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The Cultural History of Paper is a comprehensive introduction to the development of paper from its birth to its global development. Taking the evolution of paper's raw materials and technologies as clues, the book explores all areas of paper with great detail and great interest, from history, politics, economy, literature to people's daily lives, the author describes in detail the relationship between people and paper, and thinks about the key values behind these relationships. It is not only a history of technology, but also of economics, politics, art, and the common people. In today's world of electronic media, this book will help you rediscover the essence of the culture that each and every one of us needs.
Text / Rotal Mueller
Paper is ever-changing. Not only is it impossible to generalize about its uses, but it is even difficult to trace its origins. Only one thing is certain, and that is that paper originated in China. But unlike the printing presses in Europe, we can't trace back the exact date people invented the paper.
In 105 AD, the then court official Cai Lun, with the support of the emperor, produced large-format paper for writing at a low cost. But this is not a new invention from scratch, it is actually based on an ancient production technology through improvement. Modern historians have attempted to trace the origins of the long-established, step-by-step development of papermaking. They found a kind of "native paper": it was extracted from plant fibers, silk or cotton wool by imitating the manufacturing method of felt, but it was far from writing paper. Once a craft technology appears in the world, people look back at it and often take its existence for granted. But in fact, it is not achieved overnight, but developed step by step.
The original Chinese papermaking can be summarized as follows: Chinese papermakers usually used the phloem of the tree as the raw material for papermaking. They soaked the phloem of the tree in wood ash water and processed it for a certain period of time until the fibers in it separated from each other. To make these separated fibers into paper, you need to use a filter, which is made of cotton or linen tied to a wooden border, which can float on the water, also known as "paper curtain". The craftsman spreads the fibers on the paper curtain and spreads them evenly by hand. The paper curtain, along with the formed layer of paper, is then removed from the water, dried, and then the next piece of paper can be made. As a result, Chinese papermakers can only produce dozens of sheets of paper a day.
Cai Lun's improvement of papermaking technology is mainly due to his expansion of the raw material base of papermaking. According to a historical book written around 450 AD, Cai Lun used sackcloth, rags, and broken fishing nets as raw materials for papermaking, but in general, papermaking was developed for a long time in the folk. With the use of flexible and portable bamboo sieves, productivity has been greatly improved. Coupled with the increasing use of paper, papermaking began to spread in China. People not only use it as writing material, but also use it to frame doors and windows, make lanterns, paper flowers, or fans and umbrellas. Evidence suggests that in the 9th century, Chinese had already begun mass production of toilet paper. By the 10th century, paper money had become an acceptable means of payment.
An ancient Arabic story describes the process by which paper first spread from the East to the West. The story goes that in 751 AD, the Arabs and the Turkic armies fought a war, and the Turkic armies at that time were aided by some Chinese reinforcements. During this war, some Chinese paper craftsmen were captured by the Arabs. The Arabs brought these craftsmen from the banks of the Taraz River on the Tashkent battlefield to Samarkand and forced them to reveal the secrets of papermaking technology. Since then, in and around Samarkand, a place that the Arabs had conquered in the early 8th century, people began to make paper. Its quality is not inferior to that of paper produced in China.
Contemporary paper research understands this statement as follows: Military conflicts in Central Asia have accelerated the spread of paper, although this spread may have begun hundreds of years ago. The accelerated spread of secret knowledge of the Orient and the conquest by force recorded in military history are set against the backdrop of the long-standing movement of East-West cultural transmission in the history of trade. The Silk Roads played a key role in the spread of paper. Long before these Chinese paper craftsmen were captured, paper was already transmitted to Central Asia as a commodity through the transportation network of the Silk Road. Therefore, the Silk Road was also a paper road. From this perspective, papermaking is more like a cultural technique that slowly permeated the Arab world than a technique learned on a particular date. The inclusion of Chinese paper in long-distance trade triggered a double step that usually occurs when proprietary knowledge is transferred in commodity form: first importing a commodity, and then the technology that produces it. The cost of importing goods is huge and must be traveled a long way, which makes this method of introduction very attractive.
At first, Arab paper craftsmen may have been using floating sieves, and only later did they replace this "casting" process step by step by "copying paper". But no matter what details of the papermaking technology has been modified, the Arab paper craftsmen need to adapt the paper production technology to the local climatic conditions. They needed to minimize the amount of water they used and find other materials to replace the phloem of the tree, the main ingredient used in Chinese papermaking. Under this pressure, rags, old fabrics, ropes, which at best play an auxiliary role in China, became the core raw materials in Arabic papermaking.
Thus a basic model of the material cycle is established. In this model, instead of obtaining materials, such as metals, simply by changing the physical form of waste, people create a material with a completely different structure. Since then, paper has become a man-made material, and its raw material itself is the product of civilization. Although the Chinese trees and the Egyptian papyrus are not purely "natural", after all, they are also cultivated plants. But the use of rags to make paper broke the shackles of natural conditions, so that people were no longer limited to trees that could only grow in the subtropical climate of southern China, or Egyptian papyrus. Raw materials such as rags are everywhere in the places where humans live, as long as they need to dress and trade. Once the raw materials for papermaking are no longer limited by local natural conditions, papermaking technology can be spread around the world. The nomadic characteristics it already possessed as a long-distance trade commodity are also integrated into its material structure, and it does not encounter much resistance in overcoming regional production boundaries.
In the 8th century, paper mills appeared in Baghdad, followed by paper mills in Cairo and Syria. Since the 10th century AD, the people of Damascus, Tripoli, and Hama have also begun to make paper, and soon began to export paper. In the 11th century, a Persian reported that in Cairo, merchants wrapped their goods in paper, and as early as the 10th century, Syria exported not only paper to North Africa, but also papermaking technology.
With the use of materials that are already the product of civilization to make paper, paper gradually loses its connection with natural raw materials. Of course, this does not mean that its raw material base is unlimited. Because these raw materials came from cities and villages, rather than fields and woods, papermaking was inseparable from factors such as population development and textile manufacturing from the Arab civilization in the Middle Ages to the 19th century, coupled with its demand for ropes and rigging, papermaking and trade and navigation were also inextricably linked.
How paper reached Samarkand and how it spread throughout the Arab Empire was not traced in detail until the late 19th century. The orientalist Joseph von Karabacek, the curator of the Vienna Court Library, was instrumental in this. In the winter of 1877-1878, fragments of more than 20,000 pieces of paper were found near the central Egyptian city of Fayoum and in Helmoplis. Karabak's paper, Das Arabishe Papier (1887), was based on the study of more than 20,000 fragments. The fragments were later collected by The Austrian Grand Duke Erzherzog Rainer in his papyrus collection.
Karabak translated these fragments from the 8th-14th centuries, describing to the world the rich fonts, colors and formats on these fragments. He also mentioned a very thin "pigeon paper", which people used on the one hand to "fly pigeons to pass on books", and on the other hand, they also liked to use it to write love letters. In addition, Karabak published his own translation of Umdat-al-kuttab (Scribe Worker), the only surviving article written in the 11th century about Arab paper craftsmen. Finally, he showed some of these fragments to the public in an exhibition and compiled a catalogue documenting the wide range of uses and geographical distribution of paper.
At the same time, the Austrian botanist Julius Wiesner used microscopy from plant physiology to analyze the material properties of Arabic paper. He and Karabak published the results of the study at the same time. The two men's research was carried out independently, but they came to the same conclusion: Arabia was not only a transit point for the transmission of paper from China to Europe, but also the Arabs continued to improve papermaking technology, making a considerable contribution to the rise of European paper mills since the 13th century. Karabak sought to prove that the "cloth pulp paper" made of linen rags and hemp fibers originated from the Arab civilization, so the Arab civilization was a model for the European paper industry. The study on Arabic paper, conducted in Vienna, employed a method similar to historical artifacts and scientific microscopy, and was more or less echoed by some experts. But this has hardly affected the general perception of Europeans. To some extent, of course, this conclusion is less about filling the gaps in the discipline than it is about breaking an old paradigm of communication.
Joseph von Karabak called his treatise on Arabic paper a "study of history and antiquities," a subtitle that had a programmatic flavor. This means that the article will describe Arabic paper in the same meticulous and informative and accurate way as the study of ancient Greece and Rome. Karabak believes that Arabic paper is the origin of European paper. For the Arabs, their paper originated in Chinese paper. This brings us to a huge cognitive difference that was not yet perceived in Europe at the time: modern European paper is not the same as ancient papyrus.
The American papermaker Dard Hunter emphasized the distinction between the two writing materials in his review of Pliny Sr.'s description of the production process of papyrus in Volume XIII of Natural History. The papyrus used for writing is made from plants. The outer skin of the stem of papyrus is first cut off, cut into thin slices and pressed, and then processed by a method similar to fine woodworking grinding, making its surface smooth and easy to write. In papermaking, the paper obtains the pulp by separating the raw material fibers, and then goes through the steps of scooping the pulp and copying the paper to obtain the desired form.
The German word "papier" evolved from the word papyrus (papyrus, papyrus). Papyrus, on the other hand, is often referred to as "Nile paper." Therefore, it is easy to think that the European paper that flourished during the Renaissance and humanism is a direct descendant of the papyrus of the ancient Greek and Roman periods, and treat the two as the same kind of thing. In Pliny Sr.'s work, the word "papyrus" usually refers to papyrus, and the products made from it are called paper. Parchment, which was closely linked to Christianity and monastic culture, formed a bridge between ancient and modern papyrus, and Arabic paper became a supporting role. Even in the 20th century, when people look back at the history of paper, they can summarize the history of Arabic paper for hundreds of years in just one sentence: "Papermaking technology was transmitted to the West through the Arabs." ”
Orientalists such as Joseph von Karabak conducted in-depth research on Arabic paper based on the travels to the East in the 18th and 19th centuries and the materials collected after the development of archaeology. After this, it became clear that Europe was not the first region to be occupied after fierce competition for paper. When paper first reached Arabia as a material for writing (especially as a carrier of calligraphy), its competitors were mainly papyrus and parchment. Parchment can still coexist with this newcomer and become a relatively unique medium of communication. But the arrival of paper meant a continued decay in papyrus production. Decades after the establishment of the first paper mill in Baghdad, attempts were made to reproduce papyrus, but soon failed. The Nile River Basin once created the monopoly and success of Egyptian papyrus, but with the development of foreign paper, the quality of paper continued to improve, and papyrus gradually became an obstacle.
By the 11th century, the production of papyrus had disappeared in Egypt. This is largely due to the economic advantages of paper – although initially, there was not much difference in price between the two, and paper itself was an expensive commodity. Paper's first major victory in the competition for writing materials was due to the fact that papermaking raw materials broke the shackles of the natural growth cycle.
In the process of replacing papyrus paper, we clarify the path of paper's rise. First, it comes out as an alternative, playing a role in the economic and cultural spheres. Then it gives full play to these functions, proves its strength, and thus constantly stimulates people's demand for it. It did not create new writing or writing methods for the world, nor did it create the positions of ancient high-ranking officials, nor did calligraphy arise from it. It is more to make up for the lack of communication, such as in the form of communication media, means of domination and so on. Thus, along with the nomadic nature of paper in spatial geography, the various uses and functions of paper in social life continue to accumulate. Its promoters, such as the high-ranking official Cai Lun and the caliphs of the Arab kingdoms, came from the ruling class.
As early as the Umayyad Dynasty (661-750), the Arab Empire that conquered the Sassanid Dynasty of Persia had once extended its rule from the Sino-Indian border to North Africa and Spain. In 750, after the Abbasid dynasty came to power, the empire moved its capital from Damascus eastward and finally to Baghdad, the new capital established in 762 AD. This young Islamic empire learned the methods of administration from Persian culture and absorbed the rich heritage of ancient Greek natural sciences and philosophy from the Byzantine Empire. Paper, an emerging medium, helped them to replicate Greek heritage into Arab culture. At the same time, paper was very attractive to the bureaucracy and ruling class of the Abbasid caliphate. According to historian and politician Ibn Chaldun, the administrative system eliminated parchment in favor of paper during the reign of Caliph Al-Rashid between 786 and 809. Paper was considered more suitable for the administrative and legal systems and for trade dealings, since words written on papyrus could be erased or forged, and words written on parchment could be scraped off, while words written on paper were difficult to tamper with in these ways.
According to Ibn Hellerdun, the spread of paper was the result of the continuous written writing of the Abbasid administrative system and the enrichment of spiritual life, and on the other hand, the spread of paper promoted the development of administration, literature and science. Orientalists have further explained Ibn Helerton's views, such as Joseph von Karabak and Alfred von Kremer, who wrote The Cultural History of the East during the Caliphate (Kulturgeschichte des Orients unter den Chalifen, 1875). These studies have opened up a little-known world for us. In the past we only knew that the Arab and Ottoman Empires did not quickly adopt printing, and it was not until the 18th century that we reluctantly accepted it. In contrast to the effects of the absence of printing, scholars are increasingly beginning to trace back to the "paper before printing" in Arab culture.
In human civilization, words and numbers have never been bound to just one written material. Although in Arab cultures, the advent of paper soon led to the disappearance of its rival papyrus. However, in addition to parchment, which coexisted with paper and served as a carrier of calligraphy, there were also flat stones, wood, bark, palm leaves, silk, brass and gold leaf, or other materials such as camel bones. Paper is generally used to preserve drafts and sketches that are to be reproduced on metal or other materials. However, paper soon began to be used as a vehicle for copying the Qur'an, although the text of the Qur'an only mentioned papyrus and parchment as writing carriers. Since the 10th century AD, paper has become the most important medium for the spread of the Quran in the Islamic world. In the early 10th century, the Abbasid chancellor and calligrapher Ibn Muqla developed and unified the Arabic script by specifying geometric proportions for different writing areas, and paper became the best carrier of this curved script. Just as prayer is seen as an act of piety, when copying the Qur'an, in order to pursue the meticulousness of calligraphy, one cannot choose the simple way of writing these curved characters, that is, the curved letters are quickly written together. As with parchment before it, precious copies of the Quran were transcribed on paper and then framed in gold ornaments. The status of the Quran confirms the fact that these decorated papers serve as written carriers. The recitation and calligraphy of the Quran are like a pair of artistic sisters, complementing each other. Recitation, in the process of spreading the ideas of the Prophet by combining orally and in writing, is like a calligraphy of sound.
Today people mostly see ancient Arabic paper in museums or exhibitions that display medieval Islamic art from manuscripts of the Quran with expensive decorations. People first associated it with calligraphy and book art. In contrast to this image, the role of paper in administration, law, trade, and personal life at that time was weakened. In the late 19th century, a large number of documents were found in the ruins of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Forstat, Cairo. Later, most of these documents were shipped to different libraries in Europe. The Jewish Arab linguist and historian Slomo Shelomo Dov Goitein began studying these materials in the 1960s and wrote a magnificent five-volume work that has since introduced these "Geniza Documents" to readers in the English-speaking world.
The Ghnitzha documents are mostly fragments, with tens of thousands of pieces, dating back to the 10th to the second half of the 13th century. Almost all the writing on the paper is an Arabic language written in the Hebrew alphabet. During the Middle Ages, the Jews of Cairo did not live in the Jewish quarters, and they needed to communicate with Muslims on a daily basis, so these Jews used a mixed language, Judeo-Arabic. Although only a small number of the words "God" are recorded in the Gnizah, because the Jews considered Hebrew to be the language of God, the sanctity of this language was extended to the Hebrew script, and these instruments were preserved as a result. These pieces of paper are revered because of the words on them, and have nothing to do with what is written. These pieces of paper are not preserved for circulation, but to prevent their destruction.
The word "Ghnitza," which literally means "hidden" in Hebrew, refers to windowless rooms in synagogues where people store discarded paper from their daily lives. So "Ghnitza" is not an archive, because the archives not only store documents, but also have criteria for screening documents. Although there are fragments of books in Gwniza's books, book catalogues with or without pricing, and IOU Notes, compared to the archives, Gnonza is not a book warehouse or library, it is more like a huge wastepaper basket, and even the original set of paper will lose contact with each other and become a mess. The only abstract and general thing they have in common is that they are all written in the Hebrew alphabet. Like the wastepaper basket, Gwyza is not an enclosed space where everything goes and goes. Generations of people can exchange paper stored there. As needed, people take away the paper that can still write and use it to write new things. Contracts filled with one side are cut and used as small notes.
"Business letters, so worthless" – this is how traditional libraries in the West classify these pieces of paper. But Gorting didn't focus solely on fragments of precious manuscripts or books. Joseph von Karabak's historical study of Arabic paper included not only amulets with quranic texts, pen strokes painted with knights, or fragments of astrology in his writings and exhibitions, but also fragments of receipts, land registers, and tax registers. Two generations later, Slomo D. Gorting took a cultural anthropological approach to reconstructing the medieval world of Arab paper circulation.
(This article is an excerpt from The Cultural History of Paper by Rotal Muller, authorized by Chuangmei Factory Guangdong People's Publishing House.) ）
| of Humanities and Social Sciences Translate | history
The Cultural History of Paper
By Rotal müller
Translated by He Xiaoyi and Song Qiong
Chuangmei Factory · Guangdong People's Publishing House
February 2022
Rotal Müller is a historian of German literature and literature. Honorary Professor of Humboldt University, Editor-in-Chief of the Supplement of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Lecturer at the Institute of Literature and Comparative Studies at the Free University of Berlin, and Editor-in-Chief of the Literary Newsletter of FrankfurtEr Breitman. He was awarded the Alfred Kohl Prize for Literary Criticism in 2000 and the John Heinrich Merck Prize in 2008.
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