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C: The Transition from the Roll to the Codex: Technological and Cultural Implications
The transition from the roll to the codex took place gradually over rough- ly three hundred years, from the first or second through fourth or fifth centuries CE. While this very gradual transition from one basic form of the book to another is not difficult to understand conceptually, the problems involved are unfamiliar to those whose background is primarily in the his- tory of the codex book and the history of printing.
From the beginnings of Greek written literature until deep into
the Roman era, a “book” was fashioned by taking a premanu- factured papyrus roll, writing out the text, attaching additional fresh rolls as the length of text required, and, when finished, cut- ting off the blank remainder. Needed were the papyrus rolls, ink,
pen sponge, glue, and knife . . . Books on papyrus in the form of rolls (“bookrolls”) were the norm from the beginnings through
the early Roman era (Johnson, “The Ancient Book,” in Bagnall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology [2009], p. 256).
Considering the highly limited literacy rate in ancient society, and the
elite social aspects of reading in the ancient world, we may reasonably as- sume that ancient books, which contained literary, religious, philosophical, and to lesser extent scientific and other non-fictional topics, represented only a small percentage of the information recorded, most of which would have been government documents, accounting and business records, and correspondence. We may also assume that the number of surviving books is a very small percentage of the information surviving from the ancient world. Of the 1 to 1.5 million papyri—mostly fragmentary—that survive almost entirely from Egypt, fragments of only somewhat more than “3000 bookrolls, 1000 papyrus codices, and another 1000 parchment codices sur- vive from antiquity” (Johnson, op. cit., p. 268, citing data from the Leuven Database of Ancient Books as of January 2006). It has also been estimated that, apart from clay tablets with cuneiform script, somewhat more than
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