Katy Reddick's List: Writing Tools

• • Great site!

• • Pliny was an important Roman writer.  You will hear his name again!
• Many of the ancient dyes were natural. The cuttle fish secreted one of the earliest inks a brown-black dye, which created a smoke screen to confuse the cuttlefish’s enemies. Many pigments and dyes were used to achieve the colouration the blacks were commonly charcoal or soot, whilst the white was often white lead. Ochre made many of the sepia and brown pigments. The blue achieved to dye material came from wood, whilst the ancient Egyptians used cobalt and oxide of copper. The yellow pigment normally came from plants saffron, turmeric, and weld. Reds dyes were minium or red lead and vermilion. Scarlet came from an Arabian insect called Kermez, and the name crimson is derived from this as the dye cochineal is extracted from a beetle. Pliny named it granum, as it resembles a berry and it may have been the derivation of the term “ingrain colour”. Kermez from Armenia was a common dye until the Spanish brought cochineal back in the middle of the sixteenth century. The cochineal colour was richer and more vibrant and despite being far more expensive to use it did supersede the use of the old grub.
• The Romans had a word “encaustunt” for their purple ink with which they signed their edicts, and it a literal translation of the word means “burnt ink”. The French for ink is “encre”, or in Old French “enqwe” and the old English word is enke or ilzke; all of these words are probably a shorter version of encaustunt.

• Pliny, the Elder (A. D. 23-79), mentions that writing could he removed by means of a wet sponge. Martial (A. D. 100), a Roman Poet, always sent a sponge when he submitted new works of poetry, so that any of then could be deleted by his publisher. Although the Roman oil carbon ink, could not have been removed by water, it is likely to refer to the natural sepia ink.
   

   

   

  Somewhere between the early civilization of Egypt and the Roman Empire, the art of ink production declined and became almost a lost art. It was not until about 200 A. D. that the employment of ink began again. Part of the reason for this may have been the disputes between the priests and the writers’ about what could and could not be used as ink. As we have seen Judaic law declared that only natural products could be used and these would have been water-soluble. However for whatever reason the basis of the pre Christian inks are lost to us.

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• The Romans called their black writing-ink Atramentum librarium or Atramentum scriptoirium. To create the ink, the Romans mixed the soot from furnaces or hypocausts with pine-wood resin or pitch. Sometimes they used sepia, which is what they called the black matter emitted by cuttlefish (mollusks) to produce brown pigment for inks.India ink, or Indian ink as it’s called in England, is a carbon-based black ink, and as early as the period of the Maurya Empire (321-185 B.C.), masi, as the variety actually produced in ancient India is known, was produced with lampblack,tar, and pitch.