Stylus in the context of "Google Earth"

A diptych (/ˈdɪptɪk/, DIP-tick) is any object with two flat plates which form a pair, often attached by a hinge. For example, the standard notebook and school exercise book of the ancient world was a diptych consisting of a pair of such plates that contained a recessed space filled with wax. Writing was accomplished by scratching the wax surface with a stylus. When the notes were no longer needed, the wax could be slightly heated and then smoothed to allow reuse. Ordinary versions had wooden frames, but more luxurious diptychs were crafted with more expensive materials.

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.

The Ugaritic alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) with syllabic elements written using the same tools as cuneiform (i.e. pressing a wedge-shaped stylus into a clay tablet), which emerged c. 1400 or 1300 BCE to write Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language; it fell out of use amid the Late Bronze Age collapse c. 1190 BCE. It was discovered in Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra, Syria) in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, but not elsewhere.

Clay tablets written in Ugaritic provide the earliest evidence of both the North Semitic and South Semitic orders of the alphabet, which gave rise to the alphabetic orders of the reduced Phoenician writing system and its descendants, including the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and Latin, and of the Geʽez script, which was also influenced by the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system, and adapted for Amharic. The Arabic and Ancient South Arabian scripts are the only other Semitic alphabets which have letters for all or almost all of the 29 commonly reconstructed Proto-Semitic consonant phonemes.

The slate and stylus are tools used by blind people to write text that they can read without assistance. Invented by Charles Barbier as the tool for writing letters that could be read by touch, the slate and stylus allow for a quick, easy, convenient and constant method of making embossed printing for Braille character encoding. Prior methods of making raised printing for the blind required a movable type printing press.

A nib is the part of a quill, dip pen, fountain pen, ball point, or stylus which comes into contact with the writing surface in order to deposit ink. Different types of nibs vary in their purpose, shape and size, as well as the material from which they are made.

Tabula rasa (/ˈtæbjələ ˈrɑːsə, -zə, ˈreɪ-/; Latin for "blank slate") is the idea of individuals being born empty of any built-in mental content, so that all knowledge comes from later perceptions or sensory experiences. Proponents typically form the extreme "nurture" side of the nature versus nurture debate, arguing that humans are born without any "natural" psychological traits and that all aspects of one's personality, social and emotional behaviour, knowledge, or sapience are later imprinted by one's environment onto the mind as one would onto a wax tablet. This idea is the central view posited in the theory of knowledge known as empiricism. Empiricists disagree with the doctrines of innatism or rationalism, which hold that the mind is born already in possession of specific knowledge or rational capacity.

A wax tablet is a tablet made of wood and covered with a layer of wax, often linked loosely to a cover tablet, as a "double-leaved" diptych. It was used as a reusable and portable writing surface in antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages. Cicero's letters make passing reference to the use of cerae, and some examples of wax-tablets have been preserved in waterlogged deposits in the Roman fort at Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall. Medieval wax tablet books are on display in several European museums.

Writing on the wax surface was performed with a pointed instrument, a stylus. A straight-edged spatula-like implement (often placed on the opposite end of the stylus tip) would be used as an eraser. The modern expression of "a clean slate" equates to the Latin expression "tabula rasa".

The Meroitic language (/mɛroʊˈɪtɪk/) was a language of uncertain linguistic affiliation spoken in Meroë (in present-day Sudan) during the Meroitic period (attested from 300 BC) and became extinct about 400 AD. It was written in two forms of the Meroitic alphabet: Meroitic Cursive, which was written with a stylus and was used for general record-keeping; and Meroitic Hieroglyphic, which was carved in stone or used for royal or religious documents. It is poorly understood, owing to the scarcity of bilingual texts.