Writing and the durable record

• Drafts and daily working: wax on a wooden board, scratched with a stylus and smoothed to reuse.
• Short-term: charcoal on bark or smooth wood — it rubs off.
• Permanent: fired clay tablets — the most durable writing medium humans have ever used — or parchment with iron gall ink.

Pencil, unfired clay and charcoal all fade or dissolve. Decide per document which category it falls into, and put nothing load-bearing in a medium that fades.

Use fine, well-wedged clay, see pottery. Form tablets 1–2 cm thick and a size you can hold. Write while the clay is leather-soft with a pointed or wedge-ended stylus, pressing in rather than scratching.

Dry slowly and completely, then fire as for pottery — to at least a dull red, around 600 °C or more. Unfired tablets dissolve in water; fired ones survive fire, flood and burial. Number tablets that belong together, on the edge.

Dehair a hide in lime, as in tanning — but do not tan it. Rinse thoroughly, then lace it wet onto a wooden frame and stretch it tight. Scrape both sides with a curved knife as it dries under tension, tightening the lacing as it shrinks, until it is thin, even and opaque-white.

When dry, rub the writing surface with pumice or chalk so ink takes without spreading. Calf, goat and sheep all work; fine calf gives the best surface.

Iron gall ink bites into the surface rather than sitting on it, and lasts a thousand years.

1. Crush oak galls — or another strong tannin source — and steep them in water or wine for days.
2. Dissolve iron: iron filings or nails in vinegar for weeks gives an iron solution; iron sulphate (green vitriol) is better where available.
3. Combine, a classic ratio being about 3 parts galls to 2 parts iron sulphate to 1 part gum arabic by weight, in water. The gum keeps it on the surface.

It goes on pale grey and darkens to black over days as it oxidises. Too much iron eats through the page over centuries — keep iron below the tannin.

Agree one alphabet or script, one spelling for each word in the group's language, and one numeral system — positional with a zero, see arithmetic for everyone.

Write the key down: every letter, every numeral, the spelling of every technical term — plant names, units, materials, processes. A record written in a private spelling is a record only its writer can read, and fifty years later nobody can.

A settlement with one literate person has a library of one. Literacy is the mechanism by which the library becomes usable by more than one person, so it cannot be a specialist role.

Teach sounds to letters first, then blending into words, then reading whole sentences aloud. Short daily sessions — 30–60 minutes — beat long occasional ones. Test reading by giving a learner an unseen passage to read aloud and explain. Set a target and track it: more than half the group reading, then everyone. See teach the next generation.

In priority order:

1. The calendar and phenology record.
2. The seed and yield log.
3. Every process that worked, with the settings it worked at — quantities, temperatures, times, materials.
4. Medical notes — doses and outcomes.
5. The decision rules, roles and laws.
6. The map and property records.

A result without the conditions that produced it cannot be repeated. Every process entry carries its settings.

One copy is not a record; it is a single point of failure. Copy every critical document by hand.

Check every copy: one person reads the original aloud while another follows the copy, marking every difference. Store copies in different buildings. Keep an index listing each document, its copies and where each is. Then move to paper and printing — handwritten copying is the bottleneck that keeps knowledge scarce.