3

Clay, Reeds, and Skin

Memory as Medium

Laziness and distrust, as much as ambition and confidence, are the true sources of human innovation. It is true today in a place like Silicon Valley, and it was true at least seven thousand years ago when, on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, a bored and suspicious farmer or carpenter found a clever shortcut—and changed the trajectory of history.

Not long after the Agricultural Revolution reached southern Mesopotamia, farmers and craftsmen began using markers to keep count of their inventories. No doubt this was in part to keep track of stored goods to pay workers and customers, but just as likely it was to keep from being cheated or robbed. These early businessmen made markers that represented individual units. And in order to make those markers as simple to produce as possible, they used the cheapest and most flexible material at hand: dirt.

Or more precisely, small tablets of dried mud. These clay tablets fulfilled their purpose exactly: They cost nothing, were quick to make, were easy to store, and were sturdy enough to remain stored. Soon these tablets were being made by the thousands and helped propel the creation of the Sumerian society that emerged in the region.

But there were also some problems with these clay tablets. The obvious one was that they were all alike: Did that pile of tablets represent baskets of wheat or sorghum? Is that pile of tablets yours or mine? And of course there was always a potential crisis when it rained.…

No one is more practical than a farmer, especially when it comes to protecting his hard-earned wealth. So, it wasn’t long before some enterprising businessman began embossing his clay tablets with his personal mark. But that meant these personalized tablets now had their own intrinsic value; in a sense, they became a kind of low-value proto-money. So, being another kind of wealth, they, too, needed to be preserved and protected. And the best way to do that was to create a container to hold them.

This being the early Bronze Age, a metal strongbox was out of the question. No, the solution was to go back to the same material—clay—and create jars. Form them, fill them with tablets, seal the lid … and you have a nice, sturdy, and largely waterproof record-keeping system for your business. Safer, too, in a world full of people trying to cheat you in business.

There was only one problem: Once you closed that jar, you were back to depending on your own memory to remember how many tablets were sealed inside, which defeated the purpose of the tablets-and-jar scheme in the first place. Once again, a clever businessman came up with a solution: He could simply make some marks on the outside of the still-soft jar that was equal to the number of tablets inside.

And then came another turning point in the history of memory. Only a lazy soul would have realized that once you had the marks on the jar, why did you need the tablets inside? And for that matter, why did you need the jar if you could just make the same marks on one of the tablets?

Thus the simple tally mark on a slab of soft clay became the medium for counting … and for the next thirty-eight centuries, the people of this society—which, with the help of this new recording system, would become the mighty Sumerian civilization—used this technique as their universal medium of permanent record.

The original marks on these clay tablets were essentially miniature drawings, similar to the owner’s mark. But drawing on clay, as any first-grader knows, is not the easiest thing to do; chunks pile up from the groove, and the medium is so thick that it snaps the stick or reed you’re drawing with; it’s a serious problem. And so the Sumerians, in one of the great intellectual leaps of the Bronze Age, turned away from the little images—the pictographs of logographic writing—and developed a simpler and more flexible syllabic form of writing. In the process, they cut the number of symbols in their language from more than a thousand to less than four hundred.

But even more important, in simplifying their language—not to mention dealing with the limitations of the chosen writing medium—the Sumerians also, over the course of a couple thousand years, radically simplified their writing style as well. Once again, as every child knows, the easiest way to make an image in mud or clay is to take a stick and poke it in a decorative pattern. And that is exactly what the Sumerians did, albeit in a high-volume, standardized way: They took their little tablet of soft clay, put it in a little tray to keep the rectangular form from being distorted, and made little marks on its surface with a thin, wedge-shaped stylus usually made from a reed.

The result, which we call cuneiform, was the first mass-produced written language in human history. Indeed, the clay tablets bearing this writing—turned nearly to stone by later serendipitous fires that acted like kilns—are among the most ubiquitous, and treasured, artifacts of Bronze Age civilization.

Developing cuneiform was probably a pretty straightforward process for the Sumerians, given that Mesopotamia was the farming and trading capital of the world. By five thousand years ago, businessmen and farmers were already accustomed to making hash marks on jugs and tablets to keep count of their goods. Soon, as their numbers grew large, they learned to create new symbols to represent groups of numbers—like the proverbial prisoner who marks every fifth day with a diagonal line across the previous four marks.

Armed with this notion of using variants on existing symbols to represent subsets, sets, and supersets, the Sumerians probably found it pretty easy to first turn their little drawings into simplified symbols of those drawings and then to use those symbols, alone or in combination, to create more complex thoughts. In fact, it took only about four hundred years, from 3000 B.C. to 2600 B.C. for the early pictograms to evolve into the highly abstract writing we associate with cuneiform today.

The result was that daily life in ancient Sumer would have looked oddly like life today, with everyday folks sitting in shops and on benches, punching the surface of their little handheld tablets. And we can assume that experienced writers back then could have written nearly as fast in the up-down, left-right syllabic style of late cuneiform as we write in cursive alphabetic Latin style today, and probably faster than in traditional Chinese. In other words, the Sumerians, for the first time in human history, had a “permanent” writing medium that was portable and cheap, and a writing system that reduced the time from thought to printed word to a matter of seconds—not the hours and days of traditional carving in stone. And all it took to erase a sentence or message was a scrape of the thumb or a splash of water.

WORDS OF FREEDOM

One of the overarching themes of this book is that the evolution of memory, both human and artificial, is also the story of the advancement of human freedom. Every great breakthrough in our ability to capture, store, and recall knowledge has brought an ever-greater expansion of freedom and social equality in its wake.

More than forty centuries after the Sumerians created true writing, Sir Francis Bacon used that craft to write one of the best known (and least understood) aphorisms: “Knowledge is power.”

Most people who read that line assume that it describes a personal phenomenon: that social power and influence come from education—that is, the quantity and quality of learning that fills one’s memory. Thus, the more knowledge a person has stored in his or her head, the more power that person will have over his or her career, relationships, and the quotidian activities of life. Moreover, this knowledge will also enable that person to better deal with novel, unexpected, and even dangerous situations—for example, the Eagle Scout has a better chance of surviving being lost in the woods, the trained race driver in escaping a car crash, the sailor in getting through a storm at sea.

True enough. And Bacon himself, one of the brightest human beings who ever lived, would seem the embodiment of his own truism. But he was more than just a great essayist and philosopher of science. Francis Bacon was also the Lord Chancellor of one of the largest empires in history—and in that role, dealing with the murderous, scheming court of King James I that in the end would bring him down, Bacon was expert in wielding great political power. And so, as much as anyone who ever lived, he understood that real power—the kind that rules nations, changes the lives of millions, and turns the trajectory of history—was also the product of knowledge. Power was the payoff for having one’s brain packed with rules and laws and secrets and a deep understanding of the lessons of history.

It follows, then, that any new art, craft, tool, or technology that enhances the ability of human beings to accumulate knowledge—either in their own memories or in some other easily accessible place—will result in a greater acquisition of power by those who take advantage of this breakthrough. And if more people have a chance to use a breakthrough—thanks to lower costs of production or greater ease of use—the accompanying power will also be more widely disseminated throughout society … resulting in greater equality, freedom, and ultimately, democracy.

Writing on clay tablets in cuneiform was just such a history-changing breakthrough. The birth of written language 45,000 years earlier had begun to divide society into those with secret/sacred words and images—the shamans, priests, and rulers—and those without. Because carving symbols into rock was a long and laborious task requiring considerable skill, writing—and the knowledge it encoded—was reserved for the powerful and privileged few, used mostly (as with cave tableaux) to strike awe into observers and further consolidate their own power.

But in ancient Mesopotamia, clay was everywhere, as were reeds. And the cuneiform syllabic language, especially in its early pictograms, was relatively easy to learn. With this combination of availability of technology and ease of use, it was impossible for the ruling class to maintain their monopoly on knowledge—and thus on absolute power. This, of course, didn’t stop them from trying, and Sumer was hardly a modern democracy … but the evidence of the thousands of clay tablets that have miraculously survived to this day is ample evidence that, to borrow from a famous Mesopotamian story, the genie was out of the bottle. Writing became not only a popular tool but a highly competitive profession. As an old Sumerian dictum says: “He who would excel in the school of the scribes must rise with the dawn.”

Genies work magic, and the real magic of the cuneiform and clay revolution is that it unleashed human imagination more than ever before. The zenith of that creative explosion is a collection of twelve clay tablets, from the library of the seventh-century B.C. Assyrian (the successors of the Sumerians) king Ashurbanipal. These tablets contain the world’s oldest story, The Epic of Gilgamesh.

OLDEST ACQUAINTANCE

Only a society that has cast its language net wide enough to capture that rarest of literary talents could produce a story like Gilgamesh. And it takes a high level of individual freedom to allow such a story to be told—one that portrays not only the expected greatness of its protagonist, King Gilgamesh, but also his cruelties, his mistakes, and his not-insignificant flaws. This is true cultural confidence, and it explains not only the story’s profound impact when its component poems first appeared 4,500 years ago but also why Gilgamesh’s journey still speaks to us so deeply today. It is his agonized words about the loss of immortality that concluded the last chapter.

Gilgamesh’s most obvious influence was to set the form and standard for a new kind of storytelling that swept the ancient world. It’s echoes, found in later great historic poems like those of Homer,1 induced other, later cultures to devise their own national epics and then—once their own written languages had reached a comparable level of sophistication—to write down those stories. It is probably no coincidence that the Great Flood story told to Gilgamesh by the immortal Utnapishtim and his wife—the first written record of this event—is echoed in the Bible by the story of Noah and his wife. By the same token, Gilgamesh’s journey, the many creatures he encounters, and the enchantress Ishtar, find a second life a thousand years later in Homer’s Odyssey. If, as is said, all fiction is the story of a journey, then The Epic of Gilgamesh built the mold, which explains why elements and themes from the poem constantly reappear in novels, films, plays, and television dramas even today.

But Gilgamesh also had a second, more subtle but equally powerful effect on the story of mankind. As we will see, it forever tied the present to the past; launching humanity on the even larger epic we call history.

Gilgamesh is a great work of art because it combines the deeply strange with the comfortably familiar. Some 250 generations later, the story still has the capacity to entertain, thrill, surprise, and even terrify readers.2

Parts of the story are surpassingly strange, seeming to breathe the dusty old air of a long-gone world: giant talking scorpion-men, a magical cedar forest that induces visions of the future, a homicidal Bull of Heaven … There are also moments in the narrative when the characters (and, for that matter, the author) make inexplicable decisions based upon an ethical framework we no longer share—a reminder that the ancient world was often far more alien than we imagine. And there are moments of sheer terror: Gilgamesh’s seven-league (twenty-one-mile) walk through a perfectly dark void, never knowing what the next step might bring, is, in its evocative but offhand way, as scary as anything written since.

The anonymous author(s) of Gilgamesh did something never before accomplished, and something rarely achieved since: He captured his world in a kind of dramatic shorthand … and then flung that memory thousands of years into the future. It works, and will probably always work, because if Gilgamesh’s actions and motivations can sometimes seem opaque, at other moments he can be shockingly familiar. He is self-obsessed, casually cruel and manipulative, noble, brave, and afraid to die—and thus stands as a perpetual reminder that even though the cultural details change, human nature rarely does.

Gilgamesh is the oldest person we “know.” He stands at the beginning of history, pointing backward at the shadowy world that existed before writing bound together all of humanity, living and dead.

Unlike countless later heroic epics, Gilgamesh doesn’t start out either noble or heroic; in fact, he is basically a monster and a tyrant. And the story itself doesn’t begin with his birth, but instead, like The Iliad and the Gospel according to John, starts off in the middle of the action. And like later characters from Hercules to Tom Jones to Augie March, Gilgamesh is a kind of bildungsroman, in which the young hero, forced to endure a series of potentially fatal tests, emerges on the far side older, wiser, and in almost every way transformed.

At the beginning of the epic—at least, from what we think is the beginning based upon the surviving tablets that were discovered by Hormuzd Rassam in 1853 in the remains of King Ashurbanipal’s library—Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, is the familiar case of a young man drunk with power and abusing his title. Two-thirds god and one-third man—the admixture symbolizing both how far humanity has come and how far it has to go—Gilgamesh is a terror. When he isn’t with temple whores, he is deflowering local virgins on their wedding night. As for the young men in his kingdom, he diverts them from their duties and wastes their energies on playing games where he can show his prowess, on having them do meaningless tasks and, apparently, making them near-slaves on endless public works projects.

Needless to say, the Sumerian people have grown sick of Gilgamesh and, knowing they can’t defeat and topple him, decide to distract him instead. To do this, they make a plea to their gods to devise an equal and countervailing force to their king. The gods respond by essentially cloning Gilgamesh, creating a hairy, savage man named Enkidu who roams the forests raiding hunters’ traps and who embodies the dark, atavistic side of the king.

Reading Gilgamesh today, you don’t have to be an amateur psychologist to appreciate that Gilgamesh and Enkidu are two sides of the same man—one modern and the other primitive—and that the arrival of the id-like Enkidu liberates Gilgamesh to find his noble self and emulate the gods. Trained as we are in movie plots, it also seems obvious that Gilgamesh must destroy his “wild man” to move on.

But the ancients were far wiser than this. The Sumerians lived every day surrounded by wild men and knew they could never be fully defeated by the sword. Thus, the plot takes an unexpected turn: The long-suffering trapper hires a temple prostitute to seduce Enkidu and bring him to the city. The trapper then takes Enkidu to a shepherd’s camp where he is given human food and turned into the camp’s night watchman. Sex, food, and military duty—it is a strategy for dealing with barbarians that the Romans would have appreciated.

Particularly unexpected is how the two half-men finally meet. When Enkidu hears that King Gilgamesh is about to rape yet another new bride, he rushes into the city to stop him. He meets the king in the doorway to the wedding chamber and the two men engage in a vicious fight—the voice of the Old World reminding the representative of the New Order that not all of the rules can be rewritten, that sacred acts still must be preserved.

Here things start to get strange again. Gilgamesh unexpectedly wins the fight; Enkidu acknowledges this, and the two men become best friends forever. No doubt to the community’s relief, Gilgamesh suggests that the two of them head off on a big adventure—in particular, to kill Humbaba, the monster ogre of the Cedar Forest. This is a little more than the local leaders had in mind and, faced with the prospect of the power vacuum created by a dead king, they try to talk the two men out of this suicidal quest. But the elders are ignored.

In the end, after ignoring or misreading numerous omens and dreams warning them off, the two men encounter the horrifying Humbaba and, with the help of the gods, capture him. When Gilgamesh—showing either the conscience or the weakness of modern man—takes pity on the monster, Enkidu forces him to kill Humbaba. Then, in an appalling act of heresy, they take the ogre’s head back to Uruk on a raft they’ve crafted out of the sacred cedars.

As his act of near mercy shows, Gilgamesh has begun to change. And when, after being welcomed as a hero, the king is approached by the goddess Ishtar (playing the role of Odysseus’s Circe calling him back to a more violent and self-indulgent life) he spurns her advances. Furious, Ishtar calls on her father, the god Anu, to send the “Bull of Heaven” down to Uruk and avenge her humiliation. He does just that, and the city is nearly destroyed. In the end, Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay the bull, becoming even greater heroes to the citizens of Uruk.

But even though most of the gods have supported the two men in their adventures, this second slaughter of a partly divine creature cannot be endured without an equivalent death—or symbolically, a sacrifice to the old world that is about to disappear. The sacrifice will, of course, be Enkidu, who ultimately must die with his world. Beset with a series of increasingly horrifying nightmares that present an image of the afterlife that is among the most disturbing in world literature, Enkidu—lamenting that he has to die in bed like a modern man rather than in a battle like a true warrior—withers and dies.

A shattered Gilgamesh is inconsolable. He has, after all, been forever severed from his older, more natural, and perhaps “truer” self. He raises monuments to his friend and wanders the forest looking for Enkidu’s spirit. But as much as his grief is for the loss of Enkidu, it is also partly due to his painful realization of his own mortality. For the first time, he has felt the cold breath of death and now fears his own end. As will later be the case with Adam and Eve, whose story will be written in another thousand years (and whose Garden of Eden is, perhaps not coincidentally, in about the same location as Uruk), the price of knowledge is a familiarity with death.

Obsessed with escaping death, Gilgamesh embarks on his greatest, solo, quest—symbolically the same quest of civilization itself: to gain immortality. Only two people in Gilgamesh’s world are known to have been granted eternal life by the gods: a survivor of the Great Flood named Utnapishtim (which translates appropriately as “the far away”) and his wife. Gilgamesh vows to find them. The resulting journey, with its lions, endless darkness, scorpion-men, even a Charon-like ferryman, is of immeasurable importance to the future of world literature.

But Utnapishtim proves to be an ordinary man given an extraordinary gift during an equally extraordinary time (the Flood). A shattered Gilgamesh even fails what seems a simple test (staying awake for seven days) to see if he really deserves immortality. As a dejected Gilgamesh prepares to leave for home, Utnapishtim takes pity on him and tells the king about a plant that grows on the bottom of the ocean that will restore his youth.

With a clever strategy, Gilgamesh manages to retrieve the plant. But later, when he isn’t guarding it, the plant is stolen by a giant snake—which, to prove the plant’s power, sheds its skin as it slithers away. Gilgamesh has failed in his quest. He sets off for Urak older and wiser. But then, as he once again sees the great walls of Uruk, Gilgamesh’s spirits lift at the sight of what his people have accomplished. He must learn to take consolation in that.

The message of The Epic of Gilgamesh is as important now as it was then: You will die. But if you live your life intensely, your story—as words—will live beyond you in the memories of others. And if you live your life with greatness, those words may ring down through the ages, the words cheating death even though your body cannot.

Gilgamesh sought to live forever, and failed in his quest. But perhaps he was looking for immortality in the wrong place: Because of his failure, he has come as close as any mortal in history to achieving it.

As for The Epic of Gilgamesh, the subsequent millennia have revealed it for what it really is: a memory poem. It is a celebration of the power of language and writing, a threnody to a lost, older and more elemental world that lived almost solely in the present—and a reminder of the limitations of human ambition. After the death of Enkidu, his older self and the embodiment of pre-writing and prehistory, Gilgamesh (and the rest of mankind) is severed forever from the Old World. But he still has his memories of Enkidu, and once written down, he will always have them. And so, extraordinarily, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first true written work of fiction, also works like a modern-style metafiction, as it seems to anticipate its own place in history.

It is this final resonance that may explain why Gilgamesh not only has survived five thousand years, but is still read for both insight and entertainment. It survived the decline of Sumer and its conquest by the Babylonians—surviving even the death of Sumerian as both a spoken language and then cuneiform as a written language. And because it was treasured and preserved, it survived until its rediscovery and translation in the nineteenth century. Today, there is little doubt The Epic of Gilgamesh will survive at least until humanity’s next great transformation.

A KINGDOM OF STONE AND PAPER

Gilgamesh and a large pile of clay tablets are about all that remain in the modern human imagination of Sumerian civilization. But another culture, one that appears to have adopted early pictographic cuneiform and modified it for its own purposes, is so omnipresent in our daily lives that sometimes it seems to still exist on some distant corner of the planet.

Egypt.

Hieroglyphics are probably the most famous of all ancient written languages, associated even by little children with the pyramids and mummies, Cleopatra and Tutankhamun. And they seem to have been invented, like cuneiform, as a collection of symbols used to track data … and which, with the addition of a grammar, began to be linked together into complex thoughts. Because the oldest hieroglyphic symbols yet found appeared soon after the invention of cuneiform, most linguists assume the former in some way derived from the latter, although it is also possible that (as with many inventions, even today) it arose independently.

What we do know is that in very short order, hieroglyphics quickly evolved into one of the most aesthetically rich and evocative written languages ever created. Also among the most complex: From 3000 B.C. to 400 B.C., the number of different hieroglyphs jumped from a few hundred to more than five thousand.3

Clearly, Egyptian writing wasn’t easy to learn. And it wasn’t meant to be. Hieroglyphics is among the few forms of writing ever created that was specifically designed over time to be more recondite and harder to master. The pharaohs and their advisers seemed to have instinctively understood that literacy meant empowering the people … and they would have none of it. Hieroglyphic literacy in Egypt during the Pharaonic Era is believed to have never exceeded 2 percent (though one village of workers in the Valley of Kings, Set Ma’at—today known as Deir el-Medina—is believed to have a literacy rate of 40 percent)4. So, besides making the language ever more complicated—hieroglyphics eventually included everything from symbols for letters to sounds, words, and concepts—the pharaohs also restricted writing to just the “right” class of people or for use in special service of the government.

Still, for the ancient world, and in a civilization numbering several million people, 2 percent literacy was an impressive number. And, if learning hieroglyphics was more difficult (and its use more restricted) than cuneiform, Egyptian society more than compensated with an unprecedented array of cheap and durable writing media.

The Egyptians, of course, like all ancient peoples, knew how to carve and paint on stone. And, being history’s most famous builders, they had no shortage of walls to write on. Less known is that they also quickly learned to write on clay tablets—although, because of the complexity of their symbols, this writing was usually reduced to imprinting labels and personal seals. Still, hundreds of these small tablets, many dating back to 3300 B.C., have been discovered.

But within a few hundred years the Egyptians also had discovered a new and literally more flexible material upon which to write. And it changed everything.

*   *   *

The papyrus plant is a form of sedge, a type of wetland plant that also includes the water chestnut, and most resembles marsh grass or reed.5 The most salient characteristic of the papyrus plant is that the fibrous pith of its long (up to nine-foot-tall) stalks is both stringy and sticky. Prehistoric Nile dwellers had discovered that this pith could be pounded and twisted into very efficient rope for baskets, beds, and even boats.

Inevitably, somebody discovered that one can also slice that pith into thin strips, lay them side by side into one layer, add a second layer with the strips perpendicular to the first, and then pound the whole thing together into a single sheet. When the sheet was left to dry in the desert heat of Egypt, the result was “papyrus”—a cheap, highly portable and malleable medium with (after polishing with a pebble) the perfect texture to take a brush stroke.6

What made papyrus so revolutionary was not just how light and portable it was compared to clay tablets, or even its surprising durability, but the way it took marks on its surface. Stone you had to scratch or laboriously carve, clay you could only poke or impress, but on papyrus, you could draw. Now, for the first time, you could take the rich and sophisticated paintings long worked onto stone and dirt walls and commit them to a sheet that could be rolled up and tucked into your robe.

One result of this was, as we all know, Egypt became a place covered with hieroglyphics. Suddenly they were not only carved into the pyramids and painted onto stone walls but written onto thousands (perhaps millions) of papyrus rolls—not just for the information they captured but also, as with other types of ideographic writing, because of their intrinsic decorative beauty.

Hieroglyphics, which began as a pictographic language—that is, literal images used mostly for religious purposes (hieroglyphics is Greek for “sacred writing”)—went through the normal evolution to become ideograms (that is, increasingly symbolic images to capture complex thoughts)—and just kept on going. By the time of the Roman occupation, hieroglyphics contained pictographs, ideograms, phonetic symbols, alphabet-type letters, and even slang. There was even a second, shorthand, version for the less literate.* This explains why, after the Egyptians largely abandoned hieroglyphic writing (about 400 B.C.) it would take centuries for the language to be deciphered. Scholars, beginning with the Arab historians Dhul-Nun al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya in the ninth century A.D., mistakenly assumed that hieroglyphics were strictly pictographs—and quickly hit dead ends.7

That’s why the famous discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon’s troops in 1799 was so important. It wasn’t, as is generally assumed, because the big slab of granodiorite contained the same message in hieroglyphics, the Egyptian demotic Coptic script that replaced it, and ancient Greek, suddenly making reading hieroglyphics easy. If that had been the case, the translation would have taken Jean-François Champollion and others twenty minutes to accomplish, not the twenty years it eventually required. What the Rosetta Stone really showed these French translators was that hieroglyphics were a lot more complicated than they imagined.

Wrote Champollion about the discovery, “It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word.”8

It was only by the end of the nineteenth century—just in time for the golden age of Egyptology (and helping to make it possible)—that scientists like Howard Carter and various treasure hunters could read with both speed and confidence the hieroglyphics they encountered on their excavations. Meanwhile, this translation breakthrough suddenly made the search for papyrus scrolls valuable in itself.

The result was the discovery, over the last two centuries, of thousands of such scrolls. Together they present for Ancient Egypt the most complete memory of any of mankind’s founding civilizations … one reason why Egypt is so much more “present” to us than, say, Sumer or Mycenae. Individually, some of the scrolls that were found also make an important contribution to humanity’s collective legacy. They include epic narratives such as The Tale of Sinuhe (basically the Bible’s story of Joseph told in reverse), monologues like the Instructions of Amenemhat (narrated by a ghost, to burnish a dead pharaoh’s legacy), and The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor (a more fanciful antecedent to Robinson Crusoe).

But the most famous Egyptian narrative—one found carefully written on papyrus scrolls in many tombs—is The Book of the Dead (or, more precisely, The Book of Coming Forth by Day).

Strictly speaking, The Book of the Dead isn’t a book in almost any sense. It is rather the most famous of the Egyptian “funerary texts”—that is, constantly varying compilations of prayers and magic spells that were in use for 1,500 years. Though historically younger than The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Book of the Dead feels much older. The ultimate text of the death-obsessed Egyptian culture, it seems to breathe the dust and decay of mummies and long-buried tombs.

Yet interestingly, The Book of the Dead, in its way, is also the most modern of all of the ancient texts. There is evidence that wealthy Egyptians of the New Kingdom ordered their own custom papyri containing their handpicked selection of spells and narratives. At the same time, even as they had the scrolls placed in their tombs, these Egyptians would also have segments of the text painted on their tomb walls, thereby creating the first custom-designed, multimedia, multiplatform “books.”

Papyrus made this kind of flexibility, rich imagery, and wide-scale use possible because of the unique nature of the material itself. Nobody was going to carry around a clay tablet more than a few inches across—it was just too bulky and heavy. It also suffered if brought into proximity to rain, humidity, or sweat. But papyrus was a very different substance. Sheets could be hammered together end-to-end before they dried in order to create strips of almost unlimited length and, if you aligned the component papyrus pith slices so that on one side they ran the entire length of the strip, it was possible to roll the strip fairly tightly without cracking or splitting it.

The result was the scroll, that historic medium that, along with the toga, has come to symbolize the ancient world. Interestingly, while we tend to think of the papyrus scroll as being a Grecian or, better yet, a Roman phenomenon, it is in fact much longer lived than that. Its earliest use as a writing medium may date as far back as 3000 B.C. And though papyrus was largely supplanted by the beginning of the Christian era, many readers will be surprised to learn that as late as 1022—that is, well into the Middle Ages—papyrus was still used for Papal decrees (“bulls”). In Egypt and certain parts of the Byzantine empire, papyrus was used until the twelfth century. That means that the last papyrus use may have just touched the birth of modern paper. That is an amazing run of near-universal dominance by one technology.

That said, papyrus wasn’t entirely alone in the world. Other cultures, without access to that particular type of marsh sedge, found other writing media. For example, the Indus civilization learned to dry and smoke-treat palm leaves to create a kind of paper that was quickly adopted throughout East Asia. In the upper Northern Hemisphere, from Russia to North America, indigenous peoples eventually stumbled upon birch bark—an extremely pliant white surface—as their writing medium. In Mesoamerica, only a bit later than the advent of papyrus in Egypt, natives learned to take the fibrous bark from certain fig trees, soak it in a caustic solution to soften the fibers, and then pound it into sheets to create a high-quality paper. The Aztecs were history’s biggest users of this amate paper and, at the time of peak production in the fifteenth century, were estimated to manufacture nearly 500,000 sheets per year.

But each of these alternative media had serious flaws, most of them related to durability. Palm-leaf paper was so delicate that anything written upon it soon had to be copied lest the original crumble away. As anyone knows who has ever worked with birch bark, it tends to split, crack, and rot—which is why it is almost impossible to date when this kind of writing began; the oldest-known artifacts date back only to the thirteenth century A.D. Only amate paper, beloved by Latin American artists, still survives. Its fundamental flaw was a political one: Production was tightly controlled by the Aztec monarchy and priesthood, so although it proved an effective medium for storing the memory of the aristocracy, it did little for the everyday folk in the way we see evidenced in Egypt and especially Greece and Rome.

So, for three millennia, the papyrus scroll triumphed, becoming mankind’s dominant memory repository. And the enduring symbol of this achievement was, and is, the Library of Alexandria.

THE WORLD’S MEMORY

The Library of Alexandria—often conflated with the nearby lighthouse, perhaps because, intellectually, the former was just as much a Wonder of the World—was one of those ancient entities that, because it is so often imagined, we feel we know it. But in fact, the library is best characterized by what we don’t know about it.

For example, we’re pretty sure that the library was a creation of Ptolemaic Egypt, and built in the third century B.C., but we don’t know whether the work began under Ptolemy I or II. We also generally believe that the library was accidentally destroyed by fire in 50 B.C. by Julius Caesar, who was burning his ships in the face of an oncoming Egyptian army—but our only source for this is Plutarch, who wouldn’t write about it for another 150 years, and even Caesar himself doesn’t mention it.9 Neither do we know what the library looked like, although we do know it had gardens, lecture halls, meeting rooms, a cataloging room, and an acquisitions department. Legend has it that above the shelves of scrolls these words were inscribed: THE PLACE OF THE CURE OF THE SOUL. But was it a single story or multistory structure? Hellenistic Greek in design or more Egyptian?

In fact, we don’t even know how many scrolls were in the Library of Alexandria—one estimate is a half-million, but there were probably at least several hundred thousand, though many may have been duplicates. Nor do we know how the scrolls were obtained; one legend has it that every ship entering the harbor at Alexandria had to turn over every scroll they had on board. And though it is often assumed that it was the world’s first library, it probably was not; another story has it that Mark Antony gave Cleopatra 200,000 scrolls looted from the equally extraordinary, but much less famous, Library of Pergamum in Turkey.

What we do know is that the Library of Alexandria set out—probably for the first time in human history—to capture, catalog, and store mankind’s collective knowledge and memory … and came very close to doing so. Even the little we know about what was in the library’s archives is mind-boggling—all of the works of ancient Egypt, all of the writings of the Greek philosophers and dramatists, the earliest records of some of the world’s great religions … All that was consumed in the fire is heartbreaking: Perhaps 90 percent of the important writing of the ancient world is likely lost to us forever. Who knows how different history might have been if we’d had the rest of Aristotle and Sophocles and all of the rest of the great works by which the ancients defined themselves.

Almost forgotten in the story of the Library of Alexandria was that, adjoining it, was the Musaeum, its name the source of the modern term. This is appropriate because, just as the library was the prototype of all that followed, so, too (with a few wrinkles), was the Musaeum. And if the library set out to gather mankind’s memory in the form of the written word, the Musaeum attempted the same through artifacts. History records that it featured a zoo, an observatory, an anatomy hall … and one of the greatest lecture programs in history, featuring the likes of Archimedes and Euclid. In 2005, an archaeological team claimed to have uncovered the remains of thirteen lecture halls near the site, with room for a total of five thousand students.10

Readers of the history of science are often surprised when the heart of discovery seems to move out of Europe and into North Africa—not just in the case of the two aforementioned scientists, but also Eratosthenes determining the circumference of the Earth and Hipparchus inventing trigonometry. They can look to the Musaeum for an explanation.

The Library of Alexandria and the Musaeum are symbols, and perhaps the greatest examples, of a new kind of human memory. They were built in recognition of the fact that the media revolution wrought by the invention of papyrus had produced an information and memory explosion so great that vast quantities of important knowledge and new ideas risked being overlooked or lost forever. The solution was to gather all of this information into giant repositories for safekeeping.

But then, the sheer size of these repositories created their own problem: Even if you had all of the information in one place, there was now so much of it that you wouldn’t be able to find a specific item in that mountain of data if you had ten lifetimes to search for it. That meant you had to catalog these scrolls and then store them in the walls of the library by subject matter and theme. And when the number of scrolls began to reach the hundreds of thousands, you not only had to develop navigational tools to find them in the right room, in the right bin, and even the right place in that bin but you had to begin the laborious task of indexing the content within those scrolls. This indexing is a task that has yet to be completed. On the contrary, from the day the indexing work at the Library of Alexandria began, the challenge has only grown greater by the year and will likely never end.

LOST IN THE REEDS

In papyrus, the Egyptians seemed to have found the perfect writing medium: cheap, light, flexible, and—at least in Egypt—highly durable.

That last feature was hugely important. Even more so than today, written materials were expected to be very durable. One reason was that the competition (carved or painted stone) was almost immortal; the other was that, in the era before printing—and especially with a complicated pictographic language like hieroglyphics—volume was low and production times were considerable. The fact that we have Egyptian hieroglyphic scrolls that are still in superb condition 5,000 years after they were created is a testament to the toughness of papyrus. For preserving human memory and leaving incantations to the gods, those Book of the Dead scrolls placed in sealed desert caves have proven to be at least as permanent (and these days, perhaps more preservable into the future) than the carvings and paintings in those same tombs.

But papyrus is not a perfect medium. It has several inherent flaws that, although minor in Egypt, would become devastating as papyrus technology moved out into the larger world.

One of these problems is texture. Like all “paper” created from long fibers of cellulose—including amate paper and, later, Chinese rice paper (actually mulberry bark)—the surface is quite rough. As any painter will tell you, that kind of rough texture is not bad if you are working with a brush, as one did with hieroglyphics; but as any calligrapher will tell you, it’s lousy for fine writing with a pencil or quill. The result is a tradeoff: either spend a lot more money for papyrus that has been heavily pounded and polished (and is still pretty rough), or compromise on the density—how much information you could put on each sheet. This wasn’t a big deal in the largely agrarian world of Egypt in 1500 B.C.; it was a very big deal in the bureaucratic world of Imperial Rome circa A.D. 250.

By the same token, papyrus, despite being a major leap in portability in comparison to its predecessor media, was still (at least by modern standards) comparatively stiff stuff. Lining up those sheets of dried pith made it possible to roll papyrus into scrolls, but not much else. For example, you couldn’t really fold it, which meant that you were stuck with ever longer scrolls. A near-contemporary history of Ramses III, the “Great Harris Papyrus” written in about 1000 B.C., is the longest known: It is more than forty meters long.

Once again, the challenge became accessibility to search: To find an item in a scroll required the reader to look through everything in the text that came before that item. And in a scroll that’s nearly half the length of a football field, that would be a lot of rolling and peering. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the scribes who created these monster scrolls occasionally got lost: Many such scrolls feature redundant pages, suggesting either that the writers were too tired to go back to see what they’d already done, or just slotted in key pages several times to save the reader the miserable task of rolling through the entire narrative. There is also the practical problem of it requiring two hands to keep a scroll open, which meant that scholars couldn’t easily read and write at the same time—something we take for granted today.

But the biggest problem with papyrus was geographic. The plant itself grew mostly in the marshlands of hot, dry climates in North Africa, in the Levant, and in the southernmost regions of Italy. Papyrus paper preferred the same dry climate: It had a tendency to rot when it encountered humidity and cold. Unfortunately, that was just where Western civilization was moving. This explains why, in illustrations and films of ancient Greece and Rome you see, accurately, representations of priests, architects, bureaucrats, and politicians working from scrolls but you rarely see even fragments of those scrolls in modern museums. That’s because, unlike those venerable Egyptian scrolls baking away in tombs in the Valley of the Kings, most European scrolls rotted away in less than a century. In societies like Periclean Greece or Augustinian Rome, with their thoughts turned toward the infinite and the immortal, that kind of impermanence in their written memory was unconscionable. Needless to say, the hunt was soon on in Europe for a new, more weather-resistant writing medium.

Ironically, what also propelled the search for a new medium was the rise of libraries. Storing papyrus scrolls was not only a preservation challenge, but the challenge of searching through hundreds or thousands of feet of scrolls to find something was becoming increasingly untenable by the year. Additionally, the supply of papyrus plants, and thus paper, was finite (the plant eventually became extinct in Egypt from overuse and had to be reintroduced) and the big libraries began sucking up all of the available inventory. Being left on the short end of the stick was not something Rome was going to accept for long.

Basic economics says that when you have a compromised technology in declining supply (with the accompanying increased price) that is incompatible with a popular new application, then you have the perfect environment for clever entrepreneurs to develop a competitive alternative.

FLESH AND INK

In the end, the answer came from Turkey and one of the old cities of Ionian Greece, and it was an adaptation of a writing medium even older than papyrus.

Human beings had been writing on animal skins, if only for decoration, since prehistory. But animal flesh is tricky. For one thing, it is much scarcer—or, at least it was before mankind settled down and started herding flocks. But even after you’ve killed and skinned the animal, the resulting soft and bloody flesh poses a whole bunch of problems before it can be used even for clothing, much less as a writing medium.

The first challenge is that in its raw form, flesh is meat. It rots, it turns rancid, and it attracts other animals and a whole lot of different insects. Furthermore, as it dries—especially if it’s been heavily washed to get out the blood and gore—it shrinks and twists and makes every attempt to turn itself into meat jerky. And even if you manage to keep it flat, the resulting dried skin is as stiff as a board and can require months of use to soften up and become pliable.

The ancients countered all of this, over the course of thousands of years, by developing a number of techniques to turn skin into leather.11 The process ultimately included several steps. The first was to scrape the fat layer off the underside of the flesh to prevent rot, and the hair off the top side to produce a smooth, tough surface. The cleaned skin was then soaked in a solution of rotting vegetation (such as bark); cod oil or other oil; brains, or alum to both preserve the flesh and break down the proteins in the collagen to make it more pliant. This process, called tanning, also removed nearly all of the residual hair. Tanning produced a kind of skin that was sufficiently soft and flexible to make into clothing, especially because its porous nature took readily to dyeing, or to being stamped and formed into a variety of goods. If boiled, the tanned leather would shrink and start to become animal-hide glue, which created a very hard material for body armor and shields.

But working with skin could also go in a different direction. Rather than be tanned, the skins could be soaked for days in the same alkaline solution of bark or beer or, best of all, lime (calcium oxide or hydroxide) and then immediately stretched and dried. This softer material could then be scraped even further (especially on the once-hairy side) or polished, then coated with fine-grained powder such as chalk and turned into perhaps the finest writing medium ever created: parchment.

Parchment is a beautiful material for writing or illustration; it is soft, incredibly sturdy and durable (many medieval books written on parchment are as fresh today as they were when written seven hundred years ago), and it takes ink superbly by actually melting slightly to hold the image.12 It can be folded, a fact that we take lightly now but was a radical improvement at the time. It also allows for erasure—typically done by scraping off the image with a knife—a feature that could prove to be both a blessing for contemporary scribes and a curse for future historians. Many important works in the centuries to come would be erased (scraped with a knife or washed with milk and oat bran), recycled, and written over in what is called a palimpsest.13 And unlike papyrus and rice paper, parchment doesn’t depend upon a single, fragile species: It can be made (and has) from every kind of mammal skin, from cow and sheep and donkey to wild game or even squirrel (and, horribly, human flesh). The very best parchment, it was generally agreed, was made from calfskin. This high-collagen, translucent paper was called vellum.*

Parchment also has its weaknesses. Like papyrus, it, too, reacts to changes in heat and humidity. The difference is that while papyrus disintegrated in the colder and wetter climes of Europe, parchment would usually just swell and shrink slightly, becoming more or less pliant with the weather. A far bigger problem was availability; even in a meat-oriented culture like Northern Europe, it takes a lot of dead cows to fill a library with books—especially when saddle makers and armorers are competing for the leather. However, thanks to the three-hundred-year bookless interregnum—the Dark Ages—after the fall of Rome, the race between the cattle and sheep populations and the demand for parchment didn’t become severe until about the twelfth century A.D. And by then, a new Chinese invention was waiting in the wings.

Parchment as a writing medium might have remained a relatively niche industry—even the early Egyptians and Babylonians had occasionally used parchment for special documents—confined to Asia Minor had not the Library of Alexandria once again changed the rules. To reiterate, whoever controls memory also holds enormous power, and the very existence of the Library of Alexandria posed a threat to every other civilization in the Mediterranean—not least the Hellenistic Greeks living in the great cities of what is now Turkey. Not surprisingly, then, the Greeks resolved to create their own mighty library—the aforementioned Library of Pergamum, in Pergamon—a kind of intellectual arms race against the Egyptians.

They largely succeeded—at least until, if the apocryphal story is true, Marc Antony looted the place as a gift to his mistress Cleopatra—but it wasn’t easy. The biggest problem was that the Library of Alexandria, with its insatiable demand for new texts, had created a veritable black hole for papyrus throughout the Mediterranean. There wasn’t much left for Pergamon, and what there was wasn’t cheap. And shortages only got worse when Egypt stopped exporting papyrus altogether.

That helps to explain why, according to the great Roman scientist Pliny the Elder, Pergamon’s king Eumenes ordered a crash course in the development of a high-volume, good-quality alternative writing material. He found it in his own backyard: As early as the fifth century B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus had noted that the Ionians in Asia Minor commonly used animal skins instead of papyrus for their record-keeping. So, all that was needed was to streamline the parchment-making process for production in volume, and more important, to adopt this new paradigm—individual sheets instead of scrolls—as an acceptable medium for important writing … and the Library of Pergamum was back in action. So influential was this shift from plant material to animal skin, and so associated with this library was the result, that the word “parchment” is actually derived from the name “Pergamon.”

THE WRITE IMPRESSION

With hindsight, the ultimate victory of parchment over papyrus seemed inevitable—just as papyrus had triumphed over clay. But it was in fact a close-run race. It certainly helped that papyrus had durability problems in Europe and that there were chronic shortages of the material just when the Roman bureaucracy was in ascendance, and that the papyrus plant later began to disappear from Egypt due to overharvesting.

But working against parchment was what we today call “the legacy problem.” Most of the Greco-Roman world’s writing was on papyrus scrolls, most of the literate people in that part of the world had grown up with scrolls—as had their ancestors back a hundred generations—and even the interior design of buildings was patterned to accommodate huge piles of scrolls. As we’ve seen in our own times with mainframe and personal computers, operating-systems software and entertainment hardware, it is not enough for a new technology to be a bit better than its predecessor. No, to get users to abandon a standard to which they have become accustomed, you need to be a whole lot better. And at least for the first century of its use, parchment lacked that edge. Something was missing, and it had to do with ease of use. Papyrus scrolls may have been a pain to use, but they were neat, compact, and held a lot of content in a structured format. By comparison, loose sheets of parchment, for all of their advantages, were a mess, and sewing parchment sheets end to end to create a scroll resulted in a heavy, bulky mass.

Clearly a new format was needed, one that took full advantage of the strengths of parchment.

As it happened, the search for that solution was already under way in both Rome and the Near East—and the two threads would soon converge in a classic example of synthesis in innovation.

In Rome, by 100 B.C., literate citizens had long been accustomed to writing and reading notes and messages on cerae—planks of wood coated with a layer of wax. To write, they would use a sharp wooden stylus, like a pencil without lead, to cut into the wax surface. And to erase—the reason cerae were popular, since papyrus can’t be erased—they used a small spatula-like device to smooth the wax surface.

The cera was invented by the Greeks (it is even mentioned in The Iliad) as an improved version of the clay tablet, and by the time it reached the Romans several hundred years later the technology had been pretty well perfected. The classic Roman cera features two hinged boards, each of them with a wood-framed sheet of wax on its inside face. Armed with a stylus and a smoother, Romans could open their cerae, take notes or compose a few sentences, then close the covers—like a laptop computer—tuck them under an arm and be on their way.

The cera proved to be a very flexible tool—a combination of Post-it note, scrap paper for rough drafts, postcard, and clipboard. It survives in historic epics in the scenes of Caesar slamming his fist, with its signet ring, down onto an open cera being held by some flunky/scribe. In reality, because large-scale production made it very cheap, cerae were used by the thousands by Romans throughout the empire. In time, multiple-“page” cerae began to appear in order to hold ever-larger numbers of words.

As a result, in conjunction with papyrus scrolls, cerae created a nice one-two punch—as the equivalent of short- and long-term memory—for the citizens of the Greek states and then of the Roman Empire. Ephemera were impressed into wax on cerae and enduring works were painted onto papyrus in scrolls.

In theory, parchment could have simply replaced the more fragile and scarce papyrus in this equation at some supply-demand point where the price of the new technology dipped below that of its predecessor. But new technologies never work that way: They almost always begin as a replacement for an existing solution, but eventually find their own, more powerful applications.

That was true for parchment. By the first century A.D., growing levels of literacy, combined with the army of scribes and bureaucrats needed to run the empire, had created an explosion of writing. Not only was this situation made worse by the growing shortage of papyrus, but the increasing number of scrolls was becoming unwieldy. It was one thing to fill the growing ranks of libraries around the empire—Rome alone would eventually have twenty-eight distinct libraries—but the sheer size of the empire demanded a heretofore unknown degree of mobility for information.

One solution came from the Middle East. Despite papyrus’s resistance to being folded and its native fragility, some scholars began taking papyrus sheets off their rolls and accordion-folding them into pleats. This made them much more portable, especially when a cera-like hard cover was attached. In fact, this was the format in which the Dead Sea “scrolls” were found. Needless to say, with this type of folding one could only write on one side of the sheet. Moreover, the “pages” themselves were likely to split with use, leading some owners to glue or sew one side of the stacked folds together to keep from losing pieces.

You can see where this is going. All the pieces were now in place to create something new and revolutionary; all that was needed was a writing medium that could be folded in halves, fourths, or eighths, and sewn together. And parchment fit the bill perfectly. Better yet, someone figured out that you could slice the folds on the unsewn side to create two-sided pages. The result was the codex, the precursor of the modern book. It was stunningly portable, flexible (because it could be erased, the codex could do the job of the cera and the scroll) and perhaps best of all, it made the search for information nonlinear. That is, you didn’t have to look through thirty feet of scroll to get to some item at the end of the text; now you could simply turn to the last pages of the codex. Even better, you could number the pages and create an index to tell you on which pages important information lay.

With the codex, the corpus of human memory became more accessible than ever before. In Europe, at least, the parchment codex supplanted the papyrus scroll in the course of just a few generations. In the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, from A.D. 79, archaeologists have found only the carbonized remains of scrolls. By the end of that century, the poet Martial was writing raves about the portability and compactness of the codex (important for someone who composed thousands of couplets of epigrammatic verse). And within a few years after that, the scroll bins in all of those Roman libraries were being replaced by bookshelves.

THE BOOK OF EVERYTHING

Technological change brings cultural change—and ultimately creates philosophical change. Within less than a century the existence of these new codices had transformed the way that Romans looked at the organization of knowledge and memory. This evolution in thought was best captured in the sixth century by “the last scholar of the ancient world,” Saint Isidore, the archbishop of Seville. In describing the nature of the codex, he offers a glimpse not only of how the histories of books and scrolls overlap, but also how bound, indexed volumes had opened the imaginations of their users:

A codex is composed of many books; a book is of one scroll. It is called codex by way of metaphor from the trunks (codex) of trees or vines, as if it were a wooden stock, because it contains in itself a multitude of books, as it were of branches.14

These words come from Isidore’s Etymologiae—a Christian “epitome,” or compendium of summaries of other works, and was itself one of the greatest early examples of this new metaphor of a tree of knowledge. By the time the archbishop sat down to write it, Rome had fallen and Europe was sliding into the Dark Ages. The Visigoths, having conquered most of the continent, had captured the monarchy of Spain, and Isidore had successfully struggled to convert them to Christianity. But even as he did so, his work was being undermined within the church by various emerging heresies that he fought to stamp out.

In the face of all of this, in one of the most heroic intellectual efforts in human history, Isidore set out in the Etymologiae (also known as Orgines) to preserve the entire memory of Western civilization. He filled twenty volumes of parchment with nearly 250 chapters of records. But it was a doomed effort, as he probably knew, making his attempt even more admirable. Europe was collapsing into chaos and nothing could stop it. As if an augury of what was to come, Isidore dedicated the work to Visigoth king Sisebut. And, with Isidore’s death in 636, Spain, the last redoubt of European civilization, fell into darkness as well.

But Isidore’s extraordinary effort had not been in vain. The Etymologiae—preserved by the emergent Muslim empire that would capture Seville as well as by the durability of the parchment book itself—would survive the centuries until Europe was at last ready for its return. And when it was, its pages, both a welcome recipe for cultural revival and a sad reminder of all that had been lost, would serve as a cornerstone for the Middle Ages.

By then, its pages of animal hide would find themselves competing with a new memory medium, this time from China. Paper.