Guitty Azarpay, J. G. Barabe, K. A. Martin, and A. S. Teetsov, Analysis of Writing Materials in Middle Persian Documents
Leather document, courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
The Pahlavi Archive, a collection of Middle Persian documents at the
University of California’s Bancroft Library at Berkeley, comprises over
260 parchment/leather and textile manuscripts, 82 with clay bullae,
which are dated to the early post-Sasanian period in Iran. This paper
addresses the questions of the composition and characteristics of the
ink, textile, and leather used in writing materials in light of recent
scientific analyses conducted by Dr. Kathleen Martin and her associates
at McCrone Group Associates, Inc. Analysis of a random selection of
document fragments using several micro-analytic techniques by these
scientists indicates that the ink used to write the documents is
carbon-based lamp black (rather than iron gall ink), a common black
pigment employed in ink-making through Islamic times. A leather
fragment, randomly selected from among the Berkeley documents, is
parchment manufactured from goat or kid skin and, finally, the textile
used as a writing material in the Berkeley collection is in fact linen,
rather than silk as earlier believed.
