Page 137 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

Besides their use for legal documents, tabulae were used for financial doc- uments. Bankers in Greece and Rome preferred the wood tablet to papyrus because documents written on tablets were more difficult to falsify.71 That tabulae were widely used in Greece and Rome for various classes of import- ant, though shorter documents, suggests that the transition from the pa- pyrus roll to the codex form of the book reflected a conversion from one widely used form to another rather than the development of a new form. For the ancient, entrenched papyrus roll to be replaced as the dominant form of the book by the papyrus or parchment codex the presumption is that there were perceived advantages to the codex form, yet these advantages were not perceived as so great or so necessary that they caused any kind of rapid conversion: the transition required about 300 years. What were the advantages of codices? Chief among them were probably efficiency and portability. By efficiency I mean that you could contain more information more conveniently in a papyrus or parchment codex than a roll, and a single codex containing that relatively larger amount of information would proba- bly be easier to use, and easier to carry, than the group of papyrus rolls that it might take to hold an equivalent amount of information. The ability to keep long texts together in one volume, rather than in a series of bookrolls, some of which could be lost, would have been a significant factor in the preservation of texts.
In theory a papyrus roll could be made of any length by the process of pasting the end of one roll of papyrus to the end of the other, thereby extending the length of the roll, but there is evidence to suggest that the standard papyrus roll was twenty sheets of papyrus in length. One reason for maintaining shorter rolls may have been that the longer the roll the more difficult it was to find a specific place in a document. The longest roll ever found in Egypt is the Great Harris Papyrus, which extends to a length of
71 Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (1972), p. 116, footnote 83. 137