Abstract
In the transition from carbon to iron-gall inks, the two documents from the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin with shelfmarks P 13500 and P 13501 discussed in this work present an important case. Their inks appear brownish, although they date back to the fourth and third century BCE, when carbon inks are believed to have been commonly if not exclusively used. Using imaging micro-X-ray fluorescence and infrared reflectography, we discovered that the inks in both documents contain a significant amount of copper in addition to carbon. Comparing the extant recipes for black writing inks and the experimental evidence, we suggest that these inks are a transition between the pure carbon and the iron-gall inks. Such inks may have been quite common before the production of iron-gall ink was clearly understood and established.
Highlights
It is customary today to distinguish among three main types of historical black writing inks: carbon, plant, and iron-gall ink
Our attention was primarily drawn to the brown colour of the script and the corrosive action of the ink that was used to write the will dated to 284 BCE (P. 13501, Fig. 1b)
This observation suggests the presence of tannins diffused into the papyrus material (Fig. 3a and c)
Summary
It is customary today to distinguish among three main types of historical black writing inks: carbon, plant, and iron-gall ink. The oldest preserved documents are written with carbon inks. Such inks were made by mixing soot, a binder of choice, and water. The second type, plant inks, consists of an aqueous solution of tannins with or without a binding agent. The onset of the use of iron-gall inks, which are often recognized by their corrosive action on the substrate, has commonly been associated with the spread of parchment as a writing support in the early Middle Ages (Diringer 1982, p.531). Carbon inks, which were used predominantly on papyri, neither undergo compositional changes with time nor damage the substrates. The fact that most papyri appeared to be penned in carbon ink whereas
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