A reed pen (Ancient Greek: κάλαμοι kalamoi; singular κάλαμος kalamos) or bamboo pen (traditional Chinese: 竹筆; simplified Chinese: 竹笔; pinyin: zhú bǐ) is a writing implement made by cutting and shaping a single reed straw or length of bamboo.
A reed pen (Ancient Greek: κάλαμοι kalamoi; singular κάλαμος kalamos) or bamboo pen (traditional Chinese: 竹筆; simplified Chinese: 竹笔; pinyin: zhú bǐ) is a writing implement made by cutting and shaping a single reed straw or length of bamboo.
In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian ṭuppu(m) 𒁾) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age.
Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylus often made of reed (reed pen). Once written upon, many tablets were dried in the sun or air, remaining fragile. Later, these unfired clay tablets could be soaked in water and recycled into new clean tablets. Other tablets, once written, were either deliberately fired in hot kilns, or inadvertently fired when buildings were burnt down by accident or during conflict, making them hard and durable. Collections of these clay documents made up the first archives. They were at the root of the first libraries. Tens of thousands of written tablets, including many fragments, have been found in the Middle East.
Ink is a gel, sol, or solution that contains at least one colorant, such as a dye or pigment, and is used to color a surface to produce an image, text, or design. Ink is used for drawing or writing with a pen, brush, reed pen, or quill. Thicker inks, in paste form, are used extensively in letterpress and lithographic printing.
Ink can be a complex medium, composed of solvents, pigments, dyes, resins, lubricants, solubilizers, surfactants, particulate matter, fluorescents, and other materials. The components of inks serve multiple purposes; the ink's carrier, colorants, and other additives affect the flow and thickness of the ink and its dry appearance.
A pen is a common writing instrument that applies ink to a surface, typically paper, for writing or drawing. Early pens such as reed pens, quill pens, dip pens and ruling pens held a small amount of ink on a nib or in a small void or cavity that had to be periodically recharged by dipping the tip of the pen into an inkwell. Today, such pens find only a small number of specialized uses, such as in illustration and calligraphy. Reed pens, quill pens and dip pens, which were used for writing, have been replaced by ballpoint pens, rollerball pens, fountain pens and felt or ceramic tip pens.
Ruling pens, which were used for technical drawing and cartography, have been replaced by technical pens such as the Rapidograph. All of these modern pens contain internal ink reservoirs, such that they do not need to be dipped in ink while writing.
A quill is a writing tool made from a moulted flight feather (preferably a primary wing-feather) of a large bird. Quills were used for writing with ink before the invention of the dip pen/metal-nibbed pen, the fountain pen, and, eventually, the ballpoint pen.
As with the earlier reed pen (and later dip pen), a quill has no internal ink reservoir and therefore needs to periodically be dipped into an inkwell during writing. The hand-cut goose quill is rarely used by modern calligraphers, however, it is still the tool of choice for a few scribes who claim the quills provide an unmatched sharp stroke as well as greater flexibility than a steel pen.
Kalamos (Ancient Greek: Κάλαμος, lit. 'reed, reed pen'; Latin: Calamus) is a Greek mythological figure. He is son of Maiandros, the god of the Maeander river.
An album (Latin: albus, lit. 'white'), in ancient Rome, was a board plastered with chalk or gypsum, or painted white (tabula dealbata), on which decrees, edicts and other ephemeral public notices were inscribed in ink using a calamus (reed pen). Album was an early predecessor of bulletin boards. In medieval and modern times the meaning of the word album had changed to refer to a book of blank pages in which verses, autographs, sketches, photographs and the like are collected. An ancient Greek equivalent was called leukomata (Ancient Greek: λεύκωμα pl. λευκώματα).