fastened by a small leaden rod to keep them together. They afterwards
engraved on bronze: the laws of the Cretans were on bronze tables; the
Romans etched their public records on brass. The speech of Claudius,
engraved on plates of bronze, is yet preserved in the town-hall of
Lyons, in France.[8] Several bronze tables, with Etruscan characters,
have been dug up in Tuscany. The treaties among the Romans, Spartans,
and the Jews, were written on brass; and estates, for better security,
were made over on this enduring metal. In many cabinets may be found the
discharge of soldiers, written on copper-plates. This custom has been
discovered in India: a bill of feoffment on copper, has been dug up near
Bengal, dated a century before the birth of Christ.

Among these early inventions many were singularly rude, and miserable
substitutes for a better material. In the shepherd state they wrote
their songs with thorns and awls on straps of leather, which they wound
round their crooks. The Icelanders appear to have scratched their
_runes_, a kind of hieroglyphics, on walls; and Olaf, according to one
of the Sagas, built a large house, on the bulks and spars of which he
had engraved the history of his own and more ancient times; while
another northern hero appears to have had nothing better than his own
chair and bed to perpetuate his own heroic acts on. At the town-hall, in
Hanover, are kept twelve wooden boards, overlaid with bees'-wax, on
which are written the names of owners of houses, but not the names of
streets. These _wooden manuscripts_ must have existed before 1423, when
Hanover was first divided into streets. Such manuscripts may be found in
public collections. These are an evidence of a rude state of _society_.
The same event occurred among the ancient Arabs, who, according to the
history of Mahomet, seemed to have carved on the shoulder-bones of sheep
remarkable events with a knife, and tying them with a string, hung up
these sheep-bone chronicles.