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Article: Think ink! It's easy to take making your mark for granted, but it took thousands of years of trial and error to make it possible to sign on the dotted line.(THE HOME FORUM)
- Article from:
- The Christian Science Monitor
- Article date:
- September 21, 2004
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Christian Science Publishing Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Byline: Sharon J. Huntington
If you think ink is no big deal, think about this: How would you like to carry a backpack full of stone books to school every day? Before ink was invented, people wrote pretty "heavy" messages to each other. They carved pictures and letters into stone or pressed them into wet clay.
The earliest known writing consists of drawings carved into cave walls. These showed important events such as a hunting trip or planting season. Then, thousands of years ago, the Greeks began to use a writing stylus, made of bone, metal, or ivory, to scratch marks into tablets coated with wax. Writing was still a lot of work, but at least you could ...