In Mesopotamia, a shepherd counted his cattle. In order not to forget the number of his cattle, he points it out on a clay tablet and This happened about 5,000 years ago: that's how the story of the book begins. On clay
From stone to clay, It was the first evolution of the book
It is true among the first manifestations of writing is stone and monoliths. But naturally, writing about it was too heavy and soon the intelligence of man found other solutions: the clay.
In Mesopotamia, the texts were written on clay tablets, used by sides of the table. The wet clay was marked with a small piece of cut cane called calamus, the equivalent of our pencil. After the table was put to dry in the sun, or if the information was valuable, it was cooked in the oven to be more solid and thus be better preserved. In any case, cooked or not, the tables were finally placed side by side on the shelves of the temples.
On the other hand, the Egyptians created their own writing material from the plant called papyrus: they cut the leaves into long, wide strips that, agglutinated with mud from the Nile River, became a roll-up writing stand. They are papyrus rolls, soft and light, instead of those heavier and unwieldy clay books.
The papyri were kept in libraries. The largest was that of Alexandria: it was founded in 304 BC and came to contain more than 500,000 scrolls of papyrus. By the 4th century BC the Greeks and the Romans also began to use these papyri, which they call volumes.
But in Rome the papyrus was not the only support used. Schoolchildren wrote on wooden tablets, joined together in the form of a notebook and covered with a thin layer of wax. This small format is more manageable than the papyrus rolls. And less cost, but also more fragile. A good option for students
In China, about 4,000 years ago there was also the need to write. Asia stands out above all for taking advantage of nature when it comes to conserving its texts: vegetation facilitates the supports.
Among others, there are for example bamboo sheets joined with silk strips, materials easy to find in the area.
Easier to read were the texts on silk, a flexible and manageable material with which bands could be created several meters long, rolled into a cane. A curious fact: there were so many of these books that were sometimes confiscated to make tents and candles for cars during the wars.
Paper was also known in Asia, but it was underestimated for a long time because it was considered a sign of poverty. Later they took up the paper, first rolled as they did with silk, and then the sheets folded into pages.
In Japan, the first stage of the book goes through the roll of paper. Chinese techniques arrive late to the island: in the 4th century, when in China they have already overcome.
