ORIENTAL ELEMENTS ()K CULTURE IN THE OCCIDENT. 521 



wa8 another invention, I^nieiin that of printino-. on which in rix-ent 

 years new liti,'ht lias been shed, t'specially throiioh the iinds in Ko-vpt. 

 If printing now appears' to us as the greatest acliieven:ent of civiliza- 

 tion, the merit of the invention rests lesson the fundamental idea than 

 on two pi-eliniinarv conditions which rendered it possihh^ to be turned 

 to account, and without which the process would havo remained 

 unpractical, namely, the manufacture of a cheap writing material 

 and the phonetic system of writing ))y wdiich the entire fund of 

 language can be ri^presented through two dozen signs, A\'e shall see 

 how the Orient can claim in all those elements a considerable share of 

 glory. In tln^ first i)lace, as regards the fundamental idea of printing, 

 it can hardly be called a feat of genius, for thi' idea already existed in 

 the use of ancient seal signs and mint stamps. The Babylonians 

 who, as is well known, used clay as writing material, knew a method 

 of multiplying texts analogous to ])ook printing. We have old 

 oriental seal cylindei's" covered with longer or shortei- texts that were 

 impressed in soft clay as the cylinders rollefl o\(>r it. Writing mate- 

 rials of classical anticpiity were too costly to make the general appli- 

 cation of this process feasible. The art died out until East Asia 

 soh'ed the problem of material in a way Ixd'ore unsurpass(^d. As 

 recently as 1ST5 \Vatteid)ach, in the second edition of his Schrift- 

 wesen im Mittelalter (p. 114), said: ''Paper '■ ■• " wraps its 

 origin in thick darkness which will pro])al)ly never l)e dissipated.''' 

 How strangeh" this sentence now reads since the history of pa})er has 

 come to be perhaps more unfolded to us than the history of any other 

 anci(Mit invention. We owe this progress abo\e all to the fortunate 

 circumstance that the greater })art of the papyrus tind in the Fayum 

 came into the hands of investigators at Vienna who undtn'stood it well 

 enough to make a scientific use of it, while thi^ pai't which sti'ayed to 

 Berlin has contributed nothing to the numerous iind surprising results 

 gained in Vienna. 



Ancient civilized nations at lirst used for wi'iting matei-ials what 

 nature produced in a condition already suited to tiiat purpose. So 

 the Chinese formerly em\)loyed bamboo, as we can infer from the 

 composition of some of th(^ charactcn's of tluMr indeographic wi'itings,^ 

 The employment of color contrast must also be considered as a step 

 forward, for at tirst the signs were merely scratched, as was the cus- 

 t<Mn of our ancestors. I surmise that the invention of the pit (or 



"See Furtwiiiii^^lci', Antikc ( Jeniiiicii, \n\. 1, j)l;it(' 1; vhI. :!, p. 1 I'f. Illiistratidiis 

 ai'c found, for instance, in Iloiiinicl's ( icscliirlitc iljiliylonirns ami Assyricns. lirfore 

 file I'oniinu; of scaralis into use tliis form of seal |>n'vailcii also in K.i.ry])t. Kart- 

 wJingler, oji. cit. Sec Dyntff, Kiiiii-cr iliirdi das Kt"init,diciic .\ntii|iiariuiii in 

 Miinchen, i). 1 ()'.». 



''Comp. for the following Friedrich llirth, Die I'",rlindnng des I'apicrs in China: 

 T'onng Pao, Leitlen, 1890, vol. i, p. i ff, reprinted, without Chinese types, in his 

 Chinesische Studien, vol. i, ]>. LTiUff. 



