With literacy arose the industry of ink-making, says S.Ananthanarayanan.

The cuneiform is an ancient form of writing, in clay, using a stylus made of reed, which left a wedge-shaped impression — hence the word cuneiform, which means “wedge-shaped”. And there was carving, on seals or temple walls. But the best ancient records are writing with inks, on papyrus, or, more common in India, on palm leaves.

What this means is that some ancient writing has been preserved for over 2000 years. This is more than we can say of most of the records we create today. And it speaks of sophistication of ink-making in ancient times. Thomas Christiansen, Marine Cotte, Wout de Nolf, Elouan Mouro, Juan Reyes-Herrera, Steven de Meyer, Frederik Vanmeert, Nati Salvadó, Victor Gonzalez, Poul Erik Lindelof, Kell Mortensen, Kim Ryholt, Koen Janssensd, and Sine Larsenj, from the Universities of Copenhagen, Sorbonne, Pierre and Marie Curie, Paris, Antwerp, Catalonia, the National Museum of Denmark and the Synchrotron facility in Grenoble, France, write, in the journal, PNAS, of their work with the red and black inks found on Egyptian papyri. While they find that iron and lead was used in the pigments, they work it out that iron was the colorant, the lead was for fixing the stain.

Black inks were usually made by mixing carbon black with a thickening and adhesive agent, like oils and animal glue. The mixture was then ground and allowed to dry, for moistening when needed for use. The ink was applied with a reed pen and the carbon stayed on the writing surface when the ink dried. The paper in PNAS says that examples of writing, with ink on papyrus, have been found in ancient Egypt of over 5,000 years ago, and the examples are both of black ink, and red ink that was used for headings or emphasis. While soot was the main component of black ink, red ink made use of ochre, the red oxide of iron.

The paper says that different kinds of black ink were developed over the ages, some containing copper or lead, along with carbon, and these have been fairly well studied. The nature of red ink, however, has received less attention. The authors of the paper hence undertook detailed analysis of both the black, red inks and pink inks found on a selection of fragments of several manuscripts from the so-called Tebtunis temple library, an institutional library, the only one to survive, of ancient Egypt.

The Tebtunis library was discovered in 1899-1900, during excavations at the site of the ancient city, now the village of Umm-el-baragat, in Egypt, some 100 km southwest of Cairo. The library was inside the main temple precinct and threw up thousands of fragments of some 500 manuscripts – “among the most important assemblages of papyri unearthed in the sands of Egypt,” the paper says. “The papyri selected for analysis were acquired in 1931 to 1938 by the Carlsberg Foundation on (sic) the antiquities market in Cairo. Today they are housed in the Papyrus Carlsberg Collection at the University of Copenhagen,” the paper says.

Earlier analyses of the red and pink inks had shown that they had iron and lead compounds, and ochre, the oxide of iron had been identified, but none of the methods used had provided information about the nature of the lead-based compounds, the paper says. The use of lead compounds to produce pigments was also documented, but these compounds had not been found in papyri. While the compound, red lead, had been used in some applications, its use in pigments was much later. The present investigation was hence directed to pinning down the iron and lead compound found in the writing on papyri. And to this end, the authors went back to the papyrus fragments in the Carlsberg Collection.

Detailed analyses, with high energy X ray probes, generated at the particle accelerator at Grenoble, to reveal the structure, and analysis of infra red absorption, to reveal the chemical bonds, were used to study the elements and chemical composition of tiniest grains of the pigment material. With 12 samples and two colours, there were 24 samples in all, and variations in the papyrus and the thickness of the ink had to be factored, with statistical analysis to arrive at reliable estimates of the composition.

The results were that almost all the red samples contained iron and lead, aluminium, sometimes with magnesium, silicon and potassium. The elements in the red samples corresponded to the ores of iron, notably the oxide, ochre, with clay and sand intermixed. The composition of the lead content was also made out, with the lead content forming rings around specks of ochre, in the red pigment and in the papyrus.

Lead was found to be present in both the red and the black samples. The lead compounds, however were not the forms that were later documented for use with pigments. This observation, that the lead compounds would not contribute to colour and that they were found in the black ink as well as the red ink, suggests that they were not there for colour, but for other properties, like enabling drying. The paper refers to other records of the paint recipes of master painters in later centuries, and close chemical analysis, to conclude that the lead content was only for drying the pigment and mixed added at the time of preparation.

Considering the volume of the manuscripts and the writing, it is not likely that the temple priests mixed their own inks, they must have relied on specialised workshops, the paper says. “The results presented in this article have provided valuable information on the preparation and composition of red and black inks in ancient Egypt and Rome some 2000 years ago,” the paper concludes.

India Ink and the accountant/b> The earliest black ink was carbon-based and invented in China, though it is known as India Ink. This was perhaps because some of the constituents came from India
Nearer home, it is said that the accountants from the Marwar region of Rajasthan had their own method to make black ink. The method involved allowing iron nails to rust in a bath of unrefined sugar, and the property of this ink was that it would never fade.
Now, fading of ink is the feature that allows forgeries or changes in writing, carried out after a delay, to be detected. Clients of the accountants of Marwar, however, had a way out if they needed to alter their books even years after they were written.
The accountants stored each year’s stock of ink in pots buried in a vault below their place of work. When a client who wanted changes came to them, they could pull out the bottle with the ink used when the entries were made, and the new writing would look no different from what was being changed!

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