Thinking Beyond Science

The Earliest Writing Media
When humans first began to record their thoughts, writing materials were whatever could be found—pebbles, shards of pottery, bits of bark, or scraps of bone. These materials were cheap and plentiful, but they were also small, easily broken, and ill-suited for anything more than a label or a quick note. The very nature of these ancient “notepads” discouraged elaborate storytelling or deep reflection; nobody inscribed philosophical treatises on a pebble or a potsherd.

The Rise of the Clay Tablet
The Sumerians changed the course of history by introducing the first specialized writing medium. They crafted tablets from the clay abundant in Mesopotamia, washing and shaping the material into thin blocks, which were then inscribed with sharpened reeds. After drying, these tablets served as durable carriers for everything from government records to lengthier epics and religious accounts. To accommodate longer works, Sumerians even numbered their tablets, creating sequences that foreshadowed the concept of the modern book. Despite their durability, clay tablets were cumbersome, so they were reserved for formal records—and writing itself remained the province of specialized scribes.

The Advent of the Scroll
Around 2500 BC, Egyptians made a breakthrough: papyrus scrolls. By layering and pressing the fibers of the Nile’s papyrus plants, they created smooth, white sheets glued end-to-end into generous scrolls. These scrolls were portable and flexible, rapidly gaining favor in Greece and Rome, especially once parchment made from animal hides replaced papyrus. But scrolls remained expensive: papyrus had to be imported, and transforming hides into parchment was a specialized, resource-intensive craft.

Wax Tablets: Writing for the Masses
As literacy expanded, demand grew for a cheaper, reusable writing tool. The answer: the wax tablet—an inexpensive wooden frame filled with wax, onto which words could be easily scratched and later erased. Equipped with a stylus that had both a sharp writing end and a blunt scraping end, wax tablets were especially useful for students, who could reuse them again and again. These tablets played a pivotal role in democratizing writing, making it a daily tool for the literate, rather than a privilege of officials and scribes.

The Birth of the Book
The real innovation came with the codex, the earliest ancestor of the modern book. Inspired by bound wax tablets, Roman artisans later sewed multiple parchment sheets between covers of leather, creating a practical, compact format that replaced costly scrolls. Codices could be written on both sides of the page, dramatically reducing resource use and production costs. The ease of flipping through pages, their portability, and their ability to conceal sensitive texts made books the medium of choice for early Bibles and controversial manuscripts.

Books were also much more compact, making them easier to transport and to conceal. They quickly became the format of choice for publishing early Bibles and other controversial works. Books were easier to navigate too. Finding a particular passage, an awkward task with a long roll of text, became a simple matter of flipping back and forth through a set of pages.

Reading and the Legacy of Orality
Yet, even as book technology advanced, the habits and constraints of oral culture persisted. Silent reading was rare; most texts—whether scroll, tablet, or book—were read aloud, both in groups and alone. The practice of reading silently was considered so unusual that, in AD 380, Saint Augustine expressed astonishment at seeing Bishop Ambrose reading to himself without uttering a word.

Scriptura Continua and the Reader’s Burden
The ancient texts posed peculiar challenges: words ran together with no spaces or punctuation, a format called scriptura continua. Just as spoken language flows without pauses between words, early scripts mirrored this pattern. Meaning was typically inferred through inflection and accent rather than word order—rules for sentence structure had not yet evolved.

This lack of separation placed a considerable cognitive burden on readers. As Paul Saenger notes in his work on scribal books, readers in antiquity had to painstakingly parse meaning by slowly working through the dense text, employing their full mental faculties. This not only made reading laborious but also necessitated reading aloud, as sounding out words was critical to comprehension. Nevertheless, in societies still rooted in oral tradition, this method didn’t hinder enjoyment: readers found pleasure in the rhythmic patterns of spoken text—often delivered by slaves or designated readers to an audience, rather than enjoyed as solitary activity.

Conclusion
The journey from carved stones to silently read books illustrates the evolving relationship between technology and the experience of reading and writing. Each shift not only changed how information was stored, transported, and shared but also influenced how people thought, learned, and related to their world.

Source – The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

Goodreads – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9778945-the-shallows

Read Next Previous in the Series :