Ancient greeks - writing tools

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Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. By Mary Bellis Mary Bellis. Mary Bellis covered inventions and inventors for ThoughtCo for 18 years.

She is known for her independent films and documentaries, including one about Alexander Graham Bell. Learn about our Editorial Process. Featured Video. Cite this Article Format. Bellis, Mary. Last Update:. Writing Writing was a useful tool for the ancient Romans - the written word could communicate ideas to the people of Rome and to Roman subjects throughout the Empire.

These texts are found on scrolls as well as on objects as large as buildings or as small as coins. All are valuable, however, for they don't only serve as ways that the Romans communicated with each other; these texts also let the ancient Romans speak to us! This is a detail of the Arch of Titus in Rome. Re: what did the ancient greeks write with? Reply 1 on: 13 Jan, , When dry, it was about as flexible as thick bond paper and presented a surface that could absorb ink without blotting.

Sheets of papyrus could be joined with gum to form a roll biblos or biblion. On the Internet you can Google a goodly number of sites that describe its manufacture in Egypt from the third millennium B. As with other ideas they borrowed the Greeks made improvements, increasing the number of letters by adding vowels. This happened sometime around the beginning of the eighth century BC.

This was not the first time that Greek speaking peoples had used a written language. Several thousand sun-dried clay tablets covered with the Linear B script have been found on the island of Crete.

They represent the earliest form of written Greek known. Deciphered by a young English architect Michael Ventris , the tablets recorded details about the storage and distribution of household goods.

The information was probably written around BC.