{"id":12406,"date":"2014-01-02T14:01:15","date_gmt":"2014-01-02T14:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/?p=12406"},"modified":"2014-01-02T14:01:15","modified_gmt":"2014-01-02T14:01:15","slug":"some-notes-on-the-bindings-of-ancient-codices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/2014\/01\/02\/some-notes-on-the-bindings-of-ancient-codices\/","title":{"rendered":"Some notes on the bindings of ancient codices"},"content":{"rendered":"

A useful\u00a0post at the British Library blog here<\/a> drew my attention to an interesting question: what did the bindings of ancient manuscripts look like?<\/p>\n

We all know that ancient books in 1 AD were written on rolls of papyrus.\u00a0 With these we are not concerned here.\u00a0 Examples have reached us, notably the charred rolls from Herculaneum.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A roll from Herculaneum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Notes for day-to-day use were written on wax tablets.\u00a0 These consisted of wooden boards with a recess, filled with wax.\u00a0 The notes could be written on the wax with a sharp point, and erased with\u00a0the flattened area at the other end.\u00a0 Examples have been found, often with much scratching on the wood!\u00a0 One such example, now in the Louvre, is given here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Roman<\/a>
Roman wax tablet – Louvre<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A natural development from this was to take a sheet of papyrus or parchment, and fold it in the middle, again to take notes.\u00a0 This gives rise to the modern book-form or codex, which\u00a0starts being used in the 1st century AD.<\/p>\n

Such items are mentioned by Martial in his Epigrams<\/em>, who tells the reader where his poems may be bought, written on\u00a0these novel-sounding\u00a0objects.\u00a0 But most authors seem to have ignored this parvenu.\u00a0 Snobbery is always a feature of the literary world, and it was perhaps used mainly by middle-class and business people.<\/p>\n

One exception to this rule was the early Christians.\u00a0 The municipal rubbish dump at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt has yielded immense amounts of papyrus fragments from ancient books; but analysis shows that the Christian texts tended to be written on a codex much earlier than non-Christian texts.\u00a0 In this context, it is notable that the end of Mark’s gospel is lost, and plainly was lost very early indeed.\u00a0 The end of a text, if it is written on a roll, tends to be well-preserved; but the last leaf of a codex can easily become detached, if the volume does not have a cover.\u00a0 It has been suggested, therefore, that Mark’s gospel was originally written into a codex, and that the last leaf or two was lost, before almost any copies were made.<\/p>\n

These early codices were unlike modern books in one respect.\u00a0 They consisted of a single gathering or “quire”: you took a pile of sheets of papyrus, and\u00a0folded them in the middle, and sewed a link in the centre of the fold to hold them together.\u00a0 A modern example from here<\/a>\u00a0shows the problem nicely:<\/p>\n

\"Single<\/a>
Single quire notebook<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There is a maximum size to these items, and they quickly become very difficult to handle.\u00a0 The solution was found in the 4th century AD, when the multi-quire codex went into general use.\u00a0 Each quire was no more than 16 pages; and then the quires were sewn to each other to form\u00a0a book of almost any length, and the binding attached.\u00a0 A modern example again:<\/p>\n

\"Multi-quire<\/a>
Multi-quire binding<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These very large codices come into use in the late 4th century AD, and of course remain in use today in modern hardback books.<\/p>\n

The find of a collection of gnostic books at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1946 gave us a clear idea of what the ancient books of the early 4th century looked like (via here<\/a>).\u00a0 These were still single quire papyrus codices.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Nag Hammadi codices<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The British Library cover comes from a tax register written in 716-717.\u00a0 It consists of limp leather, lined with papyrus.<\/p>\n

\"British<\/a>
British Library Papyrus 1442 – 8th century leather binding of Coptic tax register<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Note that there is a flap: this would be covered with metal and used to keep the book closed.\u00a0 It formed a catch, in effect.<\/p>\n

The cover is decorated with ink, and, usefully, the British Library have enhanced a detail photograph to show it:<\/p>\n

\"BL<\/a>
BL Papyrus 1442 – enhanced image of cover<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Let me say that, after attempting to enhance it further myself, I am full of respect for the skills of the chap who created that image!<\/p>\n

Of course this is a fairly late example of an “ancient” binding, which happens to be that of a single-quire non-literary text.\u00a0 But it is clear from the Nag Hammadi volumes that this is precisely the technology in use in the early 4th century, and no doubt earlier.\u00a0 In which case, we may speculate that early – 1st century – copies of Mark’s gospel perhaps had covers of the same kind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A useful\u00a0post at the British Library blog here drew my attention to an interesting question: what did the bindings of ancient manuscripts look like? We all know that ancient books in 1 AD were written on rolls of papyrus.\u00a0 With these we are not concerned here.\u00a0 Examples have reached us, notably the charred rolls from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[338,1074,1075],"class_list":["post-12406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-my-diary-announcements","tag-british-library","tag-manuscript-bindings","tag-manuscripts"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12406\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}