The Book in the Ancient World

LRBS Week 2: 23 - 27 June 2025

The course is an intensive survey of the origins of, and the changes in, textual culture that took place between c. 3100 BCE and 400 CE. It will set these changes into their related historical contexts and place close emphasis on the material nature of writing and book construction. This will likely involve use of materials from the Museum of Writing Research Collection (Honorary Consultant: Alan Cole) from Senate House Library and other collections. Students will have the opportunity to experiment with writing using modern reconstructions of ancient materials. They will also be introduced to the advanced imaging techniques used to recover difficult-to-read texts: multispectral imaging, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), and decorrelation stretch on subject matter including ancient Egyptian texts on papyrus and stone, cuneiform tablets, curse tablets on lead and other metals, Herculaneum papyri, etc. The course will end by looking at the ways in which the modern book form (the codex) emerged at the end of the period, and how some of the ancient texts studied in the course survived through the post-classical manuscript periods to the age of printing.