Outline of Course, Outcomes for Students and Preliminary Reading
The Book in the Ancient World
Course lecturers: Dr Matthew Nicholls, Dr Marigold Norbye, Dr. Kathryn E. Piquette, Dr Eleanor
Robson, and Mr Alan Cole, Curator of the Museum of Writing.
The course is an intensive survey of the origins of, and the changes in, textual culture that took place
between c. 2500 BC and 400 AD. It will set these changes into their related historical contexts and
place considerable emphasis on the material nature of writing and book construction. This will
involve extensive use of materials from the Museum of Writing (Curator: Alan Cole) currently housed
in the Senate House Library. In addition to handling and using original artefacts, students will have
the opportunity to experiment with writing on clay tablets, on papyrus, and on wax tablets using
modern reconstructions under the guidance of Alan Cole who will provide practical sessions during
some of the seminars (these are asterisked). The course will end by looking at the ways in which the
modern book form (the codex) emerged at the end of the period, and how some of the ancient texts
studied in the course survived through the post-classical manuscript periods to the age of printing.
Course Outline
Monday 29 June
1. Introduction: the origins of writing and the emergence of the book
Palaeolithic cave painting, proto-writing, early accounting systems, etc.
2. The clay tablet book in Sumerian culture
Cuneiform; Sumerian; early versions of Gilgamesh ; the technology of clay and stylus, and a
practical exercise in using it, etc.
Tuesday 30 June
3. The clay tablet book in Assyria and Babylonia
Akkadian; Hamurabi’s Code of laws; the Creation Epic; mathematics and astronomy; temple
schools; Nineveh; Ashurbanipal’s library, etc.
4. Text in Egypt c. 3000-c. 1550 BC
Hieroglyphic script; Pyramid texts, coffin texts; shroud texts; manufacture of papyrus; the
technology of brush and papyrus, and a practical exercise in using it, etc.
5. Text in Egypt c. 1550-c. 300 BC
Hieratic and later cursive scripts; early and later developments of the Book of the Dead;
mathematics, astronomy, architecture, spells and stories, etc.
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Wednesday 1 July
6. The book in Greece c. 700- c. 300 BC
The evolution of Greek script; Linear A and Linear B; the technical revolution marked by the
transcription of the Homeric tradition; the emergence of book production in fifth century
Athens; the technology of reed pen and papyrus, and a practical exercise in using it.
7. Materials and Instruments: The Middle East, Egypt, and Europe
8. The Greek book in the Hellenistic World
Libraries at Alexandria and Pergamum; the Alexandrian recension of Homeric texts; Homeric
texts as textbooks; the survival of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides; the Septuagint, etc.
Thursday 2 July
9. The Roman book c. 300 BC-early Empire
Etruscan; evolution of Latin; early inscriptions; Ennius; M. Porcius Cato; Plautus; Terence;
libraries; Oxyrhynchus; Cicero, etc.
10. The Roman book in the Empire
The book trade in Rome and elsewhere (e.g. Lyon); libraries in Rome, Ephesus, etc.; Martial;
Oxyrhynchus; the codex form; leather and parchment; the Hebraic book (including the Dead
Sea Scrolls); the earliest Christian books.
11. The triumph of the codex
Pugillares, note books, Martial, the impact of Christianity, etc.
Friday 3 July
12. Partial survival: the ancient Book 400-1500 AD (Part I)
Early monasteries; Byzantine culture (the importance of anthologies, e.g. Stobaeus's
Anthologion , Photius's Bibliotheca the Greek Anthology ); Carolingian renaissance (the
importance of teaching and exemplary texts); Petrarch; Venice and Aldus Manutius.
13. Partial survival: the ancient Book 400-1500 AD (Part II)
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Outcomes for students
1. An appreciation of the economic, social and cultural context of the ancient societies in which
various writing systems and book forms developed.
2. An understanding of various writing systems and technologies employed in different cultures
and the effect these had on the production, distribution and consumption of texts in those
cultures.
3. An appreciation of the primacy and importance of commercial and religious texts in ancient
cultures.
4. An appreciation of the importance of archives and libraries in the ancient world.
5. An appreciation of the problems of establishing the significance and extent of 'literacy' in
various textual cultures of the ancient world.
6. An understanding of the problems of limited and partial survival of textual material from the
ancient past and the effect this might have had on current accounts of that past.
Recommended Introductory Reading
1. J. Cerný, Paper and Books in Ancient Egypt (London: H. K. Lewis, 1952).
2. Leo Deuel, Testaments of Time (London: Secker & Warburg, 1966).
3. David Diringer, The Book before Printing (New York: Dover Publications, 1982).
4. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (eds), The Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), chapters 5, 6, 7, 9, and 13.
5. W. A. Johnson, Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2004).
6. Stephen Quirke and Jeffrey Spencer (eds), Ancient Egypt (London: British Museum Press,
1992).
7. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974).
8. C. H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London: OUP, 1983)
9. Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge: CUP,
1989).
10. C. B. F. Walker, Cuneiform (London: British Museum Press, 1987).
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