A rough start to a Compleat Anachronist Article – Article being completed in consultation with the Compleat Anachronist Editors for a forthcoming publication.
Topic: Inks pre-1600
Introduction
The importance of ink is very difficult to overstate.
Ink is used to create symbols on support that both store and convey thought. These symbols can be pictograms, alphabets, numbers, pictures and more. Ink has been adapted to write on almost every surface imaginable. A short list might include, paper, parchment, papyrus, wood, clay, walls, and glass. Even in today’s modern world of electronic and digital information conveyance we still use ink in our printers. We also use ink in the mass media of newspapers, magazines, books and ball point pens. The importance of ink is very difficult to overstate.
Let us do a thought experiment to help show the importance of ink. Think about every book you have ever read, every periodical, every award, degree or certificate you have ever seen, and about manuscripts and scrolls ever written. Now, take away the ink from those things. Did your heart skip a beat? Did you just erase the vast amount of human knowledge we have ever had in the world?
The simple truth is that ink is among the most effective and efficient substances that is used to write for the past 4,500 years. And writing stores knowledge on surfaces that have stood the test of time. Ink itself flexible allowing it to survive on surfaces that bend, flex, rip, tear, be rolled up, folded and myriad of other mistreatments that other methods of writing such as carving or scraping simply do not hold up to.
It is the written word that allows us to peer into the mind and cultures of yesteryear just as clearly as those of today. And in the vast majority of cases that writing is done with ink. If you have any knowledge of history, chances are that knowledge is because of ink.
Quick History
The earliest known inks were created in Ancient Egypt and China around the same time, roughly 2,500 B.C. They were black and used with a brush as opposed to a pen. The purpose was to store knowledge using pictograms without the need to get out carving and indenting tools. It is likely the innovation of ink sped up the writing process considerably. In the 4,500 years from then to now ink has both become a global phenomenon and changed considerably. From brushes to reed and feathers dip pen ink to the ubiquitous modern ball point pen ink and even ink designed to be written in outer space and under water along with ink designed to be affixed to paper with a laser. Anywhere and just about any way one might wish to store thoughts, there is an ink for that these days.
Writing stores knowledge and the most durable and prevalent writing has been done in ink. There are many kinds of ink from colored ink to black ink. Colored inks tend to be synthetic inks their colors derived from chemical interactions. Black inks color can come from a carbon source but also from oxidized iron. The most common iron ink is Iron gall ink which has been called one of the most important inks in the history of western civilization[1]. “… the fundamental action of the pen, to deliver liquid ink to an absorbent surface, has remained unchanged for five thousand years.” (Kim, Moon, Lee, Mahadevan, & Kim, 2011)
Longer History
What is ink? Where does the word “ink” come from?
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us:
ink
Pronunciation: /iNGk/
noun
1A colored fluid used for writing, drawing, printing, or duplicating:
Middle English enke, inke, from Old French enque, via late Latin from Greek enkauston, denoting the purple ink used by Roman emperors for signatures, from enkaiein ‘burn in’.
Ink is an intermediary substance between dyes and paints. A dye fundamentally changes the substance it comes in contact with altering its color. A paint sits on top of the surface and can be scraped off with little or no change to the surface it was on. Ink both “burns in,” and sits on top of the writing surface. Anything that you write with that isn’t ink is called a writing fluid. Yes, you can make dyes and paints into writing fluids.
When we think back into how writing developed this makes sense. Writing as we first developed by impressing clay tablets and carving stone. The oldest known writing is a proto-cuneiform on the Kish Tablets dated to 3,500 BCE. Around 2,500 BCE we have ink being in Egypt to write. Based on exhumed mummies we know Egypt was using dyes on fabrics. Known fabric dying pre-dates known ink writing. It is not too far stretch to guess that perhaps one day some enterprising writer decided to try to find a way to make dyes usable for writing and speed up the process from carving stone or clay.
In our discussion we will be focusing on medieval inks, how they were made, what they were used for and how you can make some for yourself.
Black Inks
Black inks pre-1600 are typically, not exclusively, carbon-based inks or iron-based inks. Carbon inks came first. They are “natural inks” or more accurately they are inks where the natural substances used to make them are not chemically changed into something else. We know China was using the now ill-named “India Ink” in 1200 BCE. Iron inks are a synthetic ink. This means a chemical reaction is used to change the ingredients at the molecular level from what they were into the ink. The reaction to make ink is considered one of the first written about chemical reagents[i]by Pliny in the 1st century CE.[ii]
Ink both changed and was changed when the tools, support and society need changed. This was, and is, a constant feedback loop looking for the best combinations of ink to the tools and surfaces it will be used on. Ink is used on many differing writing surfaces. When speaking generally we will term all these surfaces as “support” or “supports” in accordance with standard academic and preservation terminology
We start off in China and Egypt around 2,500 BC using carbon-based inks comprised of ground up charcoal and/or oily smoke collected from light sources such as lamps. The supports in Egypt were stone, clay and papyrus mashed together to form sheets and rolls. In China the supports were stone, clay and bamboo slats tied together. Of course, anything that could be written on probably was written on. Carbon based inks were very easy to make and work well on a great variety of supports. However, carbon inks easily flake off and information is lost. This quality was often taken advantage of by future scribes and often unscrupulous individuals. They would scrape off and replace pages and words, with almost no ability to detect the tampering. Palimpsests were made this way. And official records were tampered with this way as well.
Methods and other recipe issues
Ink
Making an “authentic” medieval or renaissance ink has some complications and those often provide some freedoms as well. In the past 20 years non-invasive techniques have been used to determine the chemical makeup of ink on manuscript pages. We can use that to determine what the current composition of the ink is. From that we can determine many of the components of ink when it was put on the page, but we can’t use that to determine a recipe. So, we use recipes from pre-1600.
Ink making recipes are like any recipe you might use for food. The only real difference being the ingredients might or might not be edible and the final product really should not be ingested at all. It would be very nice if we could just grab the recipe from where ever it came from and then make it. What really happens is often much different. The first known “complete” iron gall ink recipe comes to us from Theophilus in his book “On Divers Arts” written circa 1100 C.E. We have manuscripts written in iron gall ink more than 800 years earlier.
The issues faced by would be ink re-creators are the same ones faced by re-creator cooks. The recipes are not nicely laid out with amounts and of ingredients. Theophilus in his book tells us to, “Fill two, three, four or five barrels with bark and water…” The materials and tools to make the ink are often left out, not in common use today or not made the same way today. And the methods to make the ink such as soaking, boiling and fermenting often do not come with specific times. In other words, it is a lot like listening to or reading the proverbial grandmother recipe that makes little sense if you’re not right there with her making it. You might think this is frustrating and problematic. And you are kind of right. But with that ambiguity also comes the freedom to try things and if they work, well, you did it right. Maybe not the way they did it, maybe it is. But since we don’t know, we don’t know. If the final product is ink, you didn’t do it wrong.
Recipes from 1100 to 1500 gradually become more complete. Recipes from 1500 to 1600 are often very complete looking but don’t depend on that. The more complete recipes include measurements. From when they written. Or from the time of the plagiarized recipe that has been re-written later even a few hundred years later.
These measurements from that time and that place are not the same as today’s measurements. In the time of the recipes we see, measurements were not standardized. That simple statement understates the complexity of the issue. A pint in 1100 might not be the same volume as a pint in 1550. A pint of ale or beer is not the same volume as a pint of wine or vinegar or water. And how many pints equaled a quart was not the same between them either. And of course, each kingdom or country had their own version each measurement as well. A wine pint in England was not the same as a wine pint in France for example. Today we are not free from this so don’t think of then as somehow backward. Pints still differ between countries and some still have more than one kind of pint.
A real example of the potential issues comes in the book “Book of Secrets diverse ways of making ink” translate from the Dutch by Guy SOMEONE. Did Guy translate the measurements when he translated the recipes? In one recipe for iron gall ink Guy has translated it as, “poure into them a pint of beere or wine,” A pint of beer is not the same volume as a pint of wine. If Guy translated the measurements, the English Measurement for a pint had been standardized to 28.875 Cubic inches (0.473 l) for wine and 35.25 cubic inches (0.578 l) for ale and beer. So yes, you will get more or less volume depending on which you use. The measurements of other ingredients do not change.
There are many different kinds of pounds and weight ounces as well. Today we have the saying, “A pint is a pound the world ‘round.” That simply isn’t true in pre-1600 recipes. Whose pint, whose pint, which pint and which pound?
So, what do you do? There are really two choices. You can go deep into the rabbit warren of research of different measurements from different places and different times. If you choose to go down this route, I recommend looking up the books on measurements written by Ronald Edward Zupko. He is a world recognized expert in historical metrology (the study of the history of weights and measures). There are online conversions that will do historical measurements as well. Or, you can simply use the modern measurements. Does that change the ink? In my experience the answer is sometimes but not always. When there were differences in recipes, I have been able to do in both modern measurements and my best guess as which measurements to use for the historical recipes, the end result has both measurements have produced a usable ink if not the same quality of ink.
How do you make ink?
There are several methods for making ink. Sometimes more than one method is used in the same ink making process. Speaking very generally there is an extraction method, a mixing of ingredients to get the preferred color, and a binder is added. These steps are not always in the order just given.
Materials, Tools and Supply
Iron Gall Ink
“Iron gall ink, also referred to as iron gallotannate ink, is one of the most important inks in the history of western civilisation, and was in wide spread use from the Middle Ages until the 20th century.” (Kolar, et al., 2006)
Liquids
Liquids used to make iron gall ink are always water based. This does not mean that only water was used. Recipes for iron gall ink often include wines (both read and white), beer and vinegar. All of these are water-based solutions. Water is very good at extracting chemicals from a variety of substances.
Tannic Acid
Tannic acid is a necessary ingredient for making iron gall ink. There are several sources available in the Middle Ages to harvest tannic acid. The most well know is oak galls but it isn’t the only source. Different bush and tree barks were also used.
There are three major forms of oak galls. Bark galls, leaf galls and bud galls. For the purposes of making iron gall ink we focus on the bud galls. “Galls nuts are a result of an insect or other outside contaminant piercing the outer skin of a tree, which then swells to form a growth.” (Cloutier, 2016). Oak galls come from any of the roughly 435 species of the oak tree. While we tend to focus on the tannic acid in the galls from oak trees, we must recognize that there is gallic acid in the oak galls as well. It is common to refer to this combination as gallotannic acids.
REMAINING OUTLINE
Different Kinds
European
Aleppo
Tree Bark(s)
Theophilus
Acid Content
Iron Donors
Ferrous Sulfate
Names
Vitriol
Archaeology of Chemistry
Chemical Revolution
Iron – Raw
Heated
Not heated
Copper Sulfate
Hierarchy of chemical reactivity
Makes ink on its own?
Binders
Gums
Acacia
Cherry, Apple, Pear
Glaire
Honey
Carbon Inks
Lamp Black
Oil smoke
Liquid
Suffocant
Binder
Carbon
Burnt something
Liquid
Binder
Color Ingredients
Brazilwood
Dragon’s Blood
Hawthorne Berries
Alum
Lye
Liquids
Water
Beer
Wine
Brandy
Vinegar
[1] (Kolar, et al. 2006)
[i]“ The Early History of the First Chemical Reagent” Nierenstein, M. Isis, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Nov., 1931), pp. 439-446 The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society.
[ii]Naturalis Historia., xxxiv, i i.
scribescribbling 