In the Philippines, for example, as early as 900 AD, specimen documents were not inscribed by stylus, but were punched much like the style of today's dot-matrix printers. In Southeast Asia, in the first millennium, documents of sufficiently great importance were inscribed on soft metallic sheets such as copperplate, softened by refiner's fire and inscribed with a metal stylus. Because of the likelihood of errors being introduced each time a manuscript was copied, the filiation of different versions of the same text is a fundamental part of the study and criticism of all texts that have been transmitted in manuscript. Private or government documents remained hand-written until the invention of the typewriter in the late 19th century. Manuscript copying of books continued for a least a century, as printing remained expensive. In the Islamic world and the West, all books were in manuscript until the introduction of movable type printing in about 1450. The earliest dated example is the Diamond Sutra of 868. In China, and later other parts of East Asia, woodblock printing was used for books from about the 7th century. Originally, all books were in manuscript form. Papyrus has a life of at most a century or two in relatively moist Italian or Greek conditions only those works copied onto parchment, usually after the general conversion to Christianity, have survived, and by no means all of those. Ironically, the manuscripts that were being most carefully preserved in the libraries of antiquity are virtually all lost. Volcanic ash preserved some of the Roman library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. Manuscripts in Tocharian languages, written on palm leaves, survived in desert burials in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia. The oldest written manuscripts have been preserved by the perfect dryness of their Middle Eastern resting places, whether placed within sarcophagi in Egyptian tombs, or reused as mummy-wrappings, discarded in the middens of Oxyrhynchus or secreted for safe-keeping in jars and buried ( Nag Hammadi library) or stored in dry caves ( Dead Sea scrolls). When Greek or Latin works were published, numerous professional copies were made simultaneously by scribes in a scriptorium, each making a single copy from an original that was declaimed aloud. Paper spread from China via the Islamic world to Europe by the 14th century, and by the late 15th century had largely replaced parchment for many purposes. In India, the palm leaf manuscript, with a distinctive long rectangular shape, was used from ancient times until the 19th century. In Russia birch bark documents as old as from the 11th century have survived. Manuscripts were produced on vellum and other parchment, on papyrus, and on paper. Historically, manuscripts were produced in form of scrolls ( volumen in Latin) or books ( codex, plural codices). stainsīefore the inventions of printing, in China by woodblock and in Europe by movable type in a printing press, all written documents had to be both produced and reproduced by hand.
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