Presentation at the 4th International Congress of Archaeological Sciences in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, Nicosia (Cyprus), 05/2024.

Recent research on the history of black writing ink production has unveiled the intricate beginnings of iron-gall ink, a type of ink made from the reaction between iron vitriol (iron sulphate) and tannins in an aqueous solution, with the optional addition of a binder (such as gum Arabic or animal glue). The exact time when scribes began to use this type of ink and why remain unclear, as the historical record provides no definitive answer.

Before the invention of iron-gall inks, scribes used carbon inks, made from a fine suspension of carbon pigments (made of soot or ground charcoal) with a binder in an aqueous solution. Results from several recent scientific investigations of inks from securely dated Hellenistic and Roman papyri have pointed out that besides carbon pigments, metallic compounds were occasionally used in ink production, in amounts too large to be coincidental. The first examples of such additions come already from the late fourth -early third century BCE, i.e. at the very beginning of the Hellenistic period. Such discovery echoes the earliest ink recipes mentioning metallic compounds, which date back from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The co-existence of carbon inks with and without added metallic elements, on documents from Hellenistic, Roman and early-Byzantine Egypt, suggests a transition period. During that time, scribes may have experimented with different formulations until they arrived at the well-understood iron-gall inks we know today. The diversity in ink compositions bears testimony to the extensive experimentation and innovation taking place in ink production.

In this talk, we will discuss the latest discoveries about this transition period, from both analytical and textual evidence, and detail the methods for analysing the composition of inks.

The research for this presentation was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 'Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796. The research was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.