A few words will not be out of place here respecting the writing materials of the ancients, and their custom of staining leaves of vellum.  Skins of animals were probably one of the most ancient mediums, as being the most durable.  There exists in the British Museum a ritual, written on white leather, which dates from about the year 2000 B.C.  But the custom of writing on leather is known to have been much older still.  The commonest mode of keeping records in Assyria and Babylonia was on prepared bricks, tiles, or cylinders of clay, baked after the inscription had been impressed on them.  But a wood-cut of an ancient sculpture from Konyungik* illustrates scribes in the act of writing down the number of heads and the amount of spoil taken in battle, on rolls of leather, which the Egyptians used as early as the eighteenth dynasty.  At the close of the commercial intercourse between Assyria and Egypt, rolls of leather may have been the only material employed for writing on.  Parchment, so prepared that both sides could be used, was doubtless the development of this custom, but was a much later invention.  Together with the use of the rough skins, and of the more or less carefully prepared surfaces of the leather, papyrus became one of the most frequent vehicles for written words, and was used for some time after the beginning of the Christian era.  Leaves of palm or mallow led up to the first forms of papyrus used—­hence, perhaps, the word leaf of a book.  Bark was next pressed into the service of literature and, it has often been suggested, possibly gave rise to the word book, although it seems more likely that book was of runic origin and derived from the beech-staves—­Buch-staben, on which the runes were expressed.

* Nineveh and its Remains, by Sir Henry Layard, ii., 185.

Eventually vellum entirely took the place of papyrus, but papyrus was used not only in Egypt, but in imperial Rome before vellum became common, and even biblical manuscripts were written on rolls of this material.  It was, however, too fragile and perishable to remain the receptacle of writing and illumination intended to last for all time, and therefore, by the middle of the tenth century A.D. it was altogether discarded.  Only a few tattered fragments of the New Testament written on papyrus are still extant.

The oldest manuscripts belonging to the Christian era were written on the thinnest and whitest vellum.  The parchment of later times is more coarsely grained, and less well finished, manuscripts a thousand and more years old showing no signs of decay or discoloration, unlike many which date from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  Scrivener, basing his authority on Tischendorf, observes that the Codex Sinaiticus is made of the finest skins of antelopes, the leaves being so large that a single animal could furnish but two of them.  The Codex Vaticanus is greatly admired for the beauty of the vellum; and the whiteness of the Codex Alexandrinus can be seen by all who visit the British Museum, although the exquisite thinness, softness, and delicacy of the texture can only be appreciated by touching it.  The beautiful fabric of the Codex Clarmontanus has already been mentioned.