Clay books are the most ancient. Words and symbols were squeezed out on the still soft and wet clay with a sharp stick. Then the planks were dried and fired in ovens, like pots. Sometimes the recording was very long and took up many clay tablets. Books were created from dozens and sometimes hundreds of such pages. Such books were written in the ancient states of Mesopotamia and Assyria.

In ancient Egypt, a plant that grew in abundance along the banks of the Nile River was used as a writing material. This plant was called PAPYRUS. Thick trunks were cut into strips and dried. They wrote on them with sticks, dipping them in ink or colored paints. Then the sheets were glued together to form a book in the form of a long scroll, usually about 6 meters long.

After reading, the scroll was rolled into a tube and stored in a special case. People have used papyri for many centuries. The British Museum in London houses papyrus 40 meters long, but scrolls 45 meters long have also been found. A scroll is one continuous page. The scrolls contain documents, scientific works, and literary works of the peoples of the Ancient East, Greece and Rome.

When we try to imagine the beginning of Russian literature, our thought necessarily turns to the history of writing. The importance of writing in the history of the development of civilization can hardly be overestimated. But people did not always master the art of writing. This art has been developing for a long time, over many millennia.

Certificate from Zhiznomir to Mikula. You bought a slave in Pskov, and the princess grabbed me for it (implied: convicting me of theft). And then the squad vouched for me. So send a letter to that husband if he has a slave. But I want to, having bought horses and mounted the prince’s husband, [go] to confrontation. And you, if you haven’t taken that money [yet], don’t take anything from him."

Papyrus and birch bark were replaced by a new writing material - PARCHMENT. Parchment was obtained from finely tanned bull skins; it was more convenient and, most importantly, more durable than papyrus and birch bark. But it was very expensive material. Depending on the format and number of sheets, one book required from 10 to 30 animal skins - a whole herd!

According to the testimony of one of the scribes who worked at the turn of the 14th-15th centuries, three rubles were paid for the leather for the book. At that time, you could buy three horses with this money. Therefore, even when parchment came to Rus', birch bark continued to be used for a long time as a cheaper material.

At first, books from parchment were made according to tradition in the form of scrolls, and then they began to bend a large sheet of parchment in four, in the form of a notebook. The word “notebook” comes from the Greek “notebook on,” which means “folded in four.” Several notebooks were sewn together to create a book very similar to a modern one. And this book was called “CODE”.

The first creators of handwritten books were monks. Creating a manuscript is hard and exhausting work. The scribe wrote out letter by letter, line by line. The working day lasted in summer from sunrise to sunset, and in winter they also included the dark half of the day, when they wrote by candlelight or torches.

The Ostromir Gospel is the oldest Russian handwritten book. It was written in the middle of the 11th century. More than 900 years ago, the book master scribe Gregory rewrote this Gospel for the Novgorod mayor Ostromir. It took almost seven months to write the Gospel. The scribe managed to write no more than 3 pages per day.

Books were usually written with a quill pen and ink. The king had the privilege of writing with a swan and even a peacock feather. The feather was always removed from the left wing of the bird so that the bend would be comfortable for the right writing hand. The feather was degreased by sticking it into hot sand, then the tip was cut off obliquely, split and sharpened with a special penknife. They also scraped out errors in the text.

Medieval ink, unlike the blue and black we are used to, was brown in color, as it was made on the basis of ferrous compounds, or, more simply, rust. Pieces of old iron were dipped into the water, which, rusting, painted it brown. Ancient recipes for making ink have been preserved. In addition to iron, oak or alder bark, cherry glue, kvass, honey and many other substances were used as components, giving the ink the necessary viscosity, color, and stability.

The first, capital letter in the text - “initial” or “capital cap” - was most often written in red. Since then they say - “write from the red line”. It was written out much larger than the main text, and was entirely entwined with ornaments, through which one could see a mysterious animal, bird or human face.

In the 2nd century BC. e. Paper was invented in China. It was cheaper material. Paper was invented by Cai Lun. He found a way to make paper from the fibrous interior of the mulberry tree bark. The Chinese have kept the secret of paper production for 800 years. No writing material has received such recognition as paper.

Writing paper was cheaper than parchment and more convenient than birch bark. Therefore, in later times, only very valuable books were written on parchment, mainly necessary for church use: the Gospel, the Apostle, as well as synodics or chronicles passed down from generation to generation.

Among the ancient Russian book writers there were, of course, not only copyists, but also writers. They recorded folk legends, described the events taking place around them, and wrote their own works. Each chronicle begins with the words: “in the summer of such and such”... and reports on the events that occurred that year. Messages can be both short and long, sometimes they even include lengthy stories about important events. But sometimes the chronicler limited himself to a brief remark like: “In the summer of 6752 (1244) there was nothing more” (nothing happened). The most ancient writer, whose name is well known to us, Nestor the Chronicler is the author of the first history of the Russian state - the Tale of Bygone Years.

The manuscript, which has come down to us from ancient times, itself is a witness to the era when it was created. Therefore, handwritten books of Ancient Rus' will always be an inexhaustible source for studying the history of the Russian people, their language, literature and art.

On April 19, 1563, Fedorov opened the first “printing house” in Moscow, that is, a printing house. He opened it by order of the king. The printing press was then a matter of national importance, and no one dared to start printing books without the king’s instructions.

The first printed book in Russian was published in March 1564. It was called "Acts and Epistles of the Apostles", although more often they say simply "Apostle". Ivan Fedorov and his assistant Pyotr Mstislavets worked on this book for almost a year! Ivan the Terrible himself visited Fedorov’s printing house and was pleased.

It was a rather plump volume of ecclesiastical content. Printers wanted the book to look like old handwritten books. Therefore, its font reproduced a handwritten letter, the first letter of each chapter was highlighted in red paint. The beginning of each chapter was decorated with a pattern in which grapevines and pine cones were intertwined.

Ivan Fedorov also created an alphabet using Slavic letters. This alphabet was printed, and they began to teach it to children not only from rich families, but also from poor ones. To decorate the pages, Ivan Fedorov came up with and cut out various headpieces and endings himself. Page from Ivan Fedorov's first printed primer, 1574

... Big things are seen from a distance... Alas for contemporaries! it is not possible to appreciate the meaning and significance of the event that is taking place before their eyes. This also applies to the emergence of book printing, which brought about a genuine revolution in the dissemination of information, and therefore in the development of culture, scientific knowledge, literature and art.

Today, book production processes are automated. But even today the book goes through a certain path before falling into our hands. 1. First of all, the author writes his work. 2. Submits it to the publishing house. 3. Here the proofreader checks and corrects errors in the text 4. The editor checks and prepares the text for printing 5. The artist creates illustrations for the book 6. And then the manuscript goes to the printing house. Here it will go through many more automated processes

Electronic books (e-books) refer to special tablet computers for displaying text information that is presented in electronic form. The term “electronic book” refers to both reading devices and books themselves in electronic form.

Their appearance is due to the development and specialization of tablet computers in general. In addition, modern e-readers are often equipped with a touch screen and have an expanded set of functions. The first highly specialized device for reading electronic documents was developed in 1996. But it turned out to be too expensive and did not go into mass production.

Models using electronic paper as a screen have become very popular. Such e-book models began to be produced in 2007. Modern models with color screens have already appeared. An e-reader with such a screen can be used for other purposes. For example, for surfing the Internet or watching videos.

What does the future hold for the book? Many experts believe that the computer and the Internet will greatly displace printed publications. This process has already begun. However, most likely they will complement each other. After all, if it is more convenient and faster to receive scientific information through global computer networks, then it is much more pleasant to read a fiction book while holding it in your hands.

The first writing that arose on Earth was Sumerian. This happened about 5 thousand years ago.
Their writing is called cuneiform after its later form.

They wrote on clay tablets using a pointed reed stick. If the tablets were fired in a kiln and dried, they became eternal (have survived to our time), thanks to them, we can trace the history of the emergence of writing.
There are 2 hypotheses about the origin of writing:

• monogenesis (invented in the 1st place)
• polygenesis (in several foci).

Writing is represented in 3 primary foci, the connection of which has not been proven:

1. Mesopotamian (Sumerians)
2. Egyptian (according to the theory of monogenesis, introduced from the Sumerians)
3. writing of the Far East (Chinese, according to the theory of monogenesis, introduced from the Sumerians).

Writing develops uniformly everywhere - from drawings to written signs. Pictography turns into a graphic system. Picture writing turns into language graphics not when pictures disappear (for example, in Egypt pictures were used, but this is not picture writing), but when we can guess what language the text is written in.
Sometimes people sent each other various objects instead of letters.
Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the 5th century. BC e., talks about the “letter” of the Scythians to the Persian king Darius. A Scythian messenger came to the Persian camp and placed gifts before the king, “consisting of a bird, a mouse, a frog and five arrows.” The Scythians did not know how to write, so their message looked like this. Darius asked what these gifts meant. The messenger replied that he was ordered to hand them over to the king and immediately return back. And the Persians themselves must figure out the meaning of the “letter.” Darius conferred with his soldiers for a long time and finally said how he understood the message: the mouse lives in the earth, the frog lives in the water, the bird is like a horse, and arrows are the military courage of the Scythians. Thus, Darius decided, the Scythians give him their water and land and submit to the Persians, giving up their military courage.
But the Persian commander Gobryas interpreted the “letter” differently: “If you, Persians, do not fly away like birds into the sky, or like mice do not hide in the ground, or like frogs do not gallop into the lakes, then you will not return back and will fall under the blows of our arrows.” ".
As you can see, subject writing can be interpreted in different ways. The history of Darius's war with the Scythians showed that Gobryas was right. The Persians were unable to defeat the elusive Scythians, who roamed the steppes of the Northern Black Sea region, Darius left the Scythian lands with his army.
Writing itself, descriptive writing, began with drawings. Writing with drawings is called pictography (from the Latin pictus - picturesque and the Greek grapho - I write). In pictography, art and writing are inseparable, so archaeologists, ethnographers, art historians, and literary historians study rock paintings. Everyone is interested in their own area. For a historian of writing, the information contained in the drawing is important. A pictogram usually denotes some kind of life situation, such as hunting, or animals and people, or various objects - a boat, a house, etc.
The first inscriptions were about household concerns - food, weapons, supplies - objects were simply depicted. Gradually, there is a violation of the principle of isomorphism (i.e., a reliable representation of the number of objects - how many vases there are, so many we draw). The image loses connection with the subject. Instead of 3 vases, there is now a vase and 3 dashes that indicate the number of vases, i.e. quantitative and qualitative information are given separately. The first scribes had to separate and understand the difference between qualitative and quantitative signs. Then iconicity develops, and its own grammar appears.
At the turn of the IV - III millennium BC. e. Pharaoh Narmer conquered Lower Egypt and ordered his victory to be immortalized. The relief design depicts this event. And in the upper right corner there is a pictogram that serves as a signature to the reliefs. The falcon holds a rope threaded through the nostrils of a human head, which seems to emerge from a strip of earth with six stalks of papyrus. The falcon is a symbol of the victorious king; he holds on a leash the head of the defeated king of the North; the land with papyri is Lower Egypt, papyrus is its symbol. Its six stems are six thousand captives, since the sign of papyrus means a thousand. But was it possible to convey the name of the king in a drawing? How do we know that his name was Narmer?
It turns out that at this time the Egyptians had already begun to isolate signs from their drawings that denoted not the drawn object, but the sounds that made up its name. The drawing of a dung beetle meant three sounds KhPR, and the drawing of a basket meant two sounds NB. And although such sounds remained drawings, they had already become phonetic signs. The ancient Egyptian language had words with one-, two-, and three-letter syllables. And since the Egyptians did not write vowels, monosyllabic words represented one sound. When the Egyptians needed to write a name, they used single-letter hieroglyphs.
The transition from concrete to abstract objects that do not correspond to a visual image. Chinese characters arose from drawings (13th century BC). Until now, the hieroglyphs have changed little, but the grammar of the language has changed (modern Chinese can read texts written BC, recognize the symbols, but will not catch the meaning). The drawing is stylized, simplified, standardized.
Eventually, in all places on the globe, signs begin to reflect sounds. The signs were linked to the sound of the whole word. It was very difficult to use such a letter - it is an art. A very complex writing system, but it satisfied the ancients because... it could only be used by a limited caste of people for whom this knowledge was a means of subsistence.
The need to quickly write down complex and long texts led to the fact that the drawings were simplified and became conventional icons - hieroglyphs (from the Greek hieroglyphoi - sacred writing).
In the 12th-13th centuries. BC. in the Middle East - the time of the appearance of the Sinai inscriptions. This is a step towards a sharp reduction in the number of written characters. Signs were developed that denoted a syllable. Writing has become syllabic. For different words, the combination of consonant and vowel is different.
Thanks to the presence of such single-syllable signs denoting one sound, alphabet. The Phoenicians, having become acquainted with these letters, created their own alphabetic writing based on them, simplifying the signs of syllabic writing. Each sign of this writing was assigned an indifferent vowel. Arabs and Jews used a letter without vowels. There was a complex guessing system, which nevertheless gave constant failures. Later, a system of vowels appeared, but nevertheless, in everyday life, Jews and Arabs used writing without vowels.
The Greeks adopted the Phoenician system. Greek is an Indo-European language. The Greeks introduce signs for vowels - this is a revolution. The Greeks invented a complete writing system. All vowels were depicted. Later they began to depict stress (place and type), aspiration. We also introduced an image of prosody (analogous to notes), which is impossible in the case of Russian writing and therefore is not used by us.
Is it possible to answer the question: who, what person invented the writing system? Who was the first to use alphabetic writing? There is no answer to these questions. The emergence of writing was caused by the demands of the life of society and the state, the economic activity of people - and writing appeared. But alphabets were created later, in our era, the new era, by educated people of their time. Thus, Cyril and Methodius created a letter for the Slavic languages. Mesrop Mashtots created an alphabetic letter for the Armenian language. Together with his students, Mashtots went to different countries to study writing. It was “a real scientific, perhaps the world’s first linguistic expedition, which set as its goal the development of an alphabet,” wrote corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences D. A. Olderogge.
The peoples of the Far North and Siberia did not have a written language before the October Revolution. Now researchers from the Institute of Northern Peoples have created an alphabetical letter for them.
There were many illiterates in the Tajik Republic, since the Arabic script, which the Tajiks once used, is very complex. Now Tajiks write Tajik in Russian letters.
Writing systems are also being created in the countries of modern Africa.

A 6th grade student at Klyuchevskaya Secondary School No. 27, Mogochinsky District, is writing you a letter from back in 2017. I'm your great-grandson, but you don't know me. And I saw you in old photographs of my grandmother, your daughter. How much I have heard about you, about your exploits accomplished at the front. My grandmother told me about that time, about the horrors of the war. How you fought, how you were wounded twice, how you wrote letters home from the front, supporting your family with kind and affectionate words. Your orders and medals received in the war have been preserved. Why don't the awards speak? After all, there are many interesting stories hidden in their metal, I wish I could hear them. We always remember you with love. “Grandfather was very strict, but caring, he felt responsible for everything that happened in the family,” my mother and aunt recalled. I am very proud of you, great-grandfather: you fought against the Nazis and defended the honor and independence of our Motherland! Your memory will always live in our hearts. When I think that you did not spare your life for the sake of peace, I understand that you defended your Motherland so that it would have a bright future. I don’t know those people who fought with you, but I want to say thank you to everyone. Thank you for our happy childhood! You fought so that your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren would never see war. Thanks to you and people like you, I live under a peaceful sky. Today I can freely go to school, play outside with friends, do what I love, and see the happy face of my mother.
Dear great-grandfather! I would like to ask you, is it scary in war? Most of all I want the war not to happen again. I love my village, my Motherland, and I don’t want our country to fight. Today, very few participants in the Great Patriotic War are alive. Among them is our fellow villager Alexey Nikolaevich Danilov. He is 92 years old, and we are very proud that he defended his Motherland with you. You gave us Victory, which we celebrate every year on May 9. This is the brightest and most joyful holiday for us. This year marks the 72nd anniversary of the Great Victory. Victory Day is a strange holiday when people both rejoice and cry.
How I would like to meet you, tell you about our happy life, hug you and tell you how much I love you and am proud of you. I want to tell you not to worry. A good generation of young and energetic patriots of the Motherland is growing in our country. And we remember your feat, your victories. And we remember the price of this victory. We will always be against war. After all, we need “one victory, one for all!” I promise to grow up to be a good person. It's a pity that I can't do anything for you. I'll never hear back from you, but that doesn't matter. We remember you, you are alive in our memory, and this is the main thing!
Your great-grandson Artyom.

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Summer, last year Dictionary of Russian synonyms. last year it was summer (simple); last year (outdated) Dictionary of synonyms of the Russian language. Practical guide. M.: Russian language. Z. E. Alexandrova. 2011… Synonym dictionary

From the romance “Dark cherry shawl...”. The authors of the words and music are unknown. The beginning of the romance: I don’t dream about the past now, And I don’t feel sorry for the past anymore. Only this dark cherry shawl will remind you of many, many things. Encyclopedic dictionary of winged words and... ... Dictionary of popular words and expressions

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• Crimea Pages of history from ancient times to the present day Historian Magazine about the current past, Rudakov V. (ed.). A special issue of the “Historian” magazine was prepared for the fifth anniversary of the reunification of Crimea with Russia and is dedicated to key events in the centuries-old history of Crimea. For the first time about the distant and recent past...
• Cultural memory. Writing, Memory of the Past and Political Identity in the High Cultures of Antiquity, Jan Assmann. This book will be produced in accordance with your order using Print-on-Demand technology. The book by Heidelberg Egyptologist Professor Jan Assmann is dedicated to the role played by the memory of...

The main materials on which Old Russian manuscripts were written were parchment, birch bark (birch bark), and later paper.

Parchment - leather treated in a special way, usually calf, lamb or goat, the best varieties were obtained from the skin of newborn calves and lambs - thinner and more flexible, and not spoiled by the bites of gadflies and horse flies. Parchment (parchment) got its name from the city of Pergamum (Bergam) in Asia Minor, where in the second half of the 2nd century BC. invented a technology for its production: the skin of an animal was processed - the wool and meat were peeled off, then stretched onto a frame, carefully scraped, salted, and the finished skin was cut to obtain sheets. The processed parchment was white or yellowish in color. Parchment was an expensive material, and even rejected sheets were used, for example, those damaged by a knife during initial preparation (“holey parchment”), or pieces with poorly cleaned fat that did not absorb ink (“parchment with licks”). There are manuscripts based on an earlier letter that was washed away or scraped off. They are called palimpsests (from Greek palin – “again”, psao – “scrape”). Manuscripts that were worn out or no longer needed were washed off or scraped off (usually with pumice). Now there are many methods for reading palimpsests. But among Russian manuscripts, palimpsests are rare; most of them have been preserved in the libraries of Western Europe.

Parchment came to Rus' from Byzantium, and was called "haratya"(from the Greek charter, charter), and the manuscripts on it were called " Harataic". In addition, the names used for parchment " skin" or " veal". Word " parchment"appeared in the Moscow state only in the 17th century. Parchment was used as a writing material in the 11th-14th centuries, i.e., before the advent of paper, and was the main material for statutory writing. A feature of parchment manuscripts was the absence of any standard, because the format depended on the size of the skin.

Each birch bark document found is assigned a number; now their number exceeds a thousand. Manuscripts on birch bark were found in Northwestern Rus': Novgorod, Pskov, Staraya Russa, Smolensk, Vitebsk, which is associated not so much with the place of greatest distribution of this type of material, but with the good preservation of organic artifacts in the marshy soils of these places.

To use birch bark as a writing material, it was specially prepared: brittle layers of bast were removed from the inner surface, and the flaky surface layer was removed from the outer surface. Additional elasticity was given to birch bark by boiling in water with alkali. But texts written on unprocessed birch bark or on recycled objects (for example, on the torn off bottoms of tueskas) are also known. The text was applied using bone or iron wrote(stylus) by extruding strokes. Usually it was placed on the inside of the birch bark; less commonly, manuscripts are found on the outside or on both sides of the birch bark sheet. There are rare cases of writing on birch bark with ink. Since the text was not written on birch bark, but was extruded, the graphics of birch bark letters are pointed, angular, inclined towards the line, and extending above and below beyond the line. And the everyday purpose of writing on birch bark did not contribute to the careful derivation of letters characteristic of the statutory letter. Therefore, the graphics of birch bark letters of the 11th-12th centuries. rather resembles a prototype of semi-character and sometimes even early cursive writing.

In air, birch bark quickly curls due to the uneven tension of its layers when drying, becomes brittle and delaminates. That is, this material was not designed for long-term storage. They wrote letters, notes, notes for themselves on it. The choice of birch bark for such purposes was determined by the short-term purpose of what was written; after reading the letter, a person usually immediately threw it away.

At the same time, waxed tablets were used - ceras. For example, they are well known from excavations in Novgorod. A cera was even found that preserved not only the wax filling, but also the remains of the text on it. They wrote on the walls with the same writings that were used for writing on birch bark. Moreover, according to experts, the special spatula on the reverse side of most famous writings was intended specifically for “smoothing out”, removing what was written on the surface after the need for it had expired. Ceras, like birch bark, were used for everyday correspondence, teaching literacy, writing texts on economic reporting and calculations, etc.

But sometimes business documents (in particular, acts) were also written on birch bark and ceras, but still they preferred parchment for long-term records.

Paper It has been used as a writing material in Rus' since Tue. floors XIV century. In XIV - AD XVIII centuries foreign-made paper was used: Italian (XIV-XVI centuries), French (XIV-XVI centuries), German (XV-XVI centuries), Polish (XVI centuries) and Dutch (XVII centuries). The transition to paper contributed to the spread of written sources and the development of printing. Attempts to establish our own paper production in Russia date back to the 16th-17th centuries, when the first paper mills appeared, where low-quality paper was produced. In the first quarter of the 18th century. Dozens of state-owned and private paper mills were built, capable of competing with foreign-made paper and satisfying the demand for paper in the country. In 1721, Peter I adopted a decree prohibiting the use of foreign paper in official office work (in colleges, chancelleries and other institutions, both central and local).

While writing materials have changed relatively little in recent centuries, writing instruments have undergone significant evolution during this period.

The main writing tools until the 30s of the 19th century. were goose feathers (feathers from swans, ravens and even peacocks were less commonly used) . The method of preparing goose quills for writing remained almost unchanged until the 19th century. To soften the feather and clean it from fat, it was stuck into hot sand or ash, then repaired using a penknife: an incision was made on both sides, leaving a small semicircular groove through which ink flowed. For ease of pressing, the groove was split. After this, the feather was sharpened. The quality of what was written largely depended on how the pen was cut and sharpened. Since the 1830s appeared in Russia metal feathers - first foreign, then, from the 80s of the 19th century, domestic production. The advent of steel pens helped speed up writing. But the transition to metal nibs was very slow. They were allowed for use in educational institutions only in the 80s. XIX century, and in notary offices, offices, and the military department, goose feathers were used until the Russian-Japanese War.

Capital letters and headings were written brush . The text of birch bark letters was extruded with sharp bone or metal objects - wrote . Pencil (from the Turkic "kara" - black, "tash" - stone) was used in Russia from the second half of the 16th century. The familiar simple pencil was invented in the 18th century. Czech Josef Garmut, who accidentally discovered the remarkable properties of a mixture of graphite and clay, and as a result of further research, developed writing rods, which he called “kohinor” (having no equal). Almost simultaneously, the French painter Conte also proposed making writing rods from a mixture of clay and graphite, but he came up with another brilliant idea - placing them in a wooden shell. This is how the pencil in its familiar form was born. In Russia, domestically produced pencils have never been of good quality. Before the revolution, they were brought mainly from Germany.

Old Russian manuscripts are written in thick, dense ink brown and brown colors. Sometimes there is also black ink, for which soot was added to ordinary ink. The technique of producing durable, clearly visible ink was not mastered immediately. In Ancient Rus', many recipes for making ink were known: from soot, vinegar, burnt hay, ink nuts, rusty nails, and tree bark. For example, the following recipe has been preserved: “Take a little oak bark, alder bark, and ash bark, boil them in water... and then throw in a piece of iron, add a ladle of sour cabbage soup and a mug of honey kvass.” In general, the preparation of ink was based on the reaction between salts, ferrous and tannins. In the 17th century To speed up the preparation of ink, copper sulfate began to be used instead of rusty iron. The ink penetrated deeply into the parchment and was difficult to wash out, even if the letter was wetted. To prevent the ink from flowing from the pen and to be viscous, gum was added to it - a sticky substance of plant origin. Different times and different manuscript centers had a specific chemical composition of ink, so analysis of the chemical composition and color of ink can be used to date manuscripts. In the 1880s Alazarin ink of a violet hue appeared.

To blot manuscripts, fine dry quartz sand was used, and later blotting paper. The introduction of glycerin and then alcohol caused the writing to dry quickly, which limited the use of blotting paper.

In addition to ink used paints , which were used to write headings, capital letters, ornaments and other decorations. Of these, the most widely used was cinnabar, an orange-red dye. It was often used to write capital letters, and sometimes the entire first line (hence the expressions " red line" And " heading" - from the Latin word ruber - red). Ocher, azure, lead white, and black paint were also used. In rich manuscripts, gold paint was also used, which was made from powdered gold mixed with gum (the so-called " creative gold"). Silver is extremely rare in handwritten monuments.