 Once the alphabet ha been invented, man could write; but what was he to write on? He needed to find something on which information could be preserved indefinitely, something stable and durable, something easy to handle which was at the same time fairly tough but not too difficult to tear, and as light as possible so that it could be easily transported. Smooth rock surfaces were the first 'paper' used by mankind. Remember that prehistoric men drew and painted on the stone walls of their caves. Inscription on stone were very short, exhausting for their author and had the enormous disadvantage of being impossible to move. The same difficulty applies to tree trunks, which are used by some primitive peoples to this date. Before the arrival of paper as we know it a whole series of writing surfaces were invented using materials such as clay tablets, papyrus, waxed tablets and parchment.
Today paper is one of the mainsprings of our civilization. It is said that the standard of living of a country can be measured by the amount of paper it consumes. Without paper there would be no books, no magazines, no newspapers, no notebooks . . . and so on. Thanks to paper, man has at his disposal one of the most convenient methods of communication. There can be no doubt that the invention of paper was one of the most important events in the history of humanity.
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| The Babylonians invented tablets made of clay or mud on which they wrote with a stylus. The tablets were then baked. | The ancient Egyptians used papyrus, a substance derived from the plant of the same name, which has a triangular stem enveloped membrane which may be as much as 1m in length. | The Greeks and Romans had a different method of writing. They took notes on waxed tablets by mean of a pointed instrument which pierced the layer of wax. | 
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| About 300 BC a war broke out between the kingdoms of Pergamum and Egypt. Eumenes, monarch of Pergamum, ordered his subjects to find a material which could replace Egyptian papyrus. The learned man of the kingdom discovered a substance made from sheep skin. The wool was removed and the hide was scraped, beaten and stretched. It became known as 'parchment', derived from the name of the country. | In the Middle Ages the Arabs made known throughout Muslim Spain a material which was to replace all its predecessors. This was paper, whose manufacture they imported from far distant and mysterious realm of China.
The first paper appeared in China about 200 BC. Its name is derived from papyrus. Silk was transformed into paper by a process of pasting, but because silk was expensive, wool and cotton came to be used instead. This invention was attributed to Ts'ai Lun.
In the picture above, the manufacturing process used by the Chinese. They steeped mulberry or bamboo bark in water, then kneaded it to produce a paste from which they obtained smooth thin sheets of paper. | 
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