Wax tablets
Romans used wax-coated wooden tablets (pugillares) upon which they could write and erase by using a stylus. One end of the stylus was pointed, and the other was spherical. Usually these tablets were used for everyday purposes (accounting, notes) and for teaching writing to children, according to the methods discussed by Quintilian in his Institutio Oratoria X Chapter 3. Several of these tablets could be assembled in a form similar to a codex. Also the etymology of the word codex (block of wood) suggest that it may have developed from wooden wax tablets. A stylus (plural: styli or styluses[1][2]) is a writing utensil, or a small tool for some other form of marking or shaping, for example in pottery. It can also be a computer accessory that is used to assist in navigating or providing more precision when using touchscreens. It usually refers to a narrow elongated staff, similar to a modern ballpoint pen. Many styli are heavily curved to be held more easily. Another widely-used writing tool is the stylus used by blind users in conjunction with the slate for punching out the dots in Braille.[3] Styli were first used by the ancient Mesopotamians in order to write in cuneiform, Egyptians (Middle Kingdom), and the Minoans of Crete (Linear A and Cretan Hieroglyphic) made styli in various materials: reeds that grew on the sides of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and in marshes and down to Egypt where the Egyptians used styli from sliced reeds with sharp points; bone and metal styli were also used. Cuneiform was entirely based on the "wedge-shaped" mark that the end of a cut reed made when pushed into a clay tablet, hence the name "cuneiform" from Latin cuneus = "wedge". The linear writings of Crete in the first half of the second millenni
m BC were made on sun dried clay tablets that were left to dry in order to become 'leather' hard before they were incised by the stylus. The linear nature of the writing was also dictated by the use of the stylus. Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (c. 35 – c. 100) was a Roman rhetorician from Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing. In English translation, he is usually referred to as Quintilian, although the alternate spellings of Quintillian and Quinctilian are occasionally seen, the latter in older texts.A codex (Latin caudex for "trunk of a tree" or block of wood, book; plural codices) is a book made up of a number of sheets of paper, vellum, or similar, with hand-written content,[1] usually stacked and bound by fixing one edge and with covers thicker than the sheets, but sometimes continuous and folded concertina-style. The alternative to paged codex format for a long document is the continuous scroll. Examples of folded codices are the Maya codices. Sometimes the term is used for a book-style format, including modern printed books but excluding folded books. Developed by the Romans from wooden writing tablets, its gradual replacement of the scroll, the dominant form of book in the ancient world, has been termed the most important advance in the history of the book prior to the invention of printing.[2] The spread of the codex is often associated with the rise of Christianity, which adopted the format for the Bible early on.[3] First described by the 1st-century AD Roman poet Martial, who praised its convenient use, the codex achieved numerical parity with the scroll around AD 300, and had completely replaced it throughout the now Christianised Greco-Roman world by the 6th century.[4]