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ments, the moneyed classes or religious institutions, bringing into doubt the notion that Christians adopted the codex form of the book because it was associated with a form of notebook used by the “common man.” One of the numerous examples he used is the so-called Theban Magical Library, a collection of non-Christian books, including many of the most famous magical papyri, which was acquired by institutions in Leiden and London in the nineteenth century, possibly from a single find in a tomb in the West Bank at Thebes, Egypt. Five of the thirteen items in this library are fourth century codices; eight are third century rolls.81 Bagnall observed that the rolls in the library date from the third century and the codices date from the fourth, corresponding to the period in which the codex form is thought to have become dominant. His other observation was that these collections of Egyptian magical spells can in no way be called Christian documents. This implies that in their adoption of the codex book early Christians may have been part of a general trend, rather than responsible for the trend.
Regarding the transition from the roll to the codex, Bagnall drew atten- tion to the wide Roman use of the tablet book for solemn religious, public and legal documents, as studied by Elizabeth A. Meyer in Legitimacy and Law in the Roman World: Tabulae in Roman Belief and Practice (2004). Meyer wrote:
Egyptian papyrus was the paper of the ancient world, inexpen- sive and, in the East, ubiquitous. In parts of the Roman Empire where papyrus could not be had cheaply, as in the cold camps on Hadrian’s Wall, folk might write instead on the bark of trees. But for certain types of composition, Romans like Trajan—al- though their world rustled with papyrus—preferred to write in- stead on thick wooden boards, on tabulae, on tablets. Yet tabulae were objects of complex manufacture, and so expensive; writing on a tablet—usually with a stylus on a coating of wax set into a rectangular depression in the board—was more laborious than
81 Dieleman, Priests, Tongues, and Rites: The London-Leiden Magical Manuscripts and Translation in Egyptian Ritual (10-300 CE) (2005).
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