books, Greek and Roman
books, Greek and RomanBooks existed in Egypt long before they came into use in Greece. Systems of writing had been invented and developed for administrative purposes in both Egypt and Mesopotamia by c.3000 BC. While the Sumerians and Babylonians (see Babylonia) used clay tablets for their cuneiform (wedge-shaped) scripts, the Egyptians used papyrus (made from the marsh plant Cyperus papyrus). A blank sheet of papyrus was found in the tomb of the vizier Hemaka in Saqqara of c.3000 BC. The oldest surviving inscribed papyrus texts are the temple accounts of Abusir of c.2450 BC. A number of fine statues of seated scribes of the same period suggests that this profession was already well established and that writing had been practised for centuries, long enough for the ‘hieratic’ script to develop through the adaptation of hieroglyphs to the use of reed-brush and papyrus. The hieroglyph for ‘book-roll’ is...
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