Talk:History of paper

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Ground paper?

Utopial (talk): what is the meaning of this term? --Langbein Rise (talk) 08:47, 18 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Papyrus is not paper

Papyrus Mathematical Leopard (talk) 08:43, 26 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I Have Remove-ed Zee Vandalism

Deleted a nasty little insert about somebody [...] somebody's mother. While it may have been a constructive notification to poor Nelson, I failed to see its relevance to the article.--Woerkilt (talk) 09:10, 3 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Collaboration

Does anyone feel like collaborating to help improve the article? There are various outstanding technical/grammatical/formatting issues. Mephistophelian (talk) 05:18, 11 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The Muslim, the Christians the Buddhists

Why talking about an historical issue like paper in this article, is used the expression "the Muslim" but not "the Christians" or the "Taoists"? Would not be possible and more meaningful specify if we are talking about the Abbasids or the Khazars? Exactly as it is done for the West and Far East? --Dia^ (talk) 12:46, 15 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

A different perspective

"When Muslim armies conquered Central Asia in the late seventh and early eighth centuries, they encountered paper for the first time. It is often said that Muslim armies captured Chinese papermakers following the battle of Talas in 751, but this anecdote is without factual basis and paper had been known—and made—in Central Asia for centuries. For example, archaeologists discovered a mailbag containing letters written on paper and addressed to a merchant in Samarqand in the fourth century [Fig. 6] [Sims-Williams 1987]. Devastich, lord of Panjikent in Sogdia (now Tajikistan) until his capture by the Arabs in 722, left an archive of 76 writings in Sogdian, Arabic and Chinese on leather, wood and paper, which Soviet scholars discovered at the remote site of Kala-i Mug [Zeymal’ 1996]. A few decades later in 762 the new Abbasid dynasty transferred the capital of the Islamic empire from Damascus in Syria to Baghdad in Iraq; this new eastern focus, combined with the government bureaucracy’s soaring demand for records, led to the introduction and quick diffusion of paper in the Islamic lands.

Papermaking was begun in Baghdad itself by the late 8th century. The city boasted a Suq al-warraqin (Stationers’ Market), a street whose two sides were lined with more than one hundred shops for paper- and booksellers. From Iraq, papermaking was carried to Syria, then Egypt, across North Africa to Morocco and eventually to Spain, where its use there is first recorded by a tenth-century traveler. The first sheets of “Arab” paper appear in Spanish Christian manuscripts of the late tenth century, where the sheets were substituted for the typical, but more expensive, parchment. Eventually other Europeans learned of papermaking from the Muslims of Spain, particularly as Christians began to occupy larger portions of the Iberian peninsula and needed materials on which to record deeds and titles. Similarly in Sicily and Italy, merchants and notaries began to use paper from the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, although papermaking was not introduced, perhaps from Spain or from somewhere in the Arab world, until the thirteenth. Once the Italians learned the art of papermaking, they quickly superseded their masters, producing large quantities of fine paper more cheaply than anyone else, and they began exporting it to North African and West Asian markets.

[...]"

http://www.silk-road.com/newsletter/vol3num2/5_bloom.php

Proposal for new section on the recent decline of paper and rise of the "paperless" movement

I think this article would greatly benefit from a final section charting the decline of paper coinciding with the rise of the internet, email, and now ebooks. Want to open up the discussion and planning for such a section here. Does anyone have stats on the decline in paper use or production in the last 2 decades or so? does anyone know of studies, theoretical or otherwise, that muse on the decline of paper in relation to the longer history of paper, handwriting, and printing? This section might productively incorporate future projections of paper's continued decline--or perhaps mechanisms by which paper may survive. Can anyone here point to where such discussions are happening? Thanks! Leftsideend (talk) 20:17, 2 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Byzantium and paper

I am not expert enough to edit, and I ask someone to examine the following: In the 7th century AD the muslim caliphate embargoed the supply of papyrus from Egypt to the later Roman Empire in retaliation of the the Greek embargo of solidi. Byzantium was in diplomatic relations with Tang China and the Chinese regime responded to the above embargo by sending paper making experts to Constantinople. This is from memory, and I cannot supply sources. Can someone please look into this and if I am correct, modify the article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rameshkkhanna (talk • contribs) 16:39, 28 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]