Books -- History -- 400-1450; Manuscripts; Paleography
The other important "find"--an elaborate monument of early civilization
and embodying, perhaps, the most ancient of all codes--was that
discovered on the acropolis of ancient Susa in Persia during the winter
of 1901-02 by the French Expedition. This discovery consisted of three
fragments of black diorite stone and constituted, when fitted together,
a monument nearly eight feet in height. This monument embodies a
bas-relief of King Hammurabi receiving the Laws from the sun-god, and
an inscription of about four thousand lines (the longest inscription
yet discovered) arranged in forty-four columns, engraven on the _stele_
in cuneiform characters as were the Tel-el-Amarna tablets. It is
believed by the scholars that this Code was set up in the principal
cities of the realm and was designed to be read and observed by the
King's subjects. This Hammurabi (identified by most Assyriologists as
the Amraphel of the Old Testament, Genesis 14:1) was the sixth king of
the First Dynasty of Babylon and reigned for fifty-five years, about
2250 B. C. He was a great scholar and a pious and god-fearing King who
codified existing laws and had them widely promulgated.[35]]
Wood was used in some countries as the material upon which to write
or carve records and laws. The mummy-cases were both written upon and
carved with Egyptian characters and the laws of Solon were inscribed
on tablets of wood. The word _codex_ which has come to have different
significations meant, originally, the trunk of a tree but came to
be the designation for a wooden tablet coated with wax for writing
purposes. Pliny is authority for the statement that the bark of
trees was used for writing upon before the papyrus was adopted for
this purpose. It is held that in China writing was very early made
permanent on sections of the bamboo, being burned therein by a heated
metal stylus somewhat after the fashion of the modern pyrography; this
material was displaced, however, in the third century B. C. by silk
or cloth, and these, in turn, were superseded by a kind of paper made
from the inner bark of the mulberry tree, bamboo fibre, and other
substances which came into extensive use during the Han Dynasty (206
B. C.-25 A. D.) and, under the incentive of which, as we are told, an
extensive imperial library of the reigning house was collected. And, to
the present day, palm leaves are used for writing material in parts of
India.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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