Before the E-Reader: 7 Ways Our Ancestors Took Their Reading on the Go

In Mesopotamia, in the 3rd millennium BCE, various ancient peoples began scribbling on small tablets that were several inches long. Scribes used a stylus to make marks on wet clay tablets, which were then dried outside or baked so as to make them long-lasting. Some particularly important texts ran across multiple tablets. The type of writing used by these scribes was cuneiform, and it sustained the production of these tablets for some 2,000 years.

Meanwhile, in ancient Egypt, papyrus emerged as a medium for writing. It was derived from the stalk of the so-called paper plant, Cyperus papyrus, which was sliced into strips and dried so that it resembled something akin to what we know as paper. Ancient Egyptians plundered C. papyrus for many other uses—mostly for what we’d use various fabrics today—but recording writing was papyrus’s most widespread, and enduring, use.

As in Mesopotamia, the task of writing in Egypt was given to scribes; Egyptian scribes, however, used a brush or a pen to write in cursive script on papyrus rather than imprint a wet piece of clay. A papyrus roll might consist of up to 20 sheets of papyrus, all glued together. Unlike clay tablets, however, papyrus rolls were fragile and prone to damage. Some existing rolls date to 2500 BCE, though papyrus was likely to have been in use before then. Papyrus rolls were also used in ancient Greece and during the time of the Roman Empire.

Papyrus wasn’t the only option that ancient Egyptians had. Ostraca—the plural of ostracon—were bits of pottery or limestone that were often used to jot down business matters. The Egyptians also turned ostraca into sketchpads, often with amusing results. Ancient Greeks and Hebrews used ostraca too.

The Chinese also created tablets that were made from bamboo or wood and were lashed together with the equivalent of rope. Records suggest that these may have emerged by 1300 BCE, if not before, but many simply rotted away or otherwise decayed. The emperor Shihuangdi also didn’t help in 213 BCE when he ordered that most books not in his possession be burned.

During roughly the same time, the Chinese also created scrolls made of silk, though these scrolls were not always rolled into a cylindrical form; some of the documents written on silk that were found, for example, at Mawangdui, an archaeological site in southeastern China that dates to the 2nd century BCE, were found folded into rectangles. The texts on these tablets and scrolls covered a wide range of topics, from medicine to poetry to philosophy.

Wax tablets were a riff on the ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets, courtesy of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Clay tablets could be awkward to work with; papyrus could be a pain to prepare and store. But filling a wooden block with hot wax that, after it cooled, provided a smooth soft writing surface? Simple. And cheap too. Permanence was a bit of a problem, but it was also an advantage: the wax could be remelted or scraped smooth, and the tablet was ready for use again. The Greeks and the Romans, and medieval Europeans after them, used these tablets for some important legal documentation, but their primary advantage was flexibility—very much like a paper (or electronic) tablet today.

A codex—the singular of codices—was the last stop on the way to the modern printed book. It represented an innovation that today is a bit difficult for us to recognize as an innovation: why bother with the seemingly endless writing surface of a papyrus roll when you can pile all of that on top of itself and then hold it together along one edge? That was the codex. It offered easy access to any point within the text; it was compact and easy to carry; and it could accommodate a great deal of information—on the front and the back of the writing surface—in a small physical space.

Codices were a particularly convenient medium for storing and presenting the New Testament Gospels—and it was after the time of Christ, in Europe, that the codex took hold. (Codices were also created, from about 1000 CE, in Mesoamerica.) Early codices were handwritten and consisted of vellum or parchment (both of which, though, have a longer history than codices) or, later, paper. They coexisted with rolls for several hundred years, but by the 4th century codices—buoyed by the spread and entrenchment of Christianity in Europe—had begun to dominate.

Codices were widely used until the middle of the 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg helped to usher in the era of the book printed with movable type on paper and bound at the spine, a form that has endured to this day.