practicesInscribing

The oldest dated example in this atlas is two silver scrolls found in 1979 in a Judahite burial chamber at Ketef Hinnom, southwest of Jerusalem's Old City, in a site first reported by Gabriel Barkay in 1975. They carry portions of the Priestly Blessing from Numbers, date from around 600 BCE, and took three years to unroll without destroying. They are the oldest surviving texts from the Hebrew Bible known, and they were worn.

Jewish practice still treats the letters as the object. A mezuzah's klaf is written by a qualified scribe, a sofer stam, trained in the law and in the calligraphy of Ktav Stam, in indelible black ink with a quill made from a feather or, rarely now, a reed; tearing or damaging the wording invalidates it. Tefillin are stricter still: 3,188 letters across the parchments, as long as fifteen hours of a scribe's work for a set, and the letters must be written in order — find a mistake later and it cannot be corrected, because the replacement letter would have been written out of sequence.

The Greek and Roman world wrote to bind rather than to bless. Curse tablets — tabella defixionis, katadesmos — are thin lead sheets scratched in tiny letters, then rolled, folded or pierced with nails. Writers added palindromes, boustrophedon lines and otherwise meaningless words such as Bazagra or Bescu, and professionals sometimes prepared tablets in advance with a space left for the customer's name. Mesopotamian incantation bowls run their text in a spiral from the outer rim inward, so that, in John Charles Arnold's description, demons following the charms would be caught in the centre.

China took the logic to its end and made the writing unreadable on purpose. Fulu are talismanic script — strokes that resemble Chinese characters without being them. Ge Hong noted in the Baopuzi, in the Eastern Jin (317–420), that a talisman worked whether or not its user could decipher it, and Fudan University's Ge Zhaoguang describes the illegibility as deliberate archaism, a veil that leaves only qualified clergy able to produce them. Thai yant are written in Khom Pali, a Thai variant of Khmer script, or in Lan Na Tai Tham in the north. Islamic talismanic shirts carry Quranic verses, names of God and of prophets, and numbers; the earliest surviving examples were made in or near the fifteenth century.

Inference — two opposite strategies run through all of this. One camp writes to be read by a power that reads: the blessing, the verse, the name. The other writes to be unreadable by anyone: the meaningless words on a lead sheet, the Taoist strokes, the letters that only a scribe's hand can form. Both are ways of putting the text beyond the ordinary user's reach.

Materials first, because they decide the tool: lead takes a stylus, parchment takes a quill and a ruled line, silver takes a punch, metal foil takes a stylus and then rolls, paper takes a brush. Then the text, in a script the tradition specifies. Then, in several traditions, a check: many observant Jews have a scribe examine mezuzah parchments for tears and faded letters at least twice every seven years.

Still a paid trade. Scribes write mezuzot and tefillin to order, and sellers who supply a photocopied text on paper with a decorated case are selling a case: a valid mezuzah has to be handwritten on parchment by a qualified scribe. Thai and Cambodian masters still write yant on metal, cloth and skin. Chinese folk healers still use zhuyou, the talismanic branch of healing, which traditional Chinese medicine rejects and which was reinterpreted in the twentieth century as a local counterpart to hypnosis.