Writing material

Another precursor was tally sticks used to record the count of objects or the passage of days or other discrete units of time.

Clay introduces the useful combination of extreme ease of making the inscription with the potential for rendering it fairly permanent.

Unglazed pottery shards were used almost as a kind of scratch paper, as ostraka, for tax receipts, and, in Athens, to record the individual nominations of Greek leaders for ostracism.

On the Indian subcontinent, principal writing media were bhurjapatra made from birch bark, and palm leaf manuscript.

Palm leaf manuscript was also the major source for writing and painting in South and Southeast Asian countries including Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia.

In China, early writing materials included animal bones, later silk,[9] bamboo and wooden slips,[10] until the 2nd century when paper was invented.

[citation needed] Cai Lun used old rags, hemp, tree bark, and fishing nets to develop a method of paper-making fundamentally similar to that still used today.

[9]  The Islamic world acquired the art of papermaking in the 8th century, taught by Chinese prisoners who had been taken during eastward expeditions.

The craft of paper-making reached Spain in the twelfth century, and at subsequent hundred-year intervals arrived in Italy, Germany, and England.

James Whatman and John Baskerville (1706–1775) invented a method for producing perfectly smooth paper using a fine wire mesh that left no lines from the mould on the page.