Re: Most Important Eunuchs in History
Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 8:27 am
I always believed that Daniel from the Old Testiment (of lion den fame) was a eunuch.
The mention of Cai Lun reminded me of a conversation I had a few years ago, with a woman who made her own paper. According to what she said, paper may be one of those things which was invented several times, in different periods and in different places. This seems credible, since all you need to do to make it, is to prepare a fibrous slurry from something like grass or wood chips, spread a thin layer of the slurry on a screen, a piece of felt, or on something else which will form it to a flat shape, and then let the stuff dry. (Dick Blick and other craft suppliers sell papermaking kits.)
Again, according to what the lady told me, it's thought that papermaking started out as a craft in which small pieces of paper were produced, for uses which we would now consider peripheral. This would be for things like the translucent sides of oriental lanterns, paste-on decorative paper scraps, decorative streamers which could be colored, envelopes or wrapping for powders, a substitute for kindling in starting fires; also, perhaps, with the addition of paste, tape, and, I would guess, maybe even a substitute for cloth wicks in oil lamps.
I'm not sure about this, but I think that the Mayans used something similar to paper in Precolumbian times. They had books of a sort, almost all of which were destroyed by the Spaniards. That would presumably be an independent invention of paper, if that was what the Mayans used.
Cai Lun conceivably was the person who realized that, if you made sheets of paper, they could be used as a surface to write on or to paint on. It's also possible that he made improvements in the papermaking process (such as adding sizing to the slurry) which improved the usability of paper as a writing surface.
I don't think there are any examples or Chinese paintings on paper, until at least the tenth century. This, of course, could be because any paintings on paper made before that, deteriorated and were destroyed.
All this also reminds me of the old question, "What did people use for toilet paper, before paper was invented?" The period before paper was in common use, takes up at least 75% of history, and all of prehistory. All the pharaohs, all the caesars, and all the classical Greeks, lived out their lives without ever using a roll of toilet paper. Didn't have bidets, either.
