On the plains of Asia lived the Chaldeans, whose civilization was about as old as that of the Egyptians. But their books were very different. Men use for their purposes the things that are close at hand. In Egypt the papyrus plant was utilized for making books. In Chaldea, instead of this marsh reed, there were great stores of clay and of this material the ancient Chaldeans, and the Babylonians and the Assyrians who followed them, made their books. The Chaldeans took bricks or masses of smooth clay and, while they were yet soft, made impressions on them with a metal stiletto shaped at the end like the side of a wedge. In Latin the word for _wedge_ is _cuneus_. Hence this old writing of the Chaldeans is called cuneiform or wedge-shaped. Some of these wedge-shaped impressions stood for whole words, others for syllables. After the clay tablets had been written upon, they were burned or dried hard in the sun. A Chaldean book was thus made very durable and lasted for ages. During recent years many of them have been dug up in ancient Babylonia and deciphered. They consist of grammars, dictionaries, religious books and hymns, laws, public documents, and records of private business transactions. The early Greeks and Romans used for their books tablets of ivory or metal or, more commonly, tablets of wood taken from the beech or fir tree. The inner sides of these tablets were coated with wax. On this wax coating the letters were traced with a pointed metallic pen or stiletto called the stylus. Our English word _style_, as used in rhetoric, comes from the name of this instrument. The other end of the stylus was used for erasing. Two of these waxed tablets, joined at the edges by wire hinges, were the earliest specimens of bookbinding. Wax tablets of this kind continued in partial use in Europe through the Middle Ages. Later the leaves of the palm tree were used; then the inner bark of the lime, ash, maple, or elm. The next material that came into general use for writing purposes was parchment. This was made from the skins of animals, particularly sheep or lambs. Next came vellum, the prepared skin of the calf. Parchment and vellum were written upon with a metallic pen. As these substances were very costly, sometimes one book was written over another on the same piece of parchment or vellum. Of course this made the reading of the manuscript very difficult. About the end of the ninth century or the beginning of the tenth, after Christ, parchment and vellum as material for books gave way to paper. At first paper was made of cotton, but during the twelfth century it was produced from linen. It is not known who invented linen paper, but its introduction gave the first great impulse to book making.