From Papyrus to Pocket Journals: A Brief History of Journaling

A journal can hold almost anything: an account of the day, a favorite quotation, a travel memory, a list of things to do, a sketch, or a thought someone simply doesn’t want to lose.

People have been recording their days for thousands of years, although what we now call journaling didn’t begin as one particular practice. Its history winds through work logs, travel accounts, commonplace books, private diaries, pocket planners and personal reflections.

Even the word journal points back to the idea of the day. It comes through Old French from words meaning “daily” or “of the day.” The English meaning of a journal as a personal diary appeared around 1600.

Ancient Egypt: Recording the Workday

One of the oldest surviving examples of someone systematically recording daily activity comes from ancient Egypt.

Around 2570 BCE, an official named Merer kept a log of the work performed by his crew. His surviving papyri document their movements and activities, including trips transporting limestone from quarries at Tura toward Giza during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu.

Today, the collection commonly called the Diary of Merer is recognized as the oldest surviving papyrus document known.

Merer’s record wasn’t a journal in the modern reflective sense. He wasn’t filling pages with his hopes or frustrations. It was a practical work record.

But the basic idea is remarkably familiar: record what happened today so there is a record of it tomorrow.

10th-Century Japan: When the Diary Became Literature

Hundreds of years before the familiar European diary tradition developed, Japan already had a remarkable culture of diary writing.

The Tosa Diary, written by Ki no Tsurayuki in the tenth century, recounts a 55-day journey from Tosa Province back to Kyoto. The journey began late in 934 and ended in early 935, after Tsurayuki completed his term as provincial governor.

It became part of a much larger tradition of Japanese nikki, or diary literature. Important Heian-period works include the Kagerō Diary, Murasaki Shikibu Diary and Sarashina Diary. These works could combine events, memories, poetry and personal observation rather than simply cataloging what happened each day.

That makes the history of journaling much less straightforward than it might appear. Personal writing wasn’t developing in only one place—or for only one purpose.

Renaissance Europe: The Commonplace Book

Not every ancestor of today’s journal was technically a diary. During the Renaissance and early modern period, readers commonly kept commonplace books: notebooks where they copied quotations, poems, observations, ideas and information they wanted to remember.

Readers might organize those notes alphabetically or by subject so they could find them again later. Renaissance students were actively encouraged to collect useful passages from their reading in personal notebooks.

A commonplace book has quite a bit in common with today’s reading journal, quote journal or collection of favorite thoughts. The goal wasn’t necessarily to describe your day. It was to create a book containing the things you considered worth keeping.

The 1600s: A Private Diary Becomes a Window Into History

By the seventeenth century, the personal diary was becoming more recognizable to a modern reader.

Few examples are more famous than Samuel Pepys, who kept his diary from 1660 to 1669. His original diary fills six volumes and roughly 3,100 pages, much of it written in shorthand.

Pepys recorded both ordinary life and extraordinary events. His entries include work, meals, clothes, relationships and social life alongside events such as the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London.

He was simply recording his own world. Centuries later, those private observations became an unusually detailed historical window into seventeenth-century England.

That is one of the curious things about journals: something completely ordinary to the writer can become extraordinary once enough time has passed.

The 1700s and 1800s: Journals Fit in a Pocket

Journal keeping became much easier once publishers began selling books specifically designed for recording everyday life.

By the late eighteenth century, printed pocket diaries and memorandum books included spaces for each day along with calendars, financial records, useful tables and other information.

British novelist Jane Porter, for example, used a Ladies Memorandum Book in 1796. Its printed layout provided space for each day’s events on one side and weekly expenses on the other.

The format spread considerably during the nineteenth century. Publishers produced yearly diaries with preprinted dates and limited spaces for daily entries—the ancestors of both the modern diary and the daily planner.

By the late eighteenth century, publishers were refining this long-established practice into compact pocket diaries and memorandum books designed specifically for everyday recordkeeping. Preprinted dates, spaces for daily entries, expense tables, calendars and other useful information made them convenient companions for recording ordinary life.

The 20th Century: Ordinary Pages Become Historical Records

By the twentieth century, diary keeping was firmly part of everyday life.

During World War I, soldiers and civilians recorded meals, weather, travel, fear, boredom, battles and the people around them. Many of those personal diaries later became important historical records precisely because they captured details official reports often did not.

Interest in ordinary people’s diaries continued to grow. In twentieth-century Britain, newspapers, diary manufacturers and organizations such as Mass Observation encouraged members of the public to record everyday experiences, helping establish the private diary as a valuable source for understanding social history.

History wasn’t only what governments recorded. Sometimes it was what someone wrote at the kitchen table before going to bed.

From Diary Keeping to Journaling

Today, “journaling” covers more territory than the traditional diary ever did. A journal might record daily events, but it might just as easily contain gratitude lists, travel memories, goals, reading notes, sketches, prayers, quotations or pages of free writing. Some journals are carefully organized. Others make sense only to the person who keeps them.

The materials have changed too—from papyrus and handmade manuscripts to pocket diaries, bound notebooks and digital apps. But after thousands of years, one part of the practice still looks surprisingly familiar: Something happened, mattered, or crossed someone’s mind—and they decided it was worth writing down.