The reason of this is that classical styles of decoration and technical methods, in the preparation of paper, parchment, pigments and the like, both survived to greater extent and to a very much later period than is usually supposed to have been the case, and, indeed, continued to influence both the artistic qualities and the mechanical processes of the mediaeval illuminator almost down to the time when the production of illuminated manuscripts was gradually put an end to by the invention of printing. _The pen and the stilus._ The word _manuscript_ is usually taken to imply writing with a pen, brush or _stilus_ to the exclusion of inscriptions cut with the chisel or the graver in stone, marble, bronze or other hard substance. The science of _palaeography_ deals with the former, while _epigraphy_ is concerned with the latter. The inscribed clay tablets of Assyria and Babylon might be considered a sort of link between the two, on account of the cuneiform writing on them having been executed with a stilus in soft, plastic clay, which subsequently was hardened by baking in the potter's kiln, but it will be needless to describe them here. _Writing on metal._ _Manuscripts on metal plates._ Another form of writing especially used by the ancient Greeks, which falls more definitely under the head of manuscripts, consists of characters scratched with a sharp iron or bronze _stilus_ on plates of soft tin, lead or pewter, which, when not in use, could be rolled up into a compact and conveniently portable cylinder. A considerable number of these inscribed lead rolls have been found in the tombs of Cyprus; but none of them unfortunately have as yet been found to contain matter of any great interest. _Lead rolls._ _Tin rolls._ For the most part they consist either of monetary accounts, or else of formulae of imprecations, curses devoting some enemy to punishment at the hands of the gods. We know however from the evidence of classical writers that famous poems and other important literary works were occasionally preserved in the form of these inscribed tin or lead rolls. Pausanias, for example, tells us that during his visit to Helicon in Boeotia he was shown the original manuscript of Hesiod's _Works and Days_ written on plates of lead; see Paus. IX. 31. Again at IV. 26, Pausanias records the discovery at Ithome in Messenia of a bronze urn (_hydria_) which contained a manuscript of the "Mysteries of the Great Deities" written on "a thinly beaten plate of tin, which was rolled up like a book," [Greek: kassiteron elêlasmenon es to leptotaton, epeilikto de hôsper ta biblia]. This method of writing would be quite different from the laborious method of cutting inscriptions on bronze plates with a chisel and hammer, or with a graver. A scribe could write on the soft white metal with a sharp stilus almost as easily and rapidly as if he were using pen and ink on paper, and the manuscript thus produced would have the advantage of extreme durability.