple that you might wonder why it had not been discovered earlier. The invention of pulp paper is often said to date from the description of the process by Cai Lun, an official attached to the imperial court during the Han Dynasty in 105 A.D.7 Prior to that time, from the early Shang (1600–1050 B.C.) and Zhou (1050–256 B.C.) dynasties, documents were written out on bone or bamboo strips sewn and rolled up into bundles that were heavy, awkward, and hard to transport. Silk, the alternative medium, was normally too expensive to use on a routine basis.8
Cai Lun’s account gives credit to the paper wasp or hornet for being the true source of pulp paper. The Asian paper wasp queen uses her mandibles to scrape bits of wood fiber from fences, logs, or even cardboard. She then breaks the wood fibers down in her mouth, using saliva and water to weaken them as she flies to her chosen nest site with her mouth full of soft pulp. From this she constructs water-resistant nests made of gray or brown papery material. In larger nests, she builds a few cells in which she lays sterile eggs, which hatch to produce workers who continue building the paper cells while she busies herself with other matters.9
In ancient times if someone decided to try their hand at the process and by chance produced an early form of pulp paper, they would have had to duplicate the mastication performed by these insects. More importantly, they would also have had to simulate the next step, in which the wasps shape the mush into six-sided cells, or, in the case of a hornet’s nest, to spread the pulp out in thin layers to dry, eventually building a large nest the size of a rugby ball. In any event, this may have given an early pulp papermaker the idea, the result of which was the paper recently found at Dunhuang in Gansu Province where a 2,000-year-old piece of pulp paper was discovered inscribed with legible handwriting that dates from 8 B.C.10
This early pulp paper was made from the paper mulberry tree, Broussonetia papyrifera, the inner bark of which was pounded and mixed with water to produce a paste like that made by the wasp. Chinese papermakers sometimes added cloth fiber, for which purpose they collected old fishnets, rags, and hemp waste, all of which had to be pounded into a pulp; but chiefly their paper was mainly made of wood or plant fibers.
After much pounding, stirring, and cooking, the pulp obtained would be poured out and collected on fine bamboo screen-molds. The slurry was then allowed to settle into a matrix that was peeled off the mold and pressed or further dried, then polished to form the actual paper. The whole process was scaled up in Chinese paper factories so that thousands of sheets could be produced each week.
Although the use of paper by the Chinese became widespread for writing and block printing by the third century, it was also used for wrapping and, in the royal households, as facial tissue and toilet paper. An Arab traveler to China once wrote of the curious Chinese tradition in 851 A.D., “(the Chinese) do not wash themselves with water when they have done their necessities; but they only wipe themselves with paper.” Some exclusions were in place; earlier, in 589 A.D., the Chinese scholar-official Yan Zhitui wrote, “Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes.”11
The Arabs knew that the use of rags rather than wood fibers would make a better quality paper. Then they found that speeding up the pulverization process by using water-powered mills not only improved efficiency but also improved quality. Since their mills were built over slow-flowing, shallow river water, the water wheel for the mill had to be built in a horizontal fashion and powered by water from a reservoir.12 The result was a large daily production of paper that exceeded their greatest expectations.
Arab paper was further improved by the use of sizing; that is, a coating that improved and hardened the surface. Sizing was especially used in Egypt during the Fatimid rule (969–1171 A.D.). It consisted of adding liquid starch to the new rag paper during or after manufacture.13 Starch is still used today to make paper less porous; 1.7 million tons are used annually by the US paper industry.14 These improvements made rag paper very attractive, and even while papyrus paper was still in use for commerce and letter writing, and parchment for the production of the Koran in codex form, rag paper became the medium of preference in Arab states for everyday use.
The earliest dated example of Arab paper is a letter written in 874 A.D., followed by a contract from 900 A.D., and a receipt from 909 A.D.15 An analysis of the documents held in the Erzherzog Rainer Paper Collection in Vienna (mostly paper found in Egypt) showed the steady displacement of papyrus paper by rag paper. From 719–815 A.D. there are thirty-six dated documents all on papyrus paper. From the following century (816–912 A.D.) there are ninety-six documents on papyrus paper and twenty-four on Arab rag paper. From the tenth century (913–1069 A.D.) only nine are on papyrus paper and seventy-seven are on rag paper, the last one in the collection on papyrus dates from 936 A.D.16
A hundred and seventy years after the introduction of Arab paper, in 1074 A.D. the first paper mill to produce rag paper in Europe was built by Muslims in Spain near the Jucar River. This mill employed thirty workers and used a hammer mill powered by a water wheel to pulverize the rags. After that paper mills were built in Rome, Auvergne, Nuremberg, and finally, in 1490, in England, almost 700 years after the first appearance of a mill in Baghdad.
Kilgour ascribes this slow advance of rag paper to its poor quality. Even in the fourteenth century the cheaper versions were fragile, had a rough surface and “drank” water-based ink. This may be why in the markets of Cairo by 1035 A.D., vegetables, spices, and hardware were being wrapped in rag paper, which was more pliable than papyrus, and could be looked upon as a “throwaway.”17 Carter, late professor of Chinese at Columbia tells us of a Persian traveler, writing about 1040 A.D., who recorded with surprise how “the venders of vegetables and spices in Cairo were furnished with paper in which everything that they sell is wrapped.” The paper used was of a cheaper variety, one that incorporated rags from a macabre source, as Carter discovered from a physician in Bagdad, writing a century later, who revealed the source of this wrapping paper used by the grocers: “The Bedouins and fellahin search the ancient cities of the dead to recover the cloth bands in which the mummies are swathed, and when these cannot be used for their clothes, they sell them to the factories, which make of them paper destined for the food markets.”
But quite soon things would change again as papermakers in the Arab world realized their paper had to conform to the needs of the European market. It seems that the complaints of the Europeans of the poor quality of this new paper had nothing to do with the actual substance, since the Chinese, Arab, and Persian calligraphers from 800 A.D. onward had no problems with their paper. In fact, they preferred the soft finish of the paper produced from their own mills. The Chinese used brushes and their own ink, which worked fine, while the Arab and Persians used reed pens that also worked well. The cause of concern in the West lay in the quill.
Paper Finish and the Quill
With papyrus paper the ancient Egyptians had used reed brushes, while the Greeks and Romans had made do with reed stylus pens. The quill first appeared in Seville, Spain, and became the preferred writing instrument from 600 to 1800 A.D.18 Suffice it to say that Europeans found writing with a quill pen was not only convenient but allowed faster writing, which seemed suited to the times, thus there was no problem during the transition from papyrus to parchment. Even when hand-cut goose quills became the primary writing instrument, the hard finish typical of both parchment and papyrus paper made writing easy and spoiled the scribes. It was only when the point of the quill hit the soft finish on the surface of a piece of the early Arab or Chinese paper that the trouble began.
In the West, scribes, authors, publishers and copiers were still scratching their heads as to whether or not to use this new medium when the Italian papermakers began turning out a hard-finished paper that won them over.
By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Italians had taken over the paper industry. They did this by using gelatin size, a thin, watery solution that when dry helped seal the paper finish. Rice-starch sizing used by Chinese and Arab papermakers was not available to the Europeans, and the wheat starch that they were using smelled bad and attracted molds and insects in the humid parts of Europe. The Italians got around this by using a gelatin size that gave paper the hard finish ideal for quill pens. They also used improved pulping methods made possible by building their mills in fast-water areas of Italy, rather than the slow-moving rivers of the Arabs. The result was that Italian paper became better, cheaper, and more available in quantity. It was preferred over Chinese paper, as we learn from a story Jonathan Bloom recounts about an English administrator with the East India Company in Patani, India in 1614, who pleaded with his London office to replenish his supply of paper because, “for want of paper all our books are kept on China paper, having not so much other as to write a letter to Your Worships: I therefore entreat Your Worships to remember us with books, paper and ink of which we have great need, the cockroaches eating the China paper.” Bloom also quotes Adam Olearius, ambassador for the Duke of Holstein to Persia in the seventeenth century, “Goose-quills . . . would be too hard for their Paper, which . . . is very tender.”
In the Muslim world, the Arabs and Persians were forging ahead using their own production: often fine, white paper, sized, and in plentiful supply made in Egypt, Iran, and Damascus. They even devised assembly-line methods of hand-copying manuscripts so they were able to turn out far larger numbers of books and editions than any available in Europe for centuries.19 As a result, in the Middle Ages, Arab libraries grew to enormous size while the libraries in the West remained modest. In the 1300s A.D. the library at the Sorbonne had only 1700 books.20 By the tenth century in the Islamic world, Cordoba had seventy libraries, the largest of which had 600,000 books; the library of Cairo had more than 100,000 books; while the library of Tripoli is said to have had as many as three million books before it was burnt during the Crusades. As many as 60,000 treatises, poems, polemics, and compilations were published each year in Al-Andalus in Spain, (which was still under Arab control).21
The contents of these Islamic libraries reflected the advantage of the Arab world. First, they had commandeered the papyrus market, then they had moved on to pulp paper and tried to monopolize that. While they were forging ahead, the Europeans were left saddled with parchment and circumscribed by quill pens. They seemed in no better a position than the Chinese had been in the early days with their bamboo slips.
All this would change in the 1500s with the advent of printing, an invention that the West would take up with a vengeance. Also, at that point Europeans began making paper at the same rate as the Arabs. Until then, the Arabs’ new medium did for them what papyrus had done for the Western world years before, it gave them a leg up at a time when Islam seemed poised to accomplish its universal mission. But history has a way of thwarting expectations; this time, the thwarting came in the form of the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, followed by the Crusades, thus the devastation in the Middle East that led to a slow retreat of Muslim power and Islamic influence throughout the rest of the world.
In time their new books on paper were copied by Christian monks in Muslim-Christian border areas, particularly Spain and Sicily, and from there the translations would make their way into other parts of Christian Europe, especially into book collections in monasteries that were small but numerous. Upwards of 500 monasteries in England by the end of the Middle Ages led some to estimate that a total of 300,000 volumes were then held, by which time books printed on paper had begun to appear in place of handwritten tomes, thanks to Gutenberg.
In Egypt, papyrus lost ground in more ways than one. The swamps of the delta and the backwater areas along the Nile were drained and planted with grain, other food crops and linen—linen that in turn supplied and advanced the new trade in rag paper.
