The Story of Assyria by James Baikie

Author:James Baikie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perennial Press

A KING’S LIBRARY OF TWENTY-FIVE CENTURIES AGO

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I DARESAY YOU SOMETIMES GO into a museum, and see the ancestors, as you might call them, of some of the things we use most to-day—a model, for instance, of Stephenson’s first railway-engine, the “Rocket,” or a model of the first steamship that ever ploughed the ocean. It is interesting to see how the engine or the steamship has grown out of the quaint old-fashioned thing that we see in the museum case into the powerful giant that hauls our modern trains, or the huge turbine-driven battleship that rules the seas. Well, did you ever think that just in the same way you can see the ancestors of this little book that you are reading, and of all the other books that stand upon your shelves and on those of all the libraries in the world? Some of them are just as quaint to look at, compared with our modern books, as the “Rocket” compared with a modern express engine; but, all the same, they are the great-grandfathers, ever so many times removed, of the volumes in your own bookcase.

King Solomon once said: “Of making of many books there is no end”; and it is quite true. Long before his time, indeed, almost as soon as men had learned how to shape letters and words so that other people could read them, they began to put together bits of history, and stories about their gods and their heroes, which made what are really and truly books. Each nation, almost, had its own separate way of making a book, and, no doubt, thought its neighbor nation’s way a very silly and clumsy one. But, in the main, the different ways could be more or less reduced to two. There were nations that wrote what they wanted to say with a brush, or kind of pen, and inks of different colors, on a roll of prepared stuff, which might be parchment, made out of an animal’s skin, or papyrus, what we call paper, made out of a plant; and there were nations which wrote what they wanted to say with a sharp-pointed tool on a flat tablet of prepared stuff, which might be wax, or might be clay.

In the old days these two different systems practically divided the bookmaking of the world between them, and it was a question which way would prevail. There was a long time when it looked as though the second way, of the clay tablet and the sharp point, would win the day; but, fortunately for us all, the other way proved the more convenient in the end, and our libraries are made of paper books, not of clay bricks. The chief race that used the papyrus roll and the brush or pen with ink was, as you know, the Egyptian people; and I have told you elsewhere how they made their rolls, and how they wrote upon them with their quaint and beautiful picture-writing. The chief races that used the

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