THE RÔLE OF WRITING IN THE RESOLUTION AND RECORDING OF DISPUTES

As an alternative to papyrus or parchment, stone has certain obvious advantages as a medium in which records may be made and preserved. However, if the stonemason's skill is not necessarily less than that of the scribe, his rate of production is slower and the fruits of his labour more expensive and harder to store. Thus, it may be true, as asserted, that in Armenia under the rule of the Bagratid dynasty (861–1045) deeds of foundation and donation were recorded in the form of monumental inscriptions carved on stone, but if so such acts could only have been those of the highest and the wealthiest in the land. Such a procedure would hardly be justified, if indeed possible, for the sale of a field, let alone of a pig. It is impossible to credit that a society, wedged between two such bureaucratic neighbours as Byzantium and the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate, and with such strong late Antique traditions of its own, did not make extensive use of written as well as carved records, the subsequent total disappearance of which its later history easily explains. The study of documents in the period with which this book has been concerned is the study of the accidents of survival.

This accepted, it would be little of an exaggeration to say that all of the successor states to the Roman empire are marked by their employment of writing in governmental and private transactions, and by their attempts, however circumscribed, to preserve the resulting records, and that for practical rather than antiquarian reasons.