habitually in ordinary life as time progressed and history continued. The contrary is the case; at a certain

period, and to a certain degree, the ancients were accustomed to use the art familiarly and readily; but at a

later time writing passed out of ordinary use and became restricted to a few who used it only as a lofty

possession for great purposes.

It is worth while to mention one striking example to give emphasis to the fact that, as the Roman Empire

decayed, familiarity with the use of writing disappeared from society, until it became the almost exclusive

possession of a few persons, who were for the most part connected with religion. About the beginning of

the sixth century before Christ, a body of mercenary soldiers, Greeks, Carians, etc., marched far away up the

Nile towards Ethiopia and the Sudan in the service of an Egyptian king. Those hired soldiers of fortune were

likely, for the most part, to belong to the least educated section of Greek society; and, even where they had

learned in childhood to write, the circumstances of their life were not of a kind likely to make writing a

familiar and ordinary matter to them, or to render its exercise a natural method of whiling away an idle hour.

Yet on the stones and the colossal statues at Abu Simble many of them wrote, not merely their name and

legal designation, but also accounts of the expedition on which they were engaged, with its objects and its

Such was the state of education in a rather humble stratum of Greek society six centuries before Christ. Let

us come down eleven centuries after Christ, to the time when great armies of Crusaders were marching

across Asia Minor on their way to Palestine. Those armies were led by the noblest of their peoples, by

statesmen, warriors, and great ecclesiastics. They contained among them persons of all classes, burning

with zeal for a great idea, pilgrims at once and soldiers, with numerous priests and monks. Yet, so far as I am

aware, not one single written memorial of all those crusading hosts has been found in the whole country. On

a rock beside the lofty castle of Butrentum, commanding the approach to the great pass of the Cilician

Gates --that narrow gorge which they called the Gate of Judas, because it was the enemy of their faith and

the betrayer of their cause--there are engraved many memorials of their presence; but none are written; all

are mere marks in the form of crosses.

In that small body of mercenaries who passed by Abu Simbel 600 years before Christ, there were probably

more persons accustomed to use familiarly the art of writing than in all the hosts of the Crusaders; for, even

to those Crusaders who had learned to write, the art was far from being familiar, and they were not wont to

use it in their ordinary everyday life, though they might on great occasions. In those 1700 years the

Mediterranean world had passed from light to darkness, from civilisation to barbarism, so far as writing was

concerned. Only recently are we beginning to realise how civilised in some respects was mankind in that

earlier time, and to free ourselves from many unfounded prejudices and prepossessions about the character

of ancient life and society.

The cumbrousness of the materials on which ancient writing was inscribed may seem unfavourable to its

easy or general use. But it must be remembered that, except in Egypt, no material that was not of the most

durable character has been or could have been preserved. All writing-materials more ephemeral than stone,

bronze, or terra -cotta, have inevitably been destroyed by natural causes. Only in Egypt the extreme dryness

of climate and soil has enabled paper to survive. Now the question must suggest itself whether there is any

reason to think that more ephemeral materials for writing were never used by the ancient Mediterranean

peoples generally. Was Egypt the only country in which writers used such perishable materials? The

question can be answered only in one way. There can be no doubt that the custom, which obtained in the

Greek lands in the period best known to us, had come down from remote antiquity: that custom was to make

a distinction between the material on which documents of national interest and public character were written

and that on which mere private documents of personal or literary interest were written. The former, such as

laws, decrees and other State documents, which were intended to be made as widely known as possible,

were engraved in one or two copies on tablets of the most imperishable character and preserved or exposed

in some public place: this was the ancient way of attaining the publicity which in modern time is got by

printing large numbers of copies on ephemeral material. But those public copies were not the only ones