Exploring The Role Of Parchment In Ancient Greek Culture

The papyrus plant was a reed that grew to be about fifteen feet tall and could be found growing abundantly along the Nile River in Egypt. The ancients would take the papyrus plant, cut the stalk into strips, align them in parallel rows, with another layer at ninety degrees to the bottom layer, then they would be pressed together and dried in the Egyptian sun in order to make sheets of writing material not unlike our modern paper. Parchment, which was made from animal skins treated and scraped so thin it was nearly transparent, was also used as writing material in the ancient world but was not as popular as papyrus. These sheets of papyrus were pasted together in order to make a long roll of paper that would be written on the side with the
The Roman bookroll was a high-quality artisan product that was manufactured with exacting detail and a view to style. The letters were usually formed in what was called a “bookhand,” a writing style that used rounded, elegantly formed, all capital letters that were slightly separated for clarity and beauty (fig. 1). The text was written in a succession of vertical columns that ran from left to right, the width of the column being narrower than the height (fig. 1). Though they were hand produced, there was remarkable precision and craftsmanship involved in the layout of these rolls. Books, of course, did not have to be made to such exacting detail (as we shall see below in regards to Christian books), anyone could have simply copied a text in a scribbled hand without any view to precision. The artisans who produced these high quality bookrolls “had a strong sense of the cultural demands on the product.” As was mentioned briefly above, reading aids were extremely sparse and there were usually no spaces between words, and no punctuation or breathing marks. There was very little that interrupted the continuous “stream of letters” (fig.
This construction was not due to the book manufacturer’s lack of understanding or skill. The Roman culture gave-up using the spacing between words that was common in their older Latin works in order to adapt the format and style of the Greek bookroll. “Documentary” texts that were not “literary” in any sense and meant only to convey information, that is, receipts, letters, contracts and the like, often employed spacing between words. There are school texts from this period, created by teachers, that are written on papyri and scraps of wood that show markings for the division of syllables and spaces between words to aid the student in learning the writing