Read the excerpt from The Ancient City. There were no desks. Vase paintings show boys sitting on stools holding wood-backed wax writing tablets. They wrote on the wax with a stylus, a sort of bone or metal pencil pointed at one end and flattened out in a leaf shape at the other. Many of these have been found. The flattened end was used for smoothing out the wax to make corrections. Occasionally they were allowed to write properly, with a reed pen and ink on papyrus. All books were written on papyrus, and rolled up in scrolls rather than bound in pages.