evidence of its having been occasionally employed, to the end of the seventh century, when it was superseded by parchment. All public documents, under Charlemagne and his dynasty, were written. on this last, and the papyrus was then entirely given up.

Parchment, indeed, had been invented long before, and was used for writing, as early as the year 250 before our era, by Eumenes, king of Pergamus; who being desirous of collecting a library which should vie with that of Alexandria, and being prevented by the jealousy of the Ptolemies from obtaining a sufficient quantity of papyrus, had recourse to this substitute; and its invention at Pergamus claimed, and secured to it, the lasting name of Pergamena.* It was made of the skins of sheep and calves; but to the former the name of parchment is more correctly applied, as to the latter that of vellum.t

The monopoly of the papyrus in Egypt so increased the price of the commodity, that persons in humble life could not afford to purchase it for ordinary purposes; few documents, therefore, are met with written on papyrus, except funeral rituals, the sales of estates, and official papers, which were absolutely required: and so valuable was it, that they frequently obliterated the old writing, and inscribed another document on the same sheet.

For common purposes, pieces of broken pottery,

* Called also membrana by the Romans.

+ From vellus, "a skin," or vitulinum, "of calf."

stone, board, and leather were used; an order to visit some monument, a soldier's leave of absence, accounts, and various memoranda, were often written on the fragments of an earthenware vase; an artist sketched a picture, which he was about to introduce in a temple or a sepulchre, on a large flat slab of limestone, or on a wooden panel prepared with a thin coating of stucco and even parts of funeral rituals were inscribed on square pieces of stone, on stuccoed cloth, or on leather. Sometimes leather rolls were substituted for papyri, and buried in the same manner with the deceased; they are of an early period, and probably adopted in consequence of the high price of the papyrus; but few have hitherto been found at Thebes.

In the infancy of society, various materials were employed for writing, as stones, bricks, tiles, plates of bronze, lead and other metals, wooden tables the leaves and bark of trees, and the shoulder bones of animals. Wooden tablets covered with wax, were long in use among the Romans, as well as the papyrus ; and the inner bark of trees ‡, + and pieces of linen §, had been previously adopted by them.

Many Eastern people still write on the leaves of trees, or on wooden tablets, and waraka con

* These wooden tablets, which are covered with a glazed composition capable of receiving ink, were used by the Egyptians long after they had papyri, and they are still common in schools at Cairo in lieu of our slates. One is represented in wood-cut, No. 90. fig. 5.

Whence the word " paper;" as in byblus, or biblus, originated the

name bible or book.

ま

Called liber, whence the Latin name liber, " a book."

Liv. iv. 7. xiii. 20. "Linteis libris," about the year 440 B. C.

tinues to signify, in Arabic, both "a leaf" and "paper."

The early Arabs committed their poetry and compositions to the shoulder-bones of sheep: they afterwards obtained the papyrus paper from Egypt, on which the poems called Moallaqat were written, in gold letters; and after their conquests in Asia and Africa, these people so speedily profited by, and improved the inventions of the nations they had subdued, that parchment was manufactured in Syria, Arabia, and Egypt, which in colour and delicacy might vie with our modern paper. It speedily superseded the use of the papyrus, and continued to be employed until the discovery of the method of making paper from cotton and silk, called Carta bombycina, which is proved by Montfaucon to have been known at least as early as A.D. 1100; and is supposed to have been invented about the beginning of the ninth century. Being introduced into Spain from Syria, it was denominated Carta Damascena; and some manuscripts on cotton paper are said to exist in the Escurial, written in the eleventh century.

It is a matter of doubt to what nation, and period, the invention of paper manufactured from linen ought to be ascribed. The Chinese were acquainted with the secret of making it from various vegetable substances long before it was known in Europe; the perfection to which they have carried this branch of art continues to excite our admiration ; and the librarian Casiri relates," according to

first imported from China to Samarcand A. H. 30 (A. D. 652), and invented, or rather introduced, at Mecca A. H. 88 (A. D. 710)." *

It may, however, be questioned whether it was made from linen at that early period, and we have no positive proof of linen paper being known even by the Saracens, prior to the eleventh century. The Moors, as might be expected, soon introduced it into Spain, and the Escurial library is said to contain manuscripts written on this kind of paper, as old as the twelfth century.†

But paper of mixed cotton and linen, which was made at the same time, appears to have been in more general use; and linen paper continued to be rare in most European countries till the fifteenth century. That it was known in Germany as early as the year 1312, has been satisfactorily ascertained by existing documents, and a letter on linen paper, written from Germany to Hugh Despencer, about the year 1315, is preserved in the Chapter-house at Westminster; which, even to the water-mark, resembles that made at the present day.

It was not till the close of the sixteenth century that paper was manufactured in England. The first was merely of a coarse brown quality, very. similar to that of the modern Arabs, whose skill in this, as in many arts and sciences, has been transferred to people once scarcely known to them, and then greatly their inferiors; and writing or printing

* Gibbon, vol. ix. c. 51. p. 379.

+ Some doubt the existence of any MS. on linen paper before the year 1270; but an Arabic version of the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, in the Escurial, dates in the beginning of the 13th century.

paper was not made in London before 1690; France and Holland having, till that time, supplied us with an annual importation, to the amount of nearly 100,000 pounds.

TANNERS AND LEATHER CUTTERS.

The tanning and preparation of leather was also a branch of art, in which the Egyptians evinced considerable skill; the leather cutters, as I have already observed, constituted one of the principal subdivisions of the third caste; and a district of the city was exclusively appropriated to them, in the Libyan part of Thebes.

Leather is little capable of resisting the action of damp, the salts of the earth, or excessive dryness, so that we cannot reasonably expect to find it suf ficiently well preserved, to enable us to judge of its quality; but the fineness of that employed for making the straps, placed across the bodies of mummies, discovered at Thebes, and the beauty of the figures stamped upon them, satisfactorily prove the skill of "the leather cutters *" and the antiquity of embossing: some of these bearing the names of kings, who ruled Egypt about the period of the Exodus, or 3300 years ago.

Many of the occupations of their trade are portrayed on the painted walls of the tombs at Thebes. They made shoes, sandals, the coverings and seats of chairs or sofas, bow-cases, and most of the orna