These individuals were not always held in the highest esteem. Among the Hebrews it was considered an honorable vocation, while the Greeks for a long time treated its practitioners as outcasts. It was an accomplishment possessed by the few even down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era. The rulers of the different countries were deficient in the art and depended on others to write their documents and letters to which they appended their monogram or the sign of the Cross against their names as an attestation. So late as A. D. 1516 an order was made in London to examine all persons who could write in order to discover the authorship of a seditious document. The art of writing is not mentioned in the Bible prior to the time of Moses, although as before stated, in Egypt and the countries adjacent thereto it was not only known but practiced. Its first mention recorded in Scripture will be found in Exodus xvii. v. 14; "And the Lord said unto Moses, Write this, for a memorial, in a book; and rehearse it in the ear of Joshua; for I will utterly put out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven." This command was given immediately after the defeat of the Amalekites near Horeb, and before the arrival of the Israelites at Mount Sinai. It is observable, that there is not the least hint to induce us to believe that writing was then newly invented; on the contrary, we may conclude, that Moses understood what was meant by writing in a book; otherwise God would have instructed him, as he had done Noah in building the Ark; for he would not have been commanded to write in a book, if he had been ignorant of the art of writing; but Moses expressed no difficulty of comprehension when he received this command. We also find that Moses wrote all the works and all the judgments of the Lord, contained in the twenty-first and the two succeeding chapters of the book of Exodus, before the two written tables of stone were even so much as promised. The delivery of the tables is not mentioned till the eighteenth verse of the thirty-first chapter, after God had made an end of communing with him upon the mount, though the ten commandments were promulgated immediately after his third descent. Moses makes frequent mention of ancient books of the Hebrews, but describes none, except the two tables on which God wrote the ten commandments. These he tells us, were of polished stone, engraven on both sides and as Calmet remarks: "it is probable that Moses would not have observed to us these two particulars so often as he does, were it not to distinguish them from other books, which were made of tables, not of stone, but of wood and curiously engraven, but on one side only." It cannot be said that Moses uses any language which can be construed to mean the employment of rolls of papyrus, or barks of trees, much less of parchment. We have therefore reason to believe that by the term book, he always means table-books, made of small thin boards or plates.