Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World

"I am in awe of how the author makes an unlikely subject utterly fascinating."

"Irene Vallejo is a classicist and a novelist. She combines academic research and creative writing to produce a highly accessible book about the ancient world. The book deals with how, in the Mediterranean region, books were produced, cherished, read, burnt, and destroyed. Books are part of our lives now, but we can’t take them for granted. The book explores the history of libraries, specifically the famous library in Alexandria. In a nutshell, Vallejo explores how the ancient world invented tablets, papyrus, and later books. We learn about how Athens and Rome wrote and preserved the word. It is basically a book about words and the survival of words in the form of books. There are oral traditions that survive until the present day, but human society, in general, wanted to document words in something durable, which has a lifespan longer than the lifespan of an individual, or even multiple generations. It is both a history and a sociology of knowledge. It is highly accessible, especially to non-specialists, and it’s a joy to read. It’s full of stories. Its starting point is the famous Library of Alexandria. The author combines her knowledge of Greek and Roman sources with sources in Egypt at the time, which later became Arabic. The book is full of intriguing stories about why human civilisation invented the alphabet; how people documented their lives; what kind of human imagination went into writing by Homer, including the Odyssey . There is a plethora of sources. It is astonishing that one author can combine all this knowledge in a very thick and enjoyable book. This book includes a personal dimension. Vallejo moves from an eight-year-old girl, going to bed, with her mother reading her books and novels and stories, to the academic who writes about libraries and books. Books come with challenges. There’s the challenge of making them: which material do you use? They also come with the challenge of ink: is it going to last? They come with the challenge of preservation: what temperature is good to keep them dry? They come with serious political issues. Censorship is the by-product of believing that books are dangerous as they might contain subversive ideas and thoughts. Also, there is book burning. Vallejo looks at how, in the ancient world, some books were burned simply because they were deemed dangerous. Some books were provocative, and political authorities didn’t like them. Religious groups may not appreciate their message, so they were censored or, in some cases, burned. Vallejo reaches an interesting conclusion about burning books. Any country or nation that engages in burning books, regardless of how provocative it is, is probably on the path to self-destruction. This is a message that resonates in the contemporary world, especially when some groups, whether they’re right-wing or left-wing, engage in book burning rituals in public squares or organise events to burn sacred religious books. For example, in some of the Scandinavian countries recently, right-wing groups have gotten together in public squares and burned the Qu’ran. Such acts of symbolic violence had a long history in the ancient world. Vallejo has a very important message for all of us in the modern world, where extreme opinions and positions have become acceptable in a post-liberal age, and where book burning becomes extremely common, not in countries where you’d expect it to be, but in liberal democracies! Vallejo’s book fosters global cultural understanding by allowing us the opportunity to be aware of some dangers associated with the written word. Hence its importance as a book that is highly accessible about an important history of human civilisation. Although its focus is on the Mediterranean region, the ideas resonate around the globe today. The way the Library of Alexandria accumulated so many books is incredible, given the limitations of transport in ancient times. Also, the book draws our attention to the community of intellectuals. We call them intellectuals, but they could be called sages, writers, learned individuals, theologians, philosophers, and literary people. The cosmopolitan cities around the Mediterranean Sea are incredible, in the sense that people came together from different religions—there were Jews, Christians, pagans and later on Muslims—and they all lived together to copy books or to debate them. There were study circles, where there was a kind of freedom of thought to be able to engage in these important conversations about books. Vallejo gives us a full picture of an intellectual world to which, unfortunately, we have no access, in the sense that the Library of Alexandria was burned. She looks at the debate about how it happened and concludes that there is no answer as to why it disappeared."