Everyday Archaeology: Notebooks

Dr Matilda Siebrecht
Aug 30
10 min read

There is a story from Plato (from his work Phaedrus dating from around 380 BCE) about the King of Egypt (Thamus) being presented with writing by its so-called inventor (Theuth), who claims that writing will help with memory and wisdom. In response, the King Thamus claims that actually the process of writing things down will cause people to become more forgetful, because they rely too much on their written notes and not enough on their own memory. Doesn't that sound familiar in this day of increased AI technology?

Nevertheless, the King Thamus has a point here, and the transition from oral to written tradition - aka, the change from people telling each other stories and passing down histories via word of mouth, to then writing things down for perpetuity - suggests a cultural shift in the control of knowledge. History and culture were no longer adaptive and fluctuating. It was something that was quite literally set in stone, and whoever had set it into stone was the one who decided which version to record. This is why I personally have always focused on prehistory in my archaeological research. Of course, there are interpretative biases in the approach of archaeological research itself - in my own background and experiences, in how I've learned knowledge, in how I perceive the world - but at least the huge bias of historic records is removed from the situation.

But I digress. I simply wished to highlight that the simple notebook, while being an apparently harmless object that is now so everyday as to be considered banal, would actually have been a very powerful tool, and was instrumental in the development of modern society into heirarchies and other classes. This, to me, is the most important aspect to consider when thinking about this particular object type. However, aside from the cultural and philosophical implications of the archaeology of notebooks, it's also fascinating to look at their archaeology and material development.

The first question we should probably ask ourselves is, what actually is a notebook? If we take the description literally, then we would identify a notebook as a book in which to take notes. Of course, the word "book" here is already a problematic one, as books as we know them didn't emerge until relatively recently, and yet writing has been found in the archaeological record as early as the 4th century BCE (more on that below). So how should we then define a notebook? I quite like the suggestion put forth by Richard Yeo:

"We use them to record information that we do not want to forget, but not necessarily items that we wish to memorize. Our emphasis is on noting for later retrieval." (Yeo 2008, pg 115)

If we go based on that concept - one of having some kind of material on which to note down with the focus being on using it as a reminder, then I would also argue that I notebook should be something portable. You don't want to have to go back to a stationary object like a cave wall or an engraed pillar every time you want to recall the exact information you noted down. You want to be able to do the prehistoric equivalent of slipping it into your back pocket, to be checked later.

The first archaeological evidence of writing on a portable object are clay tablets from the Uruk period in Mesopotamia, most of which are engraved with a form of writing known as cuneiform - a reference to the wedge-shaped symbols used. The photo below is of a replica clay tablet that I have, which is a copy of one currently housed at the British museum from the Late Ururk period, dating between 3100-3000 BCE . As you can see, it fits easily in the hand, and so would have been a useful portable surface on which to record its contents, which actually relate to the amount of beer and bread owed to a particular set of workers.

I always find it slightly amusing that the earliest forms of writing are simple administrative notes. Of course, there is Epic of Gilgamesh - supposedly the oldest literary work in the world - which was also transcribed on clay tablets and alledgedly refers to events that took place around 4000 years ago. However, the tablets themselves only date to the 7th century BCE. The oldest physical written remains for the previous 2500 years or so were basically lists and admin.

Of course, those clay tablets which have survived did so because of the way in which they were preserved. Once clay is baked, it becomes significantly more durable, and therefore more likely to survive for thousands of years in the right environmental conditions. However, once clay is baked, it is also unable to be changed, which means that as far as notebooks go, they might not be considered particularly useful, because you would need to find a new tablet for each new note you want to make. This had let to the suggestion - also backed up by various historical sources - that not all clay tablets would have been baked. Some would have been kept wet enough that the writing would survive for as long as it needed to in order for the information to be relayed, and then the tablet would be wiped clean and remoulded to present a fresh surface. The earliest form of an erasable notebook.

A similar concept is that of wax tablets - consisting of a wooden board covered in (usually) black or red wax - which were also commonly used in ancient societies all the way up until the medieval period and the inevitable spread of paper (more on that later). The image below is of another replica of mine (yes I own a lot) of a Mesopotamian cylinder seal featuring cuneiform writing and an image of the sun god Shamash (who incidentally played a fiarly prominent role in the Epic of Gilgamesh). The seal can be rolled on wax to create a repeatable pattern, either of writing or pictures or a bit of both.

Wax tablets may have been especially useful on things like ships, because unbaked clay tablets would have been ruined on contact with water, whether wax tablets would remain relatively unharmed. And in fact the oldest archaeological example we have of a wax tablet comes from the Uluburun shipwreck, which was discovered of the coast of Turkey but is thought to have originated in a Cypriot or Syro-Palestinian port, and has been dated to the late 14th century BCE. Of course, because wax tablets are by their very nature erasable, it may indeed be that they were in use before this date as well, but would not have been recognisable as a writing tool by archaeologists.

So what comes after the use of tablets? First of all, I will catch myself on the use of the word "after", because although it is possible to overly simplify the development of notebooks as we have defined them here into different technologies and materials, I have already demonstrated with the example of wax tablets above that there was a lot of overlap. What's really fascinating is that different writing styles and technologies emerged apparently independently in different parts of the world. Like so many other things - metallurgy, agriculture, pottery to name but a few - it was apparently just an inspired leap in technological development whose time had come.

Neverthless, this is just a blog post, so I don't have time to venture into the many nuances and threads of the intricate development of writing and written technologies throughout human history. Let's instead simplify things and head over to the next material, which is no double the one that first popped into most people's minds when trying to think of the oldest form of notebooks: papyrus. Unfortunately I do not have a replica of papyrus (even though I did once spot a whole stack of them in my local charity shop and was very tempted, and have regretted not getting them ever since...), but I imagine that the majority of you reading this may already have some vague idea of what papyrus is. In case you don't, here is a typical example from the Museum of Cairo.

The oldest papyrus with recognisable writing on it ever found comes from a site in Egypt thought to have been a storage depot in the fourth dynasty, associated with the rule of the famous Khufu, who ruled around 2500 BCE. If you recognise the name of Khufu then you will no doubt also know that he is associated with the building of the famous pyramids at Giza. And, very excitingly, this ancient piece of papyrus was also apparently associated with that most famous of constructions. Known as the Diary of Merer, it relates the everyday organisational activities of an official called - unsurprisingly - Merer. Again, we can interpret this papyrus as a notebook, intended to be used for recording important information that may be required again later. An apparently unimportant object, but one that was part of the ever-turning cogs of construction that evenetually produced one of the great wonders of the ancient world.

One of the most well-known materials associated with "older" forms of writing is parchment, which is created from stretched animals skins and is thus not only relatively flexible, but also fairly lightweight in comparison to a block of clay or wax. The popular story is that parchment was invented in the city of Pergamon by Eumenes II in the 2nd century BCE. Actually, there are several archaeological examples of parchment that date to earlier periods, including samples from the famous Dead Sea Scrolls which have been dated to around 2000 BCE. Parchment as a material continued to be used for thousands of years, most famously in medieval manuscripts and religious texts, and is actually still in use today for particular document types.

But of course we have to cover the most famous of notebook materials: Paper, which was first recorded as a material in 105 CE and attributed to Ts'ai Lun, who was a court official of the Han Dynasty. However, one of the issues with someone recording that they've invented something in this early period of history, is that we don't actually know whether or not that was the starting point of that technology, or whether it had actually been happening for hundreds if not thousands of years already and this was just the first time that someone wrote it down. In fact, archaeological excavations conducted in the mid 20th century in Baqiao discovered fragments of hemp attached to a bronze mirror, which were identified as a form of paper, and were dated to 200 BC - a whole 300 years earlier than the alledged "invention" by Ts'ai Lun. There is also an ongoing debate over whether the technique of papermaking may actually have originated in India, as suggested by a historic record by Nearcticus - Alexander the Great's ambassafor to Punjab - in 327 BCE which alledgedly describes the Indian technique of beating cotton to make paper. Of course, interpretations of the text and reference differ, and political influence has made an unbiased scholarly discussion of such an important technological origin virtually impossible.

And so we work our way forward in history, following the increasing complexity of note-taking and material development. But when does the first notebook actually emerge?

Something that I feel needs to be briefly highlighted is the difference in technique used to create the writing when the development of papyrus and paper occured. Until then, the symbols used in writing and been created by pressing a stylus into a pliable surface to create impresions. However, the introduction of materials such as papyrus, or similar plant-based materials such as Tapa in other parts of the world, was only made possible thanks to the use of pigments such as ink, the earliest of which are carbon-based inks in both Egypt and China. Tablets, while fascinating and definitely portable in their own right, were nevertheless relatively bulky, as they needed to preserve the impressions on their thick surface so had to be handled with a certain level of care. Ink, on the other hand, did not need such careful handling, which allowed writers of the ancient world to use materials that could be in some way condensed for even more portability. For example, rolled up into a scroll such as the diary of Merer, or folded into a codex like the famed examples from ancient Rome which date back as far as 200 BCE. This may seem pretty obvious to us today, but again, something so apparently simple was actually a big step in the road to the development of the notebook that's currently sitting on your desk. And it led to one of the biggest development steps - that of book binding.

Some of the earliest evidence for book binding comes from India, where materials such as palm leaves, bamboo, and other natural materials were inscribed and then bound together between boards for protection. One of the oldest examples of this is the Pārameśvaratantra - a Sanskritt Manuscript dated to 828 CE, but there is historic evidence that this technique of binding together sheets and leaves goes back as far as the 2nd century BCE. In other parts of the world, binding together parchment and papyrus also takes off, especially in religious texts and manuscripts. Binding becomes gradually more complex and varied as time goes on, until you have a whole range of styles that could fill their own blog post.

The real start of what might be most similar to the notebook that lies on the desk in front of you now is generally thought to have been prompted by the famous Gutenberg Press, invented by Johann Gutenberg in the mid 1400s, which changed the book from an expensive, elite object, to one for the everyday person. Printing technology meant that more books could be produced in a fraction of the time and - most importantly - at a fraction of the cost. Consequently, the price of books went down, and so did the price of paper. This was the Renaissance, when notebooks really thrived (often referred to as "the commonplace book"), used in their hundreds by artistic geniuses and scientific inventors, and then in later years in their thousands by everyone from housekeepers to high magistrates, leading us ever forward towards the apparent superiority of modern industrial society. And now, we have electronic notebooks that can do our thinking for us.

I wonder how that ancient King of Egypt in Socrates's Phaedrus would react if he saw how the written word has developed, and more importantly the tools that we use to note it. Would it be awe at the might of what we have accomplished? Horror at the enormity of our technological dependancy? Confusion at why we think it necessary to record every single element of our existence? A simple "I told you so"? Who knows. Perhaps that would be a good topic for a future fictional-focused blog post. I must make sure to make a note of it somewhere...

Home

Founder

Projects

Contact

Podcast

Blog

Everyday Archaeology: Notebooks

Further reading