ABSTRACT
IN THE AGES of what has been termed ‘scribal culture’, all reading matter was written by hand. The chief function of the learned man, or scholar, was the transmission of available knowledge through scribal labours. The scribal culture stretched from the dawn of history to the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. when the printing presses introduced a miraculous and magical way of dispensing with the scribe. The age of print culture began and has been continuing up to the present, that is for about five centuries – a pathetically short space of historical time compared to the untold scribal ages which preceded it.
