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Printing and bookmaking gruntle, part 2
To recap: there was a thread on Twitter by Incunabula that went viral a few weeks ago. In James Burke-ian Connections style, Incunabula says that "Cheese 🧀 is one of the 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on. The other four are snails 🐌, Jesus ✝️, underwear 🩲 and spectacles 👓." When I re-watched James Burke's "Connections" a year or so ago, in the places where I actually knew some of the history he was covering, mostly I just found myself thinking, "that's way oversimplified and leaving out a lot in order to sound neat." But sometimes, I would think, "that's just not so." This post covers one of the "that's just plain false" parts of Incunabula's highly Eurocentric and inaccurate thread.
Last time I talked about cheese (ie, parchment making), and Christianity (the spread of the codex form factor for books), and it turned out that on those topics, Incunabula was playing in the oversimplified to the point of inaccuracy end of the James Burke spectrum: the slaughter of excess young male animals to facilitate milk production certainly provided a lot of animal skins, but it was not *necessary* to the creation of vellum or parchment (the difference between which is endlessly debated), and analysis of early books and book fragments found in Egypt shows that the transition from scroll books to codex books in the Roman empire during the first few centuries CE was underway *before* Christianity became anything more than a tiny obscure cult, so Christianity's enthusiastic adoption of the codex from a very early date merely accelerated something that was already happening.
This time we're doing paper making and its relationship to clothes ("underwear").
Humans have been making cloth since at least the height of the last ice age. 30,000 year old flax fibres, including fibres spun into thread, were found in a cave in Georgia. Imprints of woven fabric, including sewn cloth, were found on 25-30,000 year old fired clay in sites in the Czech republic.
(The rest of this section about clothes is from various google results, plus the Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog's series on cloth making.)
From prehistoric times, humans domesticated several species that provided long fibres for spinning into thread and weaving into cloth: The most common ones were wool-bearing sheep, silk caterpillars, cotton, hemp, and flax (because English is weird, cloth made from flax is called linen). Silk caterpillars were found only in China, and remained a rare and expensive fabric elsewhere even after silkworm cultivation spread to India, Persia, and the Mediterranean. Cotton requires a warm climate and did not get planted much outside of its homelands for quite a while; it was also an relatively rare fabric outside those homelands until the early modern era (cotton was domesticated three separate times: in Sudan, in India, and in Central America/Peru). Sheep gladly lived anywhere there was grass. Like sheep, hemp and flax were grown all over Eurasia. Which of the three ubiquitous fabrics got used in what situations depended on multiple factors.
First, geography: Sheep required a lot of land, and tended to be raised only where it was impossible to farm - in the mountains, in areas of poor soil, or on grassland that was too dry for crops. Egypt didn't do much with sheep because it hardly had any marginal land - just rich floodplain and dry desert. In China and India, rice could be grown anywhere that it was possible to terrace and irrigate. Land that elsewhere would have been relegated to pasture got turned into rice paddies, and with less pasturage, sheep were less of a thing.
Second, the qualities of the fabrics: Hemp required less labour to extract the fibres from the stalk than flax, but hemp cloth got relegated to utilitarian roles, probably because, while strong, it didn't feel as nice. Hemp was used for sailcloth and anything needed on a boat (hemp resists rotting when wet), work aprons, and anywhere that strength and durability were paramount. Linen feels nice, but dying linen was very difficult: you could have natural, yellow-ish linen, sunbleached white linen, or coloured linen that would fade with every wash. Wool comes in various grades, varying from sheep to sheep and from one part of the sheep to another. Soft wool that feels nice is not the most common kind. Also, wool loves to soak up water and dries out slowly. On the upside, wool was easy to dye with permanent colours.
Finally, cultural preferences: for example, Egypt grew some cotton, but linen had religious significance, and became the national fabric of choice. China had hemp and flax and (away from the rice growing regions) sheep, but silk became the national fabric, reducing everything else to a minor role.
In Europe, from Imperial Rome onward (and ignoring the 1% who flaunted their wealth by wearing imported silk and cotton), the general rule was that the skin-facing inner garments were linen (a tunic or chemise, which everyone definitely wore, and also genital coverings/breast supports, which existed but how common they were is unclear), and wool was for outer layers. Coats, cloaks, and other things worn outside in rain or winter were almost always wool. In post-Roman Europe north of the Alps, washing wool clothes was done annually, in the summer, when it was warm enough to dry wool quickly and nobody was wearing very many layers anyway. Linen inner clothes got washed when dirty. Because inner garments got sweated into, they needed washing more often, and wore out faster. Linen was also ubiquitous for household fabric: tablecloths for those who could afford them, bedsheets, and cloths (often worn out rags) for cleaning and drying (hence "linens" as a generic noun for tablecloths, sheets, towels, etc). In short, every household had various kinds of linen clothes and other cloth, from the Roman Empire throughout the Middle Ages, even in countries where everyone wore wool outer garments, and this was the case from well before the spinning wheel.
Now a tiny bit about spinning wheels. Making cloth took a ton of work, and 85% of that was the time it took to spin fibres into thread. Spinning was almost exclusively done by women, who carried their spindle and fibre around with them throughout the day, taking them out to spin in idle moments - while waiting for a pot to boil, for instance, or while chatting with a neighbour. The Unmitigated Pedantry blog estimates that, pre-spinning wheel, it took 7.5 hours of spinning per day, every day of the year, to produce enough thread to make 22 square meters of cloth - enough for one set of basic clothing for each member of an extended Roman family of six (4 adults 2 children). But households didn't just have clothes: round up to 8 or 10 hours to allow for replacement blankets, window coverings, etc. And then double or triple that, because prosperous people could afford more clothes (the elite far more), and armies needed tents, ships needed sails, temples/churches needed to clothe statues and cover altars, etc. Every woman and girl of every household below elite status spent something like half their waking hours spinning thread. Perhaps half of that was to provide the minimum necessary cloth for their family; the rest was either so they could have extra clothes, or to make surplus thread that could be sold.
No one is sure where spinning wheels were invented: Islamic Persia, India, and China have all been suggested as the origin point. When they were invented is equally hard to figure out - the people writing things down were almost always male and rich, and supremely unconcerned with innovations in the daily work of poor farming women. The earliest unambiguous drawings that are definitely of spinning wheels are all the same age: 1240 in Baghdad, 1270 in China, and 1280 in Europe. Written references and more or less ambiguous drawings date from 1030 in the Islamic world and 1090 in China, but nothing earlier than the 1200's has been found for Europe. Based on the existing evidence, spinning wheels seem to have spread throughout China and Central Asia extremely rapidly, then stalled for 200 years before being adopted in Europe.
The earliest and most basic spinning wheels were three times faster than hand spinning; they gradually improved until in the early modern period they were ten times faster. Their downside was that they were not portable, so spinning on them had to be done in solid chunks instead of while taking care of other tasks. But the thread produced on early spinning wheels was weaker and looser than hand-spun thread. Warp thread had to be stronger and still required hand-spinning up until the 18th century. Half the thread in fabric is warp, so early spinning wheels reduced the total time to produce thread by 1/3, effectively increasing the cloth supply by 1/3 - an amount which increased over time as spinning wheels gradually became faster and eventually (well after the end of the medieval period) were able to make warp threads as well.
However, outside of the backward and insular world of Christian Europe, paper had already begun to radically transform the world of writing and books well before spinning wheels arrived on the scene. The following is taken from various places via Google, but especially an article and a book both by Jonathan Bloom. I found a scanned PDF of the book, "Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World," via google. The article is "Papermaking: The Historical Diffusion of an Ancient Technique".
(digression: For those keeping track, Incunabula claimed that there was a time when people did not wear "underwear," a time before the spinning wheel when linen was not a common fabric in Europe and discarded linens would not have been available in sufficient quantities to be used for making paper. I think I've shown that entire portion of their thread, the whole "underwear" section, is simply false).
Why was paper made from rags, and why not wool rags? Paper is based on the chemical interaction of tiny pieces of cellulose and water. If you make a cellulose slurry, the bits of cellulose bond together as they dry. This does not work with the animal proteins that make up wool or silk. To vastly simplify, making paper involves soaking plant fibres in water and beating them into to a pulp. You then sluice a thin layer of pulp onto a screen, lift that out of the water, and as it dries the slurry becomes a sheet that, when dried and pressed flat, is paper. Untreated paper is extremely absorbent, so to make it suited to writing, you "size" it, coating the surface with a thin layer of something - starch, gum, plaster, and glue were all used - to make it less absorbent. Any kind of plant fibre will do -- but hemp or linen rope and cloth has the advantage of already having been processed into tiny pieces of cellulose; it is easier and faster to thrash cloth until the threads disaggregate into individual fibres, than to thrash strips of bark or stalks of flax until they turn into individual fibres. Linen rags usually also had the advantage of already being sunbleached. The downside of using rags, of course, is that you are making paper from a limited resource.
Paper was invented in central-southern China (the part centred on the Yangtze river), but most of the examples of extremely old paper have been found around the Lop Desert in Northwest China, where the dry climate made it possible for examples of paper to survive the centuries. Historical sources and archaeological finds agree that the very earliest Chinese paper was made from discarded ropes and nets, rags, and other pre-processed hemp and linen. Then, as the demand for paper increased, paper started to be made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, with ropes and rags as an optional addition. While no history I looked at made the connection, I think the reason for the switch was, quite simply, that with so much of China's cloth being made from silk, there wasn't enough hemp or linen to go around, so early paper makers learned to do it the hard way.
The traditionally credited first century CE inventor of paper, Cai Lun, did not invent paper - examples have been found that date at least 2 centuries before him, and while early paper was rough and not suited for writing (it was initially used as packing material), the earliest writing paper found also predates him by several decades. Cai Lun's actual role in the story of paper is obscure. He is credited for figuring out how to make paper from bark, but that, like his inventing paper, may be apocryphal. He may have built the first paper mill, mechanizing the beating process. Or, as a chamberlain in the imperial court, he could have just helped popularize paper, accelerating its adoption as the default writing material for the Chinese government.
Paper was vastly superior to the thin strips of wood or bamboo that had been used as writing materials previously, and quickly became ubiquitous in China. Besides the government bureaucracy, Buddhist monks were delighted with it and they took paper books, and the knowledge of how to make them, everywhere they went - including to Vietnam, Korea, and Japan in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries. The main centre of Buddhism remained in India, and the road to get there led Chinese Buddhists along the Silk Road into Central Asia, then down into India (crossing the Himalayas or sailing around Southeast Asia were very much not in the cards at this time).
India's traditional writing materials - for books, at least - were dried palm or plantain leaves. And they happily stuck with those, and seem to have mostly spurned the paper that the Chinese Buddhists brought with them. Bloom suggests various reasons, but it seems nobody is sure exactly why paper did not catch on in India until much later. India's hungry tropical insects were notorious for eating paper in later centuries. A material made from refuse like rags might have been seen as improper for higher caste people to touch. Or, most simply, perhaps leaves were so common and worked well enough, that people did not think it was worth switching from stuff that grew on trees to something that required an industrial process to make. For whatever reason, India did not begin to switch to using paper for writing until Muslims brought it with them into the region in the 12th century.
Mulberry trees did not grow along the deserts and steppes of the Silk Road. But paper made in central China was exported to very distant places. The Sogdian Ancient Letters, a small cache of paper mail that somehow never got delivered, were found in Dunhuang in the early 1900's. They date sometime between the 4th and 6th century, and were written by Silk Road merchants, both men and women, working along the Road in what is now Western China (east of the Lop Desert) to their family/colleagues in Sogdia (an area centred on Samarkand, well west of the desert, today equivalent to Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and parts of a few other ex-Soviet countries due north of Afghanistan).
By the seventh century, there are documents found in Turpan, again on the eastern edge of the Lop desert, that indicate paper was being made locally, including a dated document from 620 CE that refers to a local "zhishi" or papermaker. Analysis of surviving papers from the region show a transition from imported mulberry paper to what must have been locally produced rag paper -- in other words, the paper makers along the Silk Road, lacking access to mulberry trees, fell back on the original all-rag recipe. Whether because linen cloth was more common in the desert, or because so far from the Chinese capital there was less demand for paper, makers around the Lop desert did not experience a rag supply problem, so they did not work out techniques for substituting mulberry bark with plants that could be grown locally.
Buddhist monks travelled even further west, beyond the desert and beyond China's sphere of influence, to places like Afghanistan and Sogdia (the homeland of those letter writers). Sogdia seems to have been a stopping point for paper, at least for a while. Buddhism in Sogdia never became the default religion, but coexisted with Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism (introduced when Persia conquered the area). Likewise paper did not become the sole writing material of choice there.
Fast forward to the early 8th century. Sogdia exists as several small city-states. The Islamic Umayyad caliphate, surviving Zoroastrian Persian exiles, Mongol Turks, China, and possibly some others I missed are all striving to conquer those city-states in a complex muddle of wars that Wikipedia valiantly tries to summarize, but the article only confused me. In the midst of this chaos, Devashtich, ruler of a city-state centred on Panjikent, who grandiosely styled himself as "king of Sogdiana, ruler of Samarkand" (he was neither) was trying to survive and retain power, and he exchanged a lot of diplomatic correspondence with various people. Devashtich did not succeed: he was captured by the Umayyad army and executed in 722 CE. However, parts of his archive of correspondence survived, and were found in the remains of his fortress on Mount Mugh, in what is now Tajikistan, by a Soviet farmer in the 1930's. The letters and documents in that archive are historically fascinating, but we're looking at writing materials. They were written on an eclectic mix of materials: leather hides (not parchment), the inside of split willow sticks, and paper. Bloom is confident the paper was of local manufacture. Presumably it was made by Sogdian Buddhists, since almost all the surviving documents (other than Devashtich's archive) written in Sogdian are Buddhist.
The muddle of wars ended with the Umayyads victorious, and by 751 Sogdia (also called Transoxiana, its name as a part of pre-Islamic Persia) was a province of the Umayyad Caliphate. And with that conquest, the Islamic world encountered paper for the first time. A common claim in articles on the Internet is that captured Chinese soldiers taught papermaking to the Arabs; this myth goes back to a rather fictionalized Arab chronicle written a few centuries after the fact, and is definitely not true because Arabs made their paper exclusively from rags, as was the custom in paper factories along the Silk Road, but that was not a method captured soldiers from Imperial China would have known.
For almost a millenia, since the demise of clay tablets and cuneiform in the last century or so BCE, Persians had been writing on a mix of papyrus imported from Egypt and locally made parchment. The caliphs had conquered not just Persia but lands far beyond: they now controlled the largest empire the world had yet seen, and their government desperately needed as much writing material as it could get. Paper took over the empire with great speed. It was cheaper to make than parchment or papyrus, it was thinner, lighter, and more flexible than either, it could be folded and creased without breaking, unlike papyrus, and, most important, it did not rely on scarce resources like animal skins or a plant that only grew on the banks of the Nile. The supply of paper was limited only by the supply of linen rags, and everyone throughout the entire Arab world at this time wore linen, so that was not much of an issue.
Knowledge of paper reached Baghdad around 750; the first paper mill there opened in 794, closely followed by mills in Damascus. From there, paper spread throughout the empire, much faster than it had travelled from China to Samarkand: Egypt had paper mills by 850, Morocco by 950, Muslim Spain by 1056.
And then, as with evidence for use of the spinning wheel, paper stalled for a century or so due to Christian Europe's xenophobic distrust of everything Islamic. The first Christian documents written on paper date from the early 1100's (in Sicily, an Islamic province that had recently been conquered by the Normans). It's hard to separate bad scholarship and mythology (see post scripts at the end) from facts in the realm of the earliest paper mills built in Christian lands, but paper mills in Fabriano, Italy certainly existed by 1268.
The impact of paper was immense. In the Caliphate, Parchment and papyrus use rapidly plummeted after 800. Sacred texts - Korans, Bibles, and Torahs - continued to be made from parchment for at least a few centuries, but paper dominated in every other area of writing. Papyrus, the go-to default writing material of Egypt for four thousand years, seems to have ceased to be made sometime in the middle 900's, just a century after the first paper mills opened on the Nile.
As it had in China, paper empowered a vast expansion of government. The Office of War split into recruitment and paymaster branches. Government spending was managed by a bevy of offices - of Expenditure, the Treasury, the Caliph's Bank, of Charity, and of Comparison, which dealt with duplicating orders for payment. Jobs that had once been part time responsibilities for one or two people in the ruler's household became offices, each with a staff of its own: an Office of the Cabinet dealt with petitions to the Caliph; An office of the Signet applied his seal to government orders; and an office of Letter Opening wrangled his correspondence.
Today we think first of the amount of labour it took to make something, and from that perspective, paper alone shouldn't have made that much of a difference - without printing, every copy still had to be handwritten by a single person. But we are used to material abundance, a society in which there is no such thing as an inability to make enough of something. Before paper, parchment was a scarce commodity - there are only so many acres of pasture land, and every animal killed for its skin was an acre of grass that could not be fed to more valuable milk, wool, or horsepower producing animals. Outside Egypt, papyrus was also limited in supply, and became more costly the further it had to be shipped. Paper supplies were limited by the number of rags available, but the supply of rags was far, far greater than the supply of imported papyrus reeds or animal hides.
In Europe, books before paper were incredibly scarce. Private libraries were almost unheard of: only institutions or the ruling class could afford to have one at all. The library of the monastery of St Gall, in Switzerland, had 400 books in the mid-800's; in the 1100's, the monastery at Bobbio, Italy had 650 books, and the one at Cluny, France had 570. In 1340, the library of the Sorbonne, in Paris, claimed to be the largest in Christiandom at the time, had 340 books in its reference section, chained to desks, and another 1,700 available for loan, of which 300 were unreturned/lost. In the late 1300's, the (anti)Papal library at Avignon had 2,000 books.
Contrast those numbers with the imperial library of the Tang Dynasty in China around 721 CE, which had five or six thousand paper books (this would be just around the start of block printing in China, so the library might have been partly print books). Some non-government Chinese libraries (probably in monasteries) around the same time had one or two thousand volumes.
In the Islamic world, paper enjoyed a synergistic effect with the oral-first traditions of Arab culture. Because being able to recite a memorized text was considered paramount, written books were seen as memory aids rather than primary sources. One outcome of this was the typical method of book publication: an author or scholar would gather a roomful of scribes, and dictate the book aloud to them. Copies were not considered authoritative unless one of the scribes recited the text back to the author, allowing the author to catch any errors, and each of the scribes in the room to check their work. In contrast to the European "one copy is reproduced by one scribe" method, this was not only much less error prone, it also enabled dozens of copies to be made from a single original in the same amount of time as it took a Christian monk to make one copy.
Nearly all of the above libraries were institutional or royal and not open to the public, but in the Islamic world, paper and mass copying allowed books to be common enough for individual scholars to have their own libraries, and many of these far exceeded the monasteries of Europe. In the 900's the lexographer Abu Mansur al-Azhari reported that his predecessor Abu Abd al-Rahman Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Hani al-Andalusi owned a private library housed in its own building, where he taught those who came to study from him. At his death, the library was sold for 40,000 dirhams - with ordinary books costing 10 dirhams and fancy ones 100. Allowing for a hundred or so nice books with the rest being ordinary, the collection was probably 1 or 2 thousand volumes (numbers adjusted from Bloom to correct obvious math error). In the 990's Sabur ibn Ardashir, the vizer to the emir of Iraq Baha al Dawla, founded the House of Wisdom (one of several libraries to carry that name). This private (not government owned) library was open to the public and used by scholars. At its height it held 10,400 volumes.
Royal libraries were reported as being far larger - 400,000 books for Al Hakam II, Caliph of Cordova in Spain in the late 900's, and Saladin is said to have sold off the 1.6 *million* book libary of the previous Fatimid dynasty when he deposed them in the 1170's. Many scholars assume these numbers are greatly inflated, but even if they were exaggerated by a factor of 10, they're still exceeding the great libraries in Europe by two orders of magnitude.
All of those books and libraries were part of a golden age of Islamic scholarship and learning - all of it made possible by paper. It wasn't just books and writing that were revolutionized: with paper, it became cost effective to draw architectural plans before beginning construction, for example, something that in a world where drawing materials were scarce was seldom done. Paper dramatically changed every sphere of learning and endeavour.
When paper was introduced to Europe, once again the supply of writing material was no longer constrained, and as in China and the Islamic world, there was a surge of literacy and interest in books as a result, once the reluctance to use Islamic technology faded, but the process of making copies remained largely the same - one scribe making one copy from one original. This is one of many cases where the insular and xenophobic nature of Christiandom really damaged Europe's ability to benefit from the technology and culture of their neighbours.
I think this anecdote is from Elizabeth Eisenstein's "The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe" but it's been three decades since I read it and I could be wrong: Some European paper books from the almost two centuries between the introduction of paper and the spread of the printing press were mass produced: each of many scribes were given a page or a few pages to copy over and over again, and then copies of the complete book were assembled from the copies. The completed books are often not pretty, written in dozens of hands, with some pages crammed where a scribe underestimated how much space they would need for their chunk, and others only partly full where another overestimated and ran out of material to copy before they filled the page. Yet those sloppy, ugly books found eager buyers, because they were considerably cheaper than a single copy made by a single scribe copying the whole document. The hunger for books had outstripped the methods used to produce them, but, without the willingness to visit and talk to their hated neighbours in Spain and the Middle East, no one in Europe could figure out a better method of producing more copies at a time. The European printing press was not an invention out of the blue, but a response to unmet demand for books. About which more next time.
Stuff that didn't fit above:
1: The history of paper is a niche subject and some of the standard reference works are very old. Credulous acceptance of myths and racist bullshit included in a book written in the 30's is rife in online articles about paper, despite the existence of more recent books, like Bloom's, that incorporate an additional 70 years of scholarship. For instance, one myth I saw pop up a few times, that China kept paper making a "secret" from outsiders for centuries, is clearly Orientalist bullshit considering that Buddhist monks were freely taking paper making skills everywhere they went.
2: Another load of mythology has to do with where and when Christians started making paper. I've seen multiple articles claim the first paper mill in France was founded in 1189 by a Crusader who had spent time as a POW working in a paper mill. Aside from the just-so texture of the story, I am highly dubious that someone who was being used as unfree manual labour would learn enough about the overall process to be able to replicate it once they regained their freedom, let alone would *want* to recreate the trauma of their experience by building a mill of their own. Sadly this claim found its way into Wikipedia's list of dates for when printing presses were founded in Europe.
3: Yet another myth is the claim that papyrus was harvested so extensively that it became extinct, or nearly so, and some claims even that this was the reason for the need to switch to parchment in late Roman times. This is patently untrue: papyrus reeds were grown as a crop, not a wild resource that the Egyptians mined to exhaustion. When papyrus demand cratered following the introduction of paper, papyrus fields were sown with other plants, and the plant ceased to exist under cultivation, but it was never a domesticated plant and it continues to thrive in wild areas along the river. In the 20th century the plant even started being cultivated and made into papyrus again as an export and tourist novelty, and I have some Egyptian-themed art painted on a sheet of modern papyrus hanging on my wall.
4: Paper was a thing in pre-Columbian America. Invented by Mayans, and made from tree bark, Amate paper was used throughout central America over the centuries; at the time of conquest, a group of Mayan villages conquered by the Aztecs were sending 480,000 sheets of paper each year to the Aztec empire as tribute. The earliest fragments of Amate found date to the 1st century CE. Amate was used for writing, of course, but it was also very important in numerous religious ceremonies, where it was used to construct temporary clothing, jewellery, and decorations that could be easily torn and burned as offerings. Because of its importance to indigenous religions, the Spanish banned its production. Despite the ban, Amate paper continued to be made in Mayan villages up into modern times, and has enjoyed a revival in the last several decades as an indigenous Mexican handicraft.
Last time I talked about cheese (ie, parchment making), and Christianity (the spread of the codex form factor for books), and it turned out that on those topics, Incunabula was playing in the oversimplified to the point of inaccuracy end of the James Burke spectrum: the slaughter of excess young male animals to facilitate milk production certainly provided a lot of animal skins, but it was not *necessary* to the creation of vellum or parchment (the difference between which is endlessly debated), and analysis of early books and book fragments found in Egypt shows that the transition from scroll books to codex books in the Roman empire during the first few centuries CE was underway *before* Christianity became anything more than a tiny obscure cult, so Christianity's enthusiastic adoption of the codex from a very early date merely accelerated something that was already happening.
This time we're doing paper making and its relationship to clothes ("underwear").
Humans have been making cloth since at least the height of the last ice age. 30,000 year old flax fibres, including fibres spun into thread, were found in a cave in Georgia. Imprints of woven fabric, including sewn cloth, were found on 25-30,000 year old fired clay in sites in the Czech republic.
(The rest of this section about clothes is from various google results, plus the Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog's series on cloth making.)
From prehistoric times, humans domesticated several species that provided long fibres for spinning into thread and weaving into cloth: The most common ones were wool-bearing sheep, silk caterpillars, cotton, hemp, and flax (because English is weird, cloth made from flax is called linen). Silk caterpillars were found only in China, and remained a rare and expensive fabric elsewhere even after silkworm cultivation spread to India, Persia, and the Mediterranean. Cotton requires a warm climate and did not get planted much outside of its homelands for quite a while; it was also an relatively rare fabric outside those homelands until the early modern era (cotton was domesticated three separate times: in Sudan, in India, and in Central America/Peru). Sheep gladly lived anywhere there was grass. Like sheep, hemp and flax were grown all over Eurasia. Which of the three ubiquitous fabrics got used in what situations depended on multiple factors.
First, geography: Sheep required a lot of land, and tended to be raised only where it was impossible to farm - in the mountains, in areas of poor soil, or on grassland that was too dry for crops. Egypt didn't do much with sheep because it hardly had any marginal land - just rich floodplain and dry desert. In China and India, rice could be grown anywhere that it was possible to terrace and irrigate. Land that elsewhere would have been relegated to pasture got turned into rice paddies, and with less pasturage, sheep were less of a thing.
Second, the qualities of the fabrics: Hemp required less labour to extract the fibres from the stalk than flax, but hemp cloth got relegated to utilitarian roles, probably because, while strong, it didn't feel as nice. Hemp was used for sailcloth and anything needed on a boat (hemp resists rotting when wet), work aprons, and anywhere that strength and durability were paramount. Linen feels nice, but dying linen was very difficult: you could have natural, yellow-ish linen, sunbleached white linen, or coloured linen that would fade with every wash. Wool comes in various grades, varying from sheep to sheep and from one part of the sheep to another. Soft wool that feels nice is not the most common kind. Also, wool loves to soak up water and dries out slowly. On the upside, wool was easy to dye with permanent colours.
Finally, cultural preferences: for example, Egypt grew some cotton, but linen had religious significance, and became the national fabric of choice. China had hemp and flax and (away from the rice growing regions) sheep, but silk became the national fabric, reducing everything else to a minor role.
In Europe, from Imperial Rome onward (and ignoring the 1% who flaunted their wealth by wearing imported silk and cotton), the general rule was that the skin-facing inner garments were linen (a tunic or chemise, which everyone definitely wore, and also genital coverings/breast supports, which existed but how common they were is unclear), and wool was for outer layers. Coats, cloaks, and other things worn outside in rain or winter were almost always wool. In post-Roman Europe north of the Alps, washing wool clothes was done annually, in the summer, when it was warm enough to dry wool quickly and nobody was wearing very many layers anyway. Linen inner clothes got washed when dirty. Because inner garments got sweated into, they needed washing more often, and wore out faster. Linen was also ubiquitous for household fabric: tablecloths for those who could afford them, bedsheets, and cloths (often worn out rags) for cleaning and drying (hence "linens" as a generic noun for tablecloths, sheets, towels, etc). In short, every household had various kinds of linen clothes and other cloth, from the Roman Empire throughout the Middle Ages, even in countries where everyone wore wool outer garments, and this was the case from well before the spinning wheel.
Now a tiny bit about spinning wheels. Making cloth took a ton of work, and 85% of that was the time it took to spin fibres into thread. Spinning was almost exclusively done by women, who carried their spindle and fibre around with them throughout the day, taking them out to spin in idle moments - while waiting for a pot to boil, for instance, or while chatting with a neighbour. The Unmitigated Pedantry blog estimates that, pre-spinning wheel, it took 7.5 hours of spinning per day, every day of the year, to produce enough thread to make 22 square meters of cloth - enough for one set of basic clothing for each member of an extended Roman family of six (4 adults 2 children). But households didn't just have clothes: round up to 8 or 10 hours to allow for replacement blankets, window coverings, etc. And then double or triple that, because prosperous people could afford more clothes (the elite far more), and armies needed tents, ships needed sails, temples/churches needed to clothe statues and cover altars, etc. Every woman and girl of every household below elite status spent something like half their waking hours spinning thread. Perhaps half of that was to provide the minimum necessary cloth for their family; the rest was either so they could have extra clothes, or to make surplus thread that could be sold.
No one is sure where spinning wheels were invented: Islamic Persia, India, and China have all been suggested as the origin point. When they were invented is equally hard to figure out - the people writing things down were almost always male and rich, and supremely unconcerned with innovations in the daily work of poor farming women. The earliest unambiguous drawings that are definitely of spinning wheels are all the same age: 1240 in Baghdad, 1270 in China, and 1280 in Europe. Written references and more or less ambiguous drawings date from 1030 in the Islamic world and 1090 in China, but nothing earlier than the 1200's has been found for Europe. Based on the existing evidence, spinning wheels seem to have spread throughout China and Central Asia extremely rapidly, then stalled for 200 years before being adopted in Europe.
The earliest and most basic spinning wheels were three times faster than hand spinning; they gradually improved until in the early modern period they were ten times faster. Their downside was that they were not portable, so spinning on them had to be done in solid chunks instead of while taking care of other tasks. But the thread produced on early spinning wheels was weaker and looser than hand-spun thread. Warp thread had to be stronger and still required hand-spinning up until the 18th century. Half the thread in fabric is warp, so early spinning wheels reduced the total time to produce thread by 1/3, effectively increasing the cloth supply by 1/3 - an amount which increased over time as spinning wheels gradually became faster and eventually (well after the end of the medieval period) were able to make warp threads as well.
However, outside of the backward and insular world of Christian Europe, paper had already begun to radically transform the world of writing and books well before spinning wheels arrived on the scene. The following is taken from various places via Google, but especially an article and a book both by Jonathan Bloom. I found a scanned PDF of the book, "Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World," via google. The article is "Papermaking: The Historical Diffusion of an Ancient Technique".
(digression: For those keeping track, Incunabula claimed that there was a time when people did not wear "underwear," a time before the spinning wheel when linen was not a common fabric in Europe and discarded linens would not have been available in sufficient quantities to be used for making paper. I think I've shown that entire portion of their thread, the whole "underwear" section, is simply false).
Why was paper made from rags, and why not wool rags? Paper is based on the chemical interaction of tiny pieces of cellulose and water. If you make a cellulose slurry, the bits of cellulose bond together as they dry. This does not work with the animal proteins that make up wool or silk. To vastly simplify, making paper involves soaking plant fibres in water and beating them into to a pulp. You then sluice a thin layer of pulp onto a screen, lift that out of the water, and as it dries the slurry becomes a sheet that, when dried and pressed flat, is paper. Untreated paper is extremely absorbent, so to make it suited to writing, you "size" it, coating the surface with a thin layer of something - starch, gum, plaster, and glue were all used - to make it less absorbent. Any kind of plant fibre will do -- but hemp or linen rope and cloth has the advantage of already having been processed into tiny pieces of cellulose; it is easier and faster to thrash cloth until the threads disaggregate into individual fibres, than to thrash strips of bark or stalks of flax until they turn into individual fibres. Linen rags usually also had the advantage of already being sunbleached. The downside of using rags, of course, is that you are making paper from a limited resource.
Paper was invented in central-southern China (the part centred on the Yangtze river), but most of the examples of extremely old paper have been found around the Lop Desert in Northwest China, where the dry climate made it possible for examples of paper to survive the centuries. Historical sources and archaeological finds agree that the very earliest Chinese paper was made from discarded ropes and nets, rags, and other pre-processed hemp and linen. Then, as the demand for paper increased, paper started to be made from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, with ropes and rags as an optional addition. While no history I looked at made the connection, I think the reason for the switch was, quite simply, that with so much of China's cloth being made from silk, there wasn't enough hemp or linen to go around, so early paper makers learned to do it the hard way.
The traditionally credited first century CE inventor of paper, Cai Lun, did not invent paper - examples have been found that date at least 2 centuries before him, and while early paper was rough and not suited for writing (it was initially used as packing material), the earliest writing paper found also predates him by several decades. Cai Lun's actual role in the story of paper is obscure. He is credited for figuring out how to make paper from bark, but that, like his inventing paper, may be apocryphal. He may have built the first paper mill, mechanizing the beating process. Or, as a chamberlain in the imperial court, he could have just helped popularize paper, accelerating its adoption as the default writing material for the Chinese government.
Paper was vastly superior to the thin strips of wood or bamboo that had been used as writing materials previously, and quickly became ubiquitous in China. Besides the government bureaucracy, Buddhist monks were delighted with it and they took paper books, and the knowledge of how to make them, everywhere they went - including to Vietnam, Korea, and Japan in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries. The main centre of Buddhism remained in India, and the road to get there led Chinese Buddhists along the Silk Road into Central Asia, then down into India (crossing the Himalayas or sailing around Southeast Asia were very much not in the cards at this time).
India's traditional writing materials - for books, at least - were dried palm or plantain leaves. And they happily stuck with those, and seem to have mostly spurned the paper that the Chinese Buddhists brought with them. Bloom suggests various reasons, but it seems nobody is sure exactly why paper did not catch on in India until much later. India's hungry tropical insects were notorious for eating paper in later centuries. A material made from refuse like rags might have been seen as improper for higher caste people to touch. Or, most simply, perhaps leaves were so common and worked well enough, that people did not think it was worth switching from stuff that grew on trees to something that required an industrial process to make. For whatever reason, India did not begin to switch to using paper for writing until Muslims brought it with them into the region in the 12th century.
Mulberry trees did not grow along the deserts and steppes of the Silk Road. But paper made in central China was exported to very distant places. The Sogdian Ancient Letters, a small cache of paper mail that somehow never got delivered, were found in Dunhuang in the early 1900's. They date sometime between the 4th and 6th century, and were written by Silk Road merchants, both men and women, working along the Road in what is now Western China (east of the Lop Desert) to their family/colleagues in Sogdia (an area centred on Samarkand, well west of the desert, today equivalent to Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and parts of a few other ex-Soviet countries due north of Afghanistan).
By the seventh century, there are documents found in Turpan, again on the eastern edge of the Lop desert, that indicate paper was being made locally, including a dated document from 620 CE that refers to a local "zhishi" or papermaker. Analysis of surviving papers from the region show a transition from imported mulberry paper to what must have been locally produced rag paper -- in other words, the paper makers along the Silk Road, lacking access to mulberry trees, fell back on the original all-rag recipe. Whether because linen cloth was more common in the desert, or because so far from the Chinese capital there was less demand for paper, makers around the Lop desert did not experience a rag supply problem, so they did not work out techniques for substituting mulberry bark with plants that could be grown locally.
Buddhist monks travelled even further west, beyond the desert and beyond China's sphere of influence, to places like Afghanistan and Sogdia (the homeland of those letter writers). Sogdia seems to have been a stopping point for paper, at least for a while. Buddhism in Sogdia never became the default religion, but coexisted with Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism (introduced when Persia conquered the area). Likewise paper did not become the sole writing material of choice there.
Fast forward to the early 8th century. Sogdia exists as several small city-states. The Islamic Umayyad caliphate, surviving Zoroastrian Persian exiles, Mongol Turks, China, and possibly some others I missed are all striving to conquer those city-states in a complex muddle of wars that Wikipedia valiantly tries to summarize, but the article only confused me. In the midst of this chaos, Devashtich, ruler of a city-state centred on Panjikent, who grandiosely styled himself as "king of Sogdiana, ruler of Samarkand" (he was neither) was trying to survive and retain power, and he exchanged a lot of diplomatic correspondence with various people. Devashtich did not succeed: he was captured by the Umayyad army and executed in 722 CE. However, parts of his archive of correspondence survived, and were found in the remains of his fortress on Mount Mugh, in what is now Tajikistan, by a Soviet farmer in the 1930's. The letters and documents in that archive are historically fascinating, but we're looking at writing materials. They were written on an eclectic mix of materials: leather hides (not parchment), the inside of split willow sticks, and paper. Bloom is confident the paper was of local manufacture. Presumably it was made by Sogdian Buddhists, since almost all the surviving documents (other than Devashtich's archive) written in Sogdian are Buddhist.
The muddle of wars ended with the Umayyads victorious, and by 751 Sogdia (also called Transoxiana, its name as a part of pre-Islamic Persia) was a province of the Umayyad Caliphate. And with that conquest, the Islamic world encountered paper for the first time. A common claim in articles on the Internet is that captured Chinese soldiers taught papermaking to the Arabs; this myth goes back to a rather fictionalized Arab chronicle written a few centuries after the fact, and is definitely not true because Arabs made their paper exclusively from rags, as was the custom in paper factories along the Silk Road, but that was not a method captured soldiers from Imperial China would have known.
For almost a millenia, since the demise of clay tablets and cuneiform in the last century or so BCE, Persians had been writing on a mix of papyrus imported from Egypt and locally made parchment. The caliphs had conquered not just Persia but lands far beyond: they now controlled the largest empire the world had yet seen, and their government desperately needed as much writing material as it could get. Paper took over the empire with great speed. It was cheaper to make than parchment or papyrus, it was thinner, lighter, and more flexible than either, it could be folded and creased without breaking, unlike papyrus, and, most important, it did not rely on scarce resources like animal skins or a plant that only grew on the banks of the Nile. The supply of paper was limited only by the supply of linen rags, and everyone throughout the entire Arab world at this time wore linen, so that was not much of an issue.
Knowledge of paper reached Baghdad around 750; the first paper mill there opened in 794, closely followed by mills in Damascus. From there, paper spread throughout the empire, much faster than it had travelled from China to Samarkand: Egypt had paper mills by 850, Morocco by 950, Muslim Spain by 1056.
And then, as with evidence for use of the spinning wheel, paper stalled for a century or so due to Christian Europe's xenophobic distrust of everything Islamic. The first Christian documents written on paper date from the early 1100's (in Sicily, an Islamic province that had recently been conquered by the Normans). It's hard to separate bad scholarship and mythology (see post scripts at the end) from facts in the realm of the earliest paper mills built in Christian lands, but paper mills in Fabriano, Italy certainly existed by 1268.
The impact of paper was immense. In the Caliphate, Parchment and papyrus use rapidly plummeted after 800. Sacred texts - Korans, Bibles, and Torahs - continued to be made from parchment for at least a few centuries, but paper dominated in every other area of writing. Papyrus, the go-to default writing material of Egypt for four thousand years, seems to have ceased to be made sometime in the middle 900's, just a century after the first paper mills opened on the Nile.
As it had in China, paper empowered a vast expansion of government. The Office of War split into recruitment and paymaster branches. Government spending was managed by a bevy of offices - of Expenditure, the Treasury, the Caliph's Bank, of Charity, and of Comparison, which dealt with duplicating orders for payment. Jobs that had once been part time responsibilities for one or two people in the ruler's household became offices, each with a staff of its own: an Office of the Cabinet dealt with petitions to the Caliph; An office of the Signet applied his seal to government orders; and an office of Letter Opening wrangled his correspondence.
Today we think first of the amount of labour it took to make something, and from that perspective, paper alone shouldn't have made that much of a difference - without printing, every copy still had to be handwritten by a single person. But we are used to material abundance, a society in which there is no such thing as an inability to make enough of something. Before paper, parchment was a scarce commodity - there are only so many acres of pasture land, and every animal killed for its skin was an acre of grass that could not be fed to more valuable milk, wool, or horsepower producing animals. Outside Egypt, papyrus was also limited in supply, and became more costly the further it had to be shipped. Paper supplies were limited by the number of rags available, but the supply of rags was far, far greater than the supply of imported papyrus reeds or animal hides.
In Europe, books before paper were incredibly scarce. Private libraries were almost unheard of: only institutions or the ruling class could afford to have one at all. The library of the monastery of St Gall, in Switzerland, had 400 books in the mid-800's; in the 1100's, the monastery at Bobbio, Italy had 650 books, and the one at Cluny, France had 570. In 1340, the library of the Sorbonne, in Paris, claimed to be the largest in Christiandom at the time, had 340 books in its reference section, chained to desks, and another 1,700 available for loan, of which 300 were unreturned/lost. In the late 1300's, the (anti)Papal library at Avignon had 2,000 books.
Contrast those numbers with the imperial library of the Tang Dynasty in China around 721 CE, which had five or six thousand paper books (this would be just around the start of block printing in China, so the library might have been partly print books). Some non-government Chinese libraries (probably in monasteries) around the same time had one or two thousand volumes.
In the Islamic world, paper enjoyed a synergistic effect with the oral-first traditions of Arab culture. Because being able to recite a memorized text was considered paramount, written books were seen as memory aids rather than primary sources. One outcome of this was the typical method of book publication: an author or scholar would gather a roomful of scribes, and dictate the book aloud to them. Copies were not considered authoritative unless one of the scribes recited the text back to the author, allowing the author to catch any errors, and each of the scribes in the room to check their work. In contrast to the European "one copy is reproduced by one scribe" method, this was not only much less error prone, it also enabled dozens of copies to be made from a single original in the same amount of time as it took a Christian monk to make one copy.
Nearly all of the above libraries were institutional or royal and not open to the public, but in the Islamic world, paper and mass copying allowed books to be common enough for individual scholars to have their own libraries, and many of these far exceeded the monasteries of Europe. In the 900's the lexographer Abu Mansur al-Azhari reported that his predecessor Abu Abd al-Rahman Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Hani al-Andalusi owned a private library housed in its own building, where he taught those who came to study from him. At his death, the library was sold for 40,000 dirhams - with ordinary books costing 10 dirhams and fancy ones 100. Allowing for a hundred or so nice books with the rest being ordinary, the collection was probably 1 or 2 thousand volumes (numbers adjusted from Bloom to correct obvious math error). In the 990's Sabur ibn Ardashir, the vizer to the emir of Iraq Baha al Dawla, founded the House of Wisdom (one of several libraries to carry that name). This private (not government owned) library was open to the public and used by scholars. At its height it held 10,400 volumes.
Royal libraries were reported as being far larger - 400,000 books for Al Hakam II, Caliph of Cordova in Spain in the late 900's, and Saladin is said to have sold off the 1.6 *million* book libary of the previous Fatimid dynasty when he deposed them in the 1170's. Many scholars assume these numbers are greatly inflated, but even if they were exaggerated by a factor of 10, they're still exceeding the great libraries in Europe by two orders of magnitude.
All of those books and libraries were part of a golden age of Islamic scholarship and learning - all of it made possible by paper. It wasn't just books and writing that were revolutionized: with paper, it became cost effective to draw architectural plans before beginning construction, for example, something that in a world where drawing materials were scarce was seldom done. Paper dramatically changed every sphere of learning and endeavour.
When paper was introduced to Europe, once again the supply of writing material was no longer constrained, and as in China and the Islamic world, there was a surge of literacy and interest in books as a result, once the reluctance to use Islamic technology faded, but the process of making copies remained largely the same - one scribe making one copy from one original. This is one of many cases where the insular and xenophobic nature of Christiandom really damaged Europe's ability to benefit from the technology and culture of their neighbours.
I think this anecdote is from Elizabeth Eisenstein's "The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe" but it's been three decades since I read it and I could be wrong: Some European paper books from the almost two centuries between the introduction of paper and the spread of the printing press were mass produced: each of many scribes were given a page or a few pages to copy over and over again, and then copies of the complete book were assembled from the copies. The completed books are often not pretty, written in dozens of hands, with some pages crammed where a scribe underestimated how much space they would need for their chunk, and others only partly full where another overestimated and ran out of material to copy before they filled the page. Yet those sloppy, ugly books found eager buyers, because they were considerably cheaper than a single copy made by a single scribe copying the whole document. The hunger for books had outstripped the methods used to produce them, but, without the willingness to visit and talk to their hated neighbours in Spain and the Middle East, no one in Europe could figure out a better method of producing more copies at a time. The European printing press was not an invention out of the blue, but a response to unmet demand for books. About which more next time.
Stuff that didn't fit above:
1: The history of paper is a niche subject and some of the standard reference works are very old. Credulous acceptance of myths and racist bullshit included in a book written in the 30's is rife in online articles about paper, despite the existence of more recent books, like Bloom's, that incorporate an additional 70 years of scholarship. For instance, one myth I saw pop up a few times, that China kept paper making a "secret" from outsiders for centuries, is clearly Orientalist bullshit considering that Buddhist monks were freely taking paper making skills everywhere they went.
2: Another load of mythology has to do with where and when Christians started making paper. I've seen multiple articles claim the first paper mill in France was founded in 1189 by a Crusader who had spent time as a POW working in a paper mill. Aside from the just-so texture of the story, I am highly dubious that someone who was being used as unfree manual labour would learn enough about the overall process to be able to replicate it once they regained their freedom, let alone would *want* to recreate the trauma of their experience by building a mill of their own. Sadly this claim found its way into Wikipedia's list of dates for when printing presses were founded in Europe.
3: Yet another myth is the claim that papyrus was harvested so extensively that it became extinct, or nearly so, and some claims even that this was the reason for the need to switch to parchment in late Roman times. This is patently untrue: papyrus reeds were grown as a crop, not a wild resource that the Egyptians mined to exhaustion. When papyrus demand cratered following the introduction of paper, papyrus fields were sown with other plants, and the plant ceased to exist under cultivation, but it was never a domesticated plant and it continues to thrive in wild areas along the river. In the 20th century the plant even started being cultivated and made into papyrus again as an export and tourist novelty, and I have some Egyptian-themed art painted on a sheet of modern papyrus hanging on my wall.
4: Paper was a thing in pre-Columbian America. Invented by Mayans, and made from tree bark, Amate paper was used throughout central America over the centuries; at the time of conquest, a group of Mayan villages conquered by the Aztecs were sending 480,000 sheets of paper each year to the Aztec empire as tribute. The earliest fragments of Amate found date to the 1st century CE. Amate was used for writing, of course, but it was also very important in numerous religious ceremonies, where it was used to construct temporary clothing, jewellery, and decorations that could be easily torn and burned as offerings. Because of its importance to indigenous religions, the Spanish banned its production. Despite the ban, Amate paper continued to be made in Mayan villages up into modern times, and has enjoyed a revival in the last several decades as an indigenous Mexican handicraft.