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In the ancient world parchment was the primary alternative to papyrus for long documents or books. Writing on prepared animal skins has a long history. Some Egyptian Fourth Dynasty texts were written on parchment. Though the Assyrians and the Babylonians inscribed their cuneiform on clay tablets, they also wrote on parchment from the sixth century BCE on- ward, and Jews wrote on parchment rolls. In spite of this, the invention of parchment was associated with Pergamum, site of the second largest library in the ancient world, which was constructed circa 197-159 BCE. The Latin name for parchment is charta pergamena. It has been argued that the Pergamene authorities were forced to fall back on parchment when supplies of papyrus from Egypt were interrupted during the invasions of Egypt by Antiochus IV Epihanes. During this period scholars from Pergamum may have intro- duced parchment to Rome where the shortage of papyrus would have had an even greater impact on the much larger literate population. It has also been conjectured that the Pergamenes may have improved the quality of the writing material through a new production process. The added flexibility of parchment, as well as its greater strength, made it a superior writing material for manuscripts in codex form.
The papyrus or parchment codex was a Roman innovation. The earliest certain reference to a parchment notebook appears in the Institutio oratoria of Quintilian composed in the last years of the reign of the Emperor Domitian, the final decade of the first century CE.73 About 85 CE, the poet Martial recorded the first surviving mention of literary works published in parch- ment codices, emphasizing their compactness and handiness for the traveler, and providing the name of a shop where they could be bought. From this early period only a single leaf fragment of a parchment codex has survived, with writing on both sides of the parchment—a fragment of an anonymous work entitled De bellis Macedonicis found at Oxyrthynchus (elephantnose fish), Egypt, and acquired by the British Museum in 1900. The author of the Sec- ond Epistle to Paul from Timothy, which is either a first or second century document, requests that Timothy, should “bring the cloak that I left with
73 Gamble, The Early Christian Book (1995), p. 50 140