584 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE LACK OF PRINTING IN ANTIQUITY 



By FREDERIC DREW BOND 



AMONG fragments from the Gra?co-Roman world which have come 

 down to as, not a few imply the use of some sort of stamping, or 

 rudimentary printing. Seals and stamps bearing reverse legends are 

 not infrequent, and, in 1908, the Italian Archeological Committee at 

 work in Crete discovered a terra-cotta inscription whose letters had 

 been impressed separately. According to Lacroix 1 Cicero had at least the 

 idea of movable type, for in arguing against the Epicurean conception 

 of the world as formed by the chance concourse of atoms, he uses this 

 curious line of reasoning: "Why not believe, also, that by throwing to- 

 gether, indiscriminately, innumerable forms of letters of the alphabet, 

 either in gold or in any other substance, one can print on the ground 

 with these letters, the annals of Ennius?" 



D'Israeli in bis " Curiosities of Literature " has a quaint passage in 

 which he suggests that the Bom an Senate, fearing the effects of printed 

 books, prevented movable type from coming into use. Another sugges- 

 tion is that of De Quincey, who expresses the view, which he states he 

 derives from Archbishop Whately, that the reason the Romans did not 

 use the press was not from lack of knowledge of movable type but from 

 lack of paper with which to make use of it. The ancients, as is well 

 known, used not paper, but papyrus, on which to write. Shreds of this 

 river plant (which, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, still 

 grows in the Nile valley) were split apart in long pieces, interwoven 

 with one another and the whole then heavily pressed till a smooth and 

 polished surface suitable for writing was obtained. 



But though lack of paper might have impeded the development of 

 typography in antiquity, had its invention, otherwise, been feasible, this 

 does not seem to have been the main cause accounting for its absence. 

 For, after the fall of Samarcand in 704, the Saracens became acquainted 

 with the manufacture of paper and, also, no doubt, learned of block 

 printing among the Chinese; yet printing did not appear in the cali- 

 phates of Arabia or of Spain any more than it did among the Romans. 

 (Among the Chinese, needless to say, it was the multitude of written 

 characters which prevented the development of typography from block 

 printing.) It may be thus suspected that printing was wanting in the 

 Roman Empire fcr much the same reasons that it was wanting among 

 the Saracens. By the end of the first century of our era there were 

 already written nearly all the works which we call classics and a num- 

 1 "Arts in the Middle Ages," English translation, p. 486. 



