A long time ago, before paper was invented, people wrote on all sorts of material. Early man painted pictures on cave walls and scratched marks on bones. In Babylon and the Middle East, they wrote on tablets of soft clay. The ancient Egyptians wrote on papyrus. The Romans wrote on warm, soft wax. In some parts of the world, people wrote on stretched pieces of animal hide.

The Chinese, however, made the first paper in 105 AD. The Chinese noticed how some wasps made a papery material to build their nests. The wasps chewed up bamboo shoots, which set into hard thin papery sheets when mixed with their saliva.

The Chinese copied this idea. They mixed crushed bamboo shoots with mulberry wood, and then they sieved the pulp and dried it in flat sheets.

© 2005 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)