The edicts, as well as the letters of kings, were written upon tablets and sent to the various provinces, sealed with their signets. Scripture plainly alludes to the custom of sealing up letters, edicts and the tablets on which the prophets wrote their visions. The practice of writing upon rolls made of the barks of trees is very ancient. It is alluded to in the Book of Job: "Oh! that mine adversary had written a book; surely I would take it upon my shoulders, and bind it as a crown to me." (Old version.) The new one runs: "And that I had the indictment which mine adversary hath written!" The rolls, or volumes, generally speaking, were written upon one side only. This is intimated by Ezekiel who observes that he saw one of in extraordinary form written on both sides: "And when I looked, behold, an Hand was sent unto me, and lo! a roll of a book was therein; and he spread it before me, and it was written within and without." To have been able to write on dry tablets of wood or barks of trees with the reed or brush, the then only ink-writing instruments in vogue would have necessitated the employment of lampblack suspended in a vehicle of thick gum, or in the form of a paint. Both of these maybe termed pigmentary inks. The use of thin inks would have caused spreading or blotting and thus rendered the writing illegible. The Encyclopaedia Britannica generalizes its remarks on this subject:-- "The earliest writings were purely monumental and accordingly those materials were chosen which were supposed to last the longest. The same idea of perpetuity which in architecture finds its most striking exposition in the pyramids was repeated, in the case of literary records, in the two columns mentioned by Josephus, the one of stone and the other of brick, on which the children of Seth wrote their inventions and astronomical discoveries; in the pillars in Crete on which, according to Porphyry, the ceremonies of the Corybantes were inscribed; in the leaden tablets containinlu the works of Hesiod, deposited in the temple of the Muses, in Boeotia; in the ten commandments on stone delivered by Moses; and in the laws of Solon, inscribed on planks of wood. The notion of a literary production surviving the destruction of the materials on which it was first written--the 'momentum, aere perennius' of Horace's ambition--was unknown before the discovery of substances for systematic transcription. "Tablets of ivory or metal were in common use among the Greeks and Romans. When made of wood--sometimes of citron, but usually of beech or fir--their inner sides were coated with wax, on which the letters were traced with a pointed pen or stiletto (stylus), one end of which was used for erasure. It was with his stylus that Caesar stabbed Casca in the arm when attacked by his murderers. Wax tablets of this kind continued in partial use in Europe during the middle ages; the oldest extant specimen, now in the museum at Florence, belongs to the year 1301."