Answer by Anna Willi
This is a really fun question! Herodotus himself does not tell us what materials he used, but we can make an educated guess: we have a good idea of what was available at his time and can get further clues from the way Herodotus talks about writing materials more generally and by thinking about how he may have written his Histories.
People in antiquity wrote onto all kinds of materials and objects, including pottery sherds (ostraka) and sheets of lead, but for composing longer, literary texts like Herodotus’ Histories, the three main candidates were papyrus, parchment and wooden writing tablets with or without a layer of wax on them. Papyrus was made from the papyrus plant native to Egypt and mostly exported from there. It was used as individual sheets or as papyrus scrolls, for which several sheets were stuck together. Parchment was made from animal hide, but untanned as opposed to leather. Both papyrus and parchment were inscribed with ink, which was coloured with carbon in antiquity. As far as we can tell, quills only came into use in Late Antiquity; before that people used reed pens or, much less commonly, metal inkpens. Ink was also sometimes used with wooden tablets, and they were sometimes whitened first. Other wooden tablets had a recess that was filled with wax, and they were inscribed with a stylus that was usually made of metal or bone. All three materials were used as supports for writing in the Mediterranean from the 3rd or 2nd millennium BCE onwards. Of the three materials, parchment was perhaps the least widely used in Herodotus’ world. Initially it was more common in the Near East; in the wider Mediterranean it became more and more popular in the Roman period and properly took off in the Early Middle Ages.
The conditions in the eastern Mediterranean, where Herodotus lived, are sadly not very favourable for the preservation of organic material. To my knowledge, the earliest finds of wax tablets and papyrus from Greece (and in Greek script) were both found in the burial of a musician or poet in Daphni (Athens) dating to 430–420 BCE. They probably contained texts of literary character. The date puts them right at the end of Herodotus’s lifetime, but through literary sources and depictions we know that both papyrus and writing tablets were used commonly in the 5th century BCE, including for literary texts. Euripides, for example, a contemporary of Herodotus’, mentions fables on writing tablets in his play Iphigenia at Aulis (IA 798–9), and both writing-tablets and papyrus can be seen on Attic red-figure vases from the 5thcentury.
Herodotus also mentions all three writing materials in his work, but sadly never in the context of literary composition or his own writing. He mentions papyrus frequently, but almost exclusively for letters and messages (byblion, βυβλίον). Writing-tablets, called deltos or deltion (δέλτος, δελτίον), are mentioned twice: according to Herodotus they were used to send a secret message hidden under wax to inform the Lacedaemonians (i.e. the Spartans) of Xerxes’ resolution to invade Greece (7.239), and Mys of Europus used them to note down an oracle of Apollon Ptoios for the Persian commander Mardonius (8.135). The only mention of parchment in the context of writing, called diphthera (διφθέρα), is in a particularly interesting passage, where Herodotus describes how writing was first brought to Greece by the Phoenicians (5.58). He notes that their neighbours, the Ionians, adapted the Phoenician alphabet and called papyrus ‘skins’ (διφθέρας), because that was what they used to write on before papyrus became available to them. He remarks that to his day many foreigners (barbaroi) still wrote onto skin. Together with the fact that he very rarely mentions tablets and parchment, this perhaps suggests that he himself was most familiar with papyrus.
Which material was used at any given time and place would have depended on the immediate availability and on local preferences and customs, but they also had different characteristics that made them more or less suitable for specific purposes: papyrus was light and pliable, and writing in black ink on papyrus was easy to read. Both whitened wooden boards and wax tablets were rewritable, and writing tablets were small and rigid, making them convenient for writing on the go.
Our knowledge about the writing materials used for literary composition by ancient authors stems largely from writers of later periods, and they seem to have favoured wax tablets. In the 3rd century BCE, the poet Callimachus imagined himself taking notes on wax tablets while listening to Apollo (Aitia fr. 1.20), and much later, Roman authors regularly mention wax tablets for note-taking and drafting, for example Pliny the Younger, who liked to stop and take notes on them while hunting (1.6.1). Some later authors also talk about Herodotus’ contemporaries: Diogenes Laertius, for example, relates that Plato’s Laws had been left behind written in wax and were then copied, and that multiple versions of the beginning of his Republic were found (3.37). According to Galenus, Hippocrates had left behind notes on all three materials, from which his son wrote up part of his work (In Hipp. Epid. 6 comm. 2.15).
While it is difficult to know to what extent Diogenes’ and Galenus’ accounts reflect the writing practices of their own time rather than those of the people they wrote about, they illustrate how longer works may have been drafted as a collection of separate notes, and this is how I imagine Herodotus worked as well. We know that he wrote his Histories by collecting information from the works of other authors but also during his travels, by talking to locals and gathering information. As he must have been working on them over a considerable amount of time and presumably under different circumstances depending on where he was, I think it is very likely that he wrote down accounts and excerpts (hypomnemata) on a number of supports, over time amassing an archive of loose papyrus sheets, individual tablets and tablet-‘books’, and perhaps even the occasional bit of parchment or ostrakon. At some point, a continuous draft would emerge from this, and the final version was then copied onto papyrus scrolls for distribution.
If you are now picturing Herodotus sitting on the steps of a sanctuary somewhere in Greece, papyrus on his knees and a reed pen in his hand, writing down whatever he was just told by the priest, then there is one more thing to consider: he may have dictated much of his work to a servant – even though he was undoubtedly capable of writing himself.
If you would like to learn more about writing materials in Antiquity and you have access to a library, you could start with A. Bülow-Jacobsen (2009). ‘Writing materials in the ancient world’, in R. Bagnall (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Papyrology. Oxford, 3–29; if you read German you could also consult the volume ‘Materiale Textkulturen’, which is online and Open Access. The following books provide starting points for different contexts in which writing happened and the materials used:
Bagnall, R. (2011). Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East. Berkeley.
Cribiore, R. (1996). Writing, teachers, and students in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Atlanta.
Sarri, A. (2018). Material Aspects of Letter Writing in the Graeco-Roman World, 500 BC-AD 300. Berlin, Boston.
And if you read Italian, Dorandi specifically tackles the process of literary composition: Dorandi, T. (2007). Nell’officina dei classici. Come lavoravano gli autori antichi. Rome.
Herodotus Helpline 