Since they are part of our everyday lives, we rarely stop to think about the importance of a rubber eraser or paper, but they are technological innovations that revolutionised writing. The material we write on and the instrument we use determine how and what we write, that is, they influence our thinking and how we express it. Writing is therefore a complex technology with a long history full of milestones. Among the technological advances that marked a turning point are the ink.This allowed ideas, feelings and experiences to be communicated in a way that would have been impossible using incised media. For this reason, few inventions have been so important to human civilisation – and yet so overlooked. In fact, in ancient times, the function of inks was not limited to writing: their ingredients gave them medicinal and ritual properties, a potential that did not go unnoticed by doctors and priests. Ink is therefore a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary product, and we have numerous examples of its use and production scattered throughout religious and magical manuals, alchemical treatises, and literary, medical, scientific and technical works. Black, red, green and invisible inks, ritual and decorative inks... All of these are known as “historical inks”, and this project is dedicated to their study.