Jews, Christians,
and Others: Late Antique Perceptions of
Book Formats
Scrolls, Notebooks,
Codices, and More: The Early History of
Book Formats in Texts and Art
by Robert A. Kraft
for the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies on 10 April 2008
[10ap08 version -- more information on images (location, dates, etc.)
needs to be included]
Context and
Orientation:
This presentation is tangental to a larger project on "The Gestation of the Codex," which began with the ambition to update the 1983 study by C.H.Roberts and T.C.Skeat on "The Birth of the Codex." Despite the reputation enjoyed by that book, it has some significant problems both in its organization and in its presentation, in addition to being outdated by the wealth of subsequent papyrological publications. What I hope to do here is to show, in text and images, some of the main issues (and artistic perceptions) that relate to the early history of book formats, up to the 6th century of the common era (Justinian, Ravenna) and sometimes beyond.
The possible role of early Jewish book producers -- especially of the Greek speaking kind -- in this process of transition from scroll to codex has been largely neglected. I readily admit to my methodological prejudice, whereby for anything that is found in early Christianity the first place I look for connections and continuities is the situation in Jewish circles. Put bluntly, early Christian developments are Jewish until shown otherwise. There is ample evidence in support of such a principle. Whether it also applies to this bibliotechnic situation remains to be seen.
Ancient Technologies and Vocabularies -- Tablets, Stelae, "Notebooks," and Scrolls:
Among the earliest known portable writing surfaces are "tablets" -- hard surfaces of various sorts (stone, wood, various metals; note also the use of pottery and bone) on which letters are chiseled or scratched or applied with a marking substance (paint, ink, chalk, etc.), or soft surfaces that are hardened after writing is embedded, such as tablets of clay, or even erasable soft surfaces such as wax on wood. They can be large and stationary, such as the Code of Hammurabi or the Rosetta Stone (normally classified as "stelae," not intended to be carried around), or relatively small and transportable (PINAKES, tabellae). For present purposes the latter are most relevant, since several smaller tablets can be bound together to form a stiff paged codex, whether hinged to open vertically (like a laptop computer!) or to open horizontally -- either of which could also be attached "accordian" or "concertina" style, imitating a roll.
We know of such tablet codex devices in the Greek and Roman worlds from at least the 6th century BCE onward. Often the hard surface was coated with an erasable substance such as wax (even colored wax), which could be smoothed with the blunt end of the writing implement, or written on with a removable substance such as chalk, permitting "pages" to be reused as needed. Sometimes the surface (usually wood) was painted in a light tone (white or grey) and written on with ink or paint. In different parts of the Greco-Roman world, different materials were used by necessity, and along with them somewhat different techniques, as the Vindolanda discoveries from the end of the first century ce in northern Britain illustrate. Even in the Dead Sea area, similar wooden tablet technology appears at the same time with Aramaic contents [Bar Kokhba letter in Aramaic]. Over time, this rigid tablet technology transmuted and produced both single sheets of pliable material (for all sorts of purposes) and pliable paged notebook codices made of papyrus or leather (then parchment), which survived along with the older forms in wood and/or wood and wax. Such notebooks became a regular feature of basic education in literacy for centuries [see Cribiore], and were also basic for various other things such as legal records (e.g. birth certificates [see Meyer]) and bookkeeping, especially the recording of debts, for which they could be transmitted to heirs as evidence of debt value (Ulpian et al.). Authors also used them for rough drafts (Quintilian), or for taking notes (elder Pliny), and mathematicians and astronomers for making calculations and diagrams. In later Christian liturgy, wooden diptychs were also used liturgically [Verkerk 94]. The point is that throughout the period presently being investigated, this rudimentary form of codex technology was widely known and used, even when "high literature" took the form of scrolls or later, of developed codices.Scrolls
also have a long history, also both in a horizontal
format, where the
writing
appears in columns along the width of the material, from side to side,
and in vertical format
(sometimes
called "transversa charta," later often
called
"rotulus," although those terms are sometimes used ambiguously in the
literature),
where the lines of writing run down the length of the material, from
top to
bottom (see now the 5/6th c Petra Papyri for "documentary" examples).
Especially in Egypt, papyrus dominated the market for writing material
and was exported to other parts of the Mediterranean world. Its main
rival was leather, which was refined through special treatment into
"parchment," and later into "vellum" to produce very attractive and
durable writing surfaces. The horizontal scroll format is the primary
choice,
at least for literature, through the Greco-Roman period up until
its gradual replacement by the codex from about the 4th century ce
onward.
The horizontal scroll could also be folded
over and held
in one hand, much like an open codex (also here
and here).
The
vertical or "rotulus"
format
survives to the present in certain special
applications (Christian liturgy
[and here],
genealogical tables, some court
records), and has left its impact on popular visual
representations as
we shall see. In Sunday School plays, as in (older) Hollywood
productions, one
often sees the rotulus scroll representing ancient practice in
anachronistic ways. Late dated horizontal scrolls also exist, but are
rare,
and sometimes exhibit codex features (e.g. resembling one sided codex
pages glued edge to edge).
Although the rigid tablet in its various
manifestations never disappeared from the scene (see e.g. National
Geographic April 2008), and sometimes even appeared in ivory or in
exotic woods (Martial's
gifts, legal
definitions), its transmutation to
multi-leaved rigid versions (to which the name "codex" was applied in
Latin, i.e. "wooden device") and then to flexible versions using
parchment (e.g. Quintilian) and papyrus [e.g. PSI 1.23 and 34, and 8.959-60]
seems to
have been accomplished by the first century of the common era. There
does not seem to have been anything dramatic in this process -- after
all, the literate classes in general were accustomed to the use of such
materials in their schooling -- but rather it was a natural development
that was largely taken for granted by the participants (see e.g. Quintilian
on using parchment if wax was difficult to read), and by the end of the
first century ce had also begun to impact the book trade, at least in
Rome (Martial's publisher).
As might
be expected, the use of flexible
codices outside of the school context first seems to find favor among
those who were relatively more accustomed to making drafts and notes of
their work in areas such as astronomy, mathematics, commentary,
memoirs, and the like. Conventional "high literature" such as basic
Homer or
Thucycides, Livy and
Virgil, continued to circulate largely in scroll
format, even as the flexible codices were gradually gaining in
visibility and acceptability. The earliest known codices were
relatively
small scale, containing basically no more than the amount of
material that could be accommodated on one or two scrolls. Indeed,
awareness of
how much text a conventional scroll could hold probably produced
concepts of what
constituted a "book" in the multi-volumed productions of antiquity,
including early codices. That is, even when codex technology had
developed to the point where a codex could hold the equivalent of
several
scrolls, the authored works continued to be segmented into roll-length
"books," functioning rather like our chapter divisions. Whether newly
written works that had never been in scroll
format followed such a convention I cannot tell, but suspect that it
may have been so -- perhaps Melito
(end of 2nd century) produced his 6 books of scriptural excerpts on
scrolls, but did Eusebius, in the early 4th century when well
developed codices were very well known, write his 10 "books" of the
Ecclesiastical History in
scroll form (as 10 separate scrolls), or already in codex form with
scroll length subdivisions (e.g. as two codices, with 5 "books" in
each)?
Major developers of codex technology were found
among Christians, with many examples surviving from the 2nd and 3rd
centuries (including an image
from a 3rd century catacomb), and the apex was reached in the 4th and
5th
centuries, with such "mega codices" as the largely scriptural
anthologies in the famous codices Sinaiticus,
Vaticanus,
and
Alexandrinus.
The non-Christian Greco-Roman world was also producing
significant codices at that time [get examples], unifying materials
previously in separate scrolls whether by a single author or by several
(anthologies). The transition to a book world of codices cannot have
been hurt by Constantine's sponsorship of Christianity, including his
instructions
to Eusebius to produce 50 parchment codices of the "holy
scriptures" for use in newly established churches in the Constantinople
area. As Christianity became the favored religion in the Roman world by
the end of the 4th century, the use of codices in virtually all
areas
of published literature was supplanting
the older horizontal scroll format,
and almost
caused scrolls to disappear from medieval memory except in those
special uses for
which the vertical "rotulus" continued to be used. The mosaics
preserved from 4th-6th century Ravenna provide a good starting point to
help illustrate the artistic perceptions of the transitions taking
place:
Christian debts to
the Jewish heritage(s) of early Christianity?
The Christian involvement in the transition from a
scroll technology to that of the codex has been widely discussed and
documented in various ways. With rare and relatively uninformed
exceptions, the possible
Jewish contributions have gone unexplored in
any depth. The model of Judaism usually employed in such discussions is
drawn from rabbinic traditions, with the prescription of parchment
scrolls for scriptures, or at least for Torah as used liturgically.
Thanks to a short discussion in Lieberman's Jews/Hellenism, and a
followup article by Resnick, the possibility of early Jewish use of
notebook codices for basic schooling and advanced private recording of
a teacher's halakhic pronouncements gets a nod, but usually as a way of
explaining how the early followers of Jesus might have recorded his
sayings in codex form, thus starting the Christian codex ball rolling.
I know of no careful discussion of the possibility that some Greek
speaking Jews were already transmitting some scriptures in codex form
in the 2nd century, despite the general consensus that a codex fragment
of Greek Genesis from about the end of the 2nd century is probably of
Jewish origin (POxy 656).
We also know of presumably Jewish scriptural
scrolls from the same period or slightly earlier (Job,
Esther).
We are dealing here with several "moving targets."
On
the one hand, there is rapidly disappearing Greek speaking Judaism,
which in Egypt suffered a devastating, if not permanent, blow after the
uprisings under Trajan, around 115-117 ce, but presumably survived more
successfully elsewhere in the Greco-Roman and late antique world(s).
There are also the transitions in "book"
terminology, trying to keep
pace with technological changes, but thereby rendering problematic the
exact meaning of certain standard terms such as "volumen" in Latin
texts. Greek terminology sometimes borrowed from the Latin (e.g.
membrane, codix), but in general applied the increasingly ambiguous
biblos or biblion to all formats. Even terms such as "open"
and "close" (a book)
could be applied equally to the different formats (e.g. Lk
4.17-20). For
better or worse, assumptions about scripturality and biblical canon
also play a role in attempting to understand the surviving evidence
from Judaism and Christianity, in various ways. We also have
significantly different varieties of early Christianity, in different
locations, for which even the 4th century transitions to legality and
political power did not produce homogenization. Thus when exploring the
development of conceptions of book formats in the surviving evidence
(textual, archaeological, and visual), it is difficult to understand
fully what that evidence represents.
--
Some Special Bibliography and Online Sites to explore further
Yadin, "Expedition D" [Bar Kokhba
Letters], IEJ 11 (1961) 41 on Aramaic letter on wood leaves (like
Vindolanda) --
4 slats, 2 still joined, opens to a size of 17.5 x 7.5 cm; 2 cols
(rt to left), scored to fold wood "and thus formed a kind of pinax"; 9
lines on rt col, 8 on left, in ink (Aramaic). Found in packet between
folded papyri (Pl. 22B). "The practice of writing on wood was
widespread throughout the Orient, and is often mentioned even in
rabbinical literature" (41). From Shim`on Bar Kosiba to Yehonathan and
Masabala on three specific issues, signed by Shmuel Bar `Ami.
Verkerk, Dorothy. Early Medieval Bible Illumination and the
Ashburnham Pentateuch (Cambridge UP 2004) --
Ashburnham Pentateuch = Paris, Bibl. nat. lat. nouv. acq. 2334 [= G /
Turonensis (missing end of Num 36.6b - Deut); "early medieval" (late
6th/early 7th, with later additions, etc.) vellum Christian codex,
probably from Italy/Rome (not Spain, as earlier conjectured by Lowe,
followed by Bishoff), 18 pages of illustrations and over 100 scenes;
attacks theory of Josef Strzygowski that it depends on 3rd c. Jewish
book images from Near East (cf Dura Jewish art), as developed by Kurt
Weitzman and Ursula Schubert; fol 76r =
Moses receiving the law:
"Moses, accompanied by Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, approaches the Lord,
whose head appears in a cloud at the top of Mount Sinai. Below, in the
middle of the page, Moses reads the covenant to the people of Israel,
who gather to offer sacrifices, as described in Ex 24.4-8 .... Moses,
standing behind a stepped altar of dressed stone, reads from the book
of the covenant, portrayed as a diptych ... leget popula librum federis." (90)
... "Rarely is the book of the covenant depicted as a diptych, although
this is not unique to the Ashburnham Pentateuch.\109/ (94) -- xerox of
relevant pages made by RAK]
Jocelyn P Small. Wax
Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory and Literacy in
Classical Antiquity (Routledge 1997)
/end/