How the humble book, folded from awkward scrolls, won the ancient world
For centuries the written word came rolled up, and finding a passage near the far end meant winding through everything before it. The fix was to fold the roll into pages and bind them, creating the codex. By the fourth century that format had won, and most scrolls simply vanished once their text was copied.
Scrolls began as the first editable written records in ancient Egypt, made of papyrus and later parchment or paper. A reader unrolled one section at a time, keeping the rest wound on either side, and depending on the language the lines might run left to right, right to left, or switch direction with each line. Because the surface flexed every time it was opened, scribes needed special inks that would cling on, and even these gradually flaked away. Scrolls also carried writing on only one side.
The codex appeared under the Romans and caught on around the first century AD, though scrolls kept their prestige well into Roman times. A popular story says Julius Caesar first folded scrolls like a concertina to send dispatches to his army in Gaul, but the Roman writer's wording is unclear, and scholars doubt the tale proves anything. Surviving books point to early Christians as the first heavy users of the new format, with some Christian papyrus codices dating to the second century.
The advantages piled up. Both sides of each page could be written on, the pages stayed flat instead of being stressed by constant bending, and stiff wooden covers wrapped in leather protected them. A title on the spine made shelves easy to organise. The vocabulary still remembers the wood: codex means a block of wood in Latin, and both liber, root of library, and the German Buch refer to it too. Long rolls did not disappear entirely, surviving in medieval Europe for accounts, rents and legal records.
Many surviving ancient scrolls are too charred or brittle to open. Today they can be scanned in three dimensions with X-rays and unrolled by computer, a method used on the burned En-Gedi Scroll and the Herculaneum papyri scorched by Vesuvius.
Source: Scroll
