By Carol Symes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The scroll was the ancient format of the book for millennia. Ancient scrolls were usually made of papyrus, a wetland plant that flourishes up and down marshy areas such as the Nile River valley in Egypt, and many other places in Africa, the Mediterranean, and Asia.
Byblos
The stringy pith of the papyrus could be woven into long, continuous sheets, essentially a form of textile. When dried, a length of this textile could receive and preserve markings in various kinds of ink.
And because these dried sheets were too brittle to be folded and still retain their shape, they were carefully rolled into scrolls of various sizes and lengths.
Most common word for a papyrus book in antiquity, in both Greek and Latin, was byblos, which was actually the name of a city on the coast of what is now Lebanon, and famous for its papyrus.
So byblos came to be the name for a papyrus book in the same way that any facial tissue is called a Kleenex, making a brand name into a generic one.
Byblos is also the root of so many words for book-related sciences: bibliography, bibliophile, etcetera. It’s also how the sacred scriptures of the ancient Hebrews and, later, the early Christians, came to be called simply “the books”: biblia in both Greek and Latin.
Ancient Classics as Lengthy Scrolls
Like the Bible, most of the ancient works of literature that we regard as singular books—think of the Iliad and the Odyssey—were actually made up of multiple books, multiple scrolls. In fact, it can be noticed that a copy of one of these classics is still divided into multiple books: 24 for the Iliad, 24 for the Odyssey.
That’s because a scroll can only be so long before it becomes unwieldy: too long to furl and unfurl without damaging it, too large to carry or to fit in a cylindrical case for traveling.
The Greco-Roman biographer Plutarch tells a great story about how Alexander the Great found the perfect luggage for his own treasured copy of the Iliad, which his teacher Aristotle had given him. He’d brought all 12 scrolls with him when he set out to conquer the Persian Empire, and when he captured the entire baggage train of the Persian king, Darius, one of the most precious objects in it was a coffer or small chest, probably decorated with gems and precious metals. It was just the thing, Alexander said, in which to store his precious Iliad.
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Horizontal and Vertical Format of Byblos
Although one could create a byblos on a vertical length of papyrus with one continuous text to scroll down through, that was a method reserved for shorter texts, like letters, lists, public announcements, and so on.
For copying a longer work, like a Homeric epic or the book of Genesis, one would work with the horizontal papyrus and divide the text into columns. That way, they could open the scroll to a particular place and read a particular episode, working either from the front or the back, and leaving the ends furled to mark their place.
Limitations of a Scroll
But what if one wanted to compare two passages written in the same scroll? Unless they were very close to each other, one couldn’t. That was one of the major limitations of this technology. There were others, too.
Although papyrus was plentiful and relatively cheap in certain parts of the world, books made of papyrus were pretty wasteful because they allowed to write only on one side of the material, part because it was so thin, but mostly because the scroll was designed to be rolled up in one way only.
Moreover, papyrus is relatively brittle, so if a scroll isn’t properly furled and carefully stored it starts to deteriorate; that’s why most of the ancient papyrus scrolls that survive today are incomplete and often just tiny fragments.
A properly rolled scroll is loosely rolled, and hence takes up a lot of space. So scrolls were wasteful of materials and wasteful of space, suggesting that only well-to-do or wealthy people in antiquity had personal libraries. They also had the slaves who copied and carried their books for them.
Not for Colder Climes
All of these drawbacks become even more limiting beyond the Mediterranean world. In northern climates, which are colder and damper, papyrus deteriorates even more quickly. So if one happens to live in one of those places where papyrus doesn’t grow, and don’t have ready access to a papyrus manufacturer or to merchants and trade routes connected to those manufacturers, what do they do if they run out of writing materials?
This also brings us to notice that all the papyrus fragments we still have—the ones in libraries and museums today—mostly come from dry, hot climates. In places like Egypt and Sicily, they could be preserved for thousands of years, even after being thrown into waste-dumps as rubbish.
Experiments with Scrolls
It’s clear that, by the time of Jesus, around the 1st century, people throughout the ancient world were experimenting with ways of getting around the problems posed by scrolls. We have evidence of papyrus scrolls folded like accordions, so that individual columns could be taken in at a glance.
It would only be a short step from there to cutting those columns into separate pages and fastening them together. Those fastened pages could then lie flat, be stacked, and transported more easily. one of the first people who may have used this technique was another well-traveled military man, Julius Caesar, who kept detailed notes on his campaigns against the Celts in Gaul and later wrote a book about his exploits.
Common Questions about Books of the Ancient Millenia
Ancient scrolls were usually made of papyrus, a wetland plant that flourishes up and down marshy areas such as the Nile River valley in Egypt, and many other places in Africa, the Mediterranean, and Asia.
For copying a longer work, like a Homeric epic or the book of Genesis, one would work with the horizontal papyrus and divide the text into columns. That way, they could open the scroll to a particular place and read a particular episode, working either from the front or the back, and leaving the ends furled to mark their place.
Scrolls did not allow for comparing two distant passages from the same scroll. They were wasteful because they allowed to write only on one side of the material and required a lot of space for storage.
