scroll A scroll (from the Old French ''escroe'' or ''escroue''), also known as a roll, is a roll of papyrus, parchment, or paper containing writing. Structure A scroll is usually partitioned into pages, which are sometimes separate sheets of papyru ...

(from the Old French ''escroe'' or ''escroue'') is a roll of

papyrus Papyrus ( ) is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, ''Cyperus papyrus'', a wetland sedge. ''Papyrus'' (plural: ''papyri'' or ''papyruses'') can a ...

parchment Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared Tanning (leather), untanned skins of animals—primarily sheep, calves and goats. It has been used as a writing medium in West Asia and Europe for more than two millennia. By AD 400 ...

, or

paper Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, Textile, rags, poaceae, grasses, Feces#Other uses, herbivore dung, or other vegetable sources in water. Once the water is dra ...

containing writing. The history of scrolls dates back to ancient Egypt. In most ancient literate cultures scrolls were the earliest format for longer documents written in ink or paint on a flexible background, preceding bound

book A book is a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium. Originally physical, electronic books and audiobooks are now existent. Physical books are objects that contain printed material, ...

s; rigid media such as

clay tablet In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian language, Akkadian ) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age. Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay t ...

s were also used but had many disadvantages in comparison. For most purposes scrolls have long been superseded by the

codex The codex (: codices ) was the historical ancestor format of the modern book. Technically, the vast majority of modern books use the codex format of a stack of pages bound at one edge, along the side of the text. But the term ''codex'' is now r ...

book format, but they are still produced for some ceremonial or religious purposes, notably for the Jewish

Torah scroll A Sephardic Torah scroll rolled to the first paragraph of the Shema An Ashkenazi Torah scroll rolled to the Decalogue file:Keneseth Eliyahoo Synagogue, Interior, Tora Cases.jpg">Torah cases at Knesset Eliyahoo Synagogue, Mumbai, India ...

for use in

synagogue A synagogue, also called a shul or a temple, is a place of worship for Jews and Samaritans. It is a place for prayer (the main sanctuary and sometimes smaller chapels) where Jews attend religious services or special ceremonies such as wed ...

Origins of the scroll

The oldest known scroll is the

Diary of Merer The Diary of Merer (also known as ''Papyrus Jarf'') is the name for papyrus logbooks written over 4,500 years ago by Merer, a middle-ranking official with the title ''inspector'' ( ''sḥḏ'', ''sehedj''). They are the oldest known papyri with ...

, which can be dated to c. 2568 BCE in the reign of the Pharaoh Khufu or Cheops due to its contents. Scrolls were used by many early civilizations before the

, or bound

with pages, was invented by the Romans and popularized by Christianity. Nevertheless, scrolls were more highly regarded than codices until well into Roman times.

Eastern Mediterranean, West Asia and Europe

Israel

Scrolls were used by the

Hebrews The Hebrews (; ) were an ancient Semitic-speaking peoples, ancient Semitic-speaking people. Historians mostly consider the Hebrews as synonymous with the Israelites, with the term "Hebrew" denoting an Israelite from the nomadic era, which pre ...

to record their religious texts, which today is referred to as the

Tanakh The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. ''

Dead Sea Scrolls The Dead Sea Scrolls, also called the Qumran Caves Scrolls, are a set of List of Hebrew Bible manuscripts, ancient Jewish manuscripts from the Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE). They were discovered over a period of ten years, between ...

Greece and Rome

Scrolls were used by the ancient Greeks. In Roman usage the scrolls were written latitudinally, usually placed on podiums with roll holders from which the rolls were unwound. A vertically rolled form was also used, called a

rotulus A ''rotulus'' (plural ''rotuli'') or ''rotula'' (pl. ''rotulae''), often referred to as a "vertical roll," is a long and narrow strip of writing material, historically papyrus or parchment, that is wound around a wooden axle or rod. ''Rotuli'' ar ...

. The Romans eventually found the scroll too cumbersome for lengthy works and developed the

, which is the formal name for the modern style of book, with individual pages bound together.

Early Christian era

Scrolls continued to be used at times during the Early Church era until the

Early Middle Ages The Early Middle Ages (or early medieval period), sometimes controversially referred to as the Dark Ages (historiography), Dark Ages, is typically regarded by historians as lasting from the late 5th to the 10th century. They marked the start o ...

, but Christianity was an early adopter of the codex. It is often thought that this reflects the background in trade of many early Christians, who were used to codex notebooks, and less attached to the form that was traditional among the Roman elite and religious Jews.

European Middle Ages

Scrolls virtually ceased to be used for books and documents in Europe during the

Middle Ages In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the 5th to the late 15th centuries, similarly to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire and ...

, and were reintroduced for rare use in official treaties and other international documents of great significance during and after the Baroque Era of the 17th century. These were usually written on high quality vellum, and stored in elaborate silver and gold cases inscribed with names of participants. Earlier examples were written in Latin. Scrolls continued in use for administrative and accounting purposes all over Europe. In English they were often referred to as "rolls", hence the Great Rolls of the English

Exchequer In the Civil Service (United Kingdom), civil service of the United Kingdom, His Majesty's Exchequer, or just the Exchequer, is the accounting process of central government and the government's ''Transaction account, current account'' (i.e., mon ...

, and titles such as

Master of the Rolls The Keeper or Master of the Rolls and Records of the Chancery of England, known as the Master of the Rolls, is the President of the Court of Appeal (England and Wales)#Civil Division, Civil Division of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales ...

(a senior judge), still used in the 21st century. The official copy of English, now British, legislation was still printed on vellum in a roll format and stored in the

Palace of Westminster The Palace of Westminster is the meeting place of the Parliament of the United Kingdom and is located in London, England. It is commonly called the Houses of Parliament after the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the two legislative ch ...

until 2017, when the use of Vellum was replaced with archival paper. The Exultet Scroll from Southern Italy and Byzantine Joshua Scroll were prestige objects that used the old form in a revivalist spirit.

West and Central Asia

Scrolls continued in use longer in the Islamic world, often elaborately decorated in calligraphic writing that included use of gold embossing and pigments when used for the writing of the Qur'an.

East Asia

Scrolls continued in use longer in East Asian cultures like China, Korea and Japan. The Chinese invented and perfected 'Indian Ink' for use in writing, including scrolls. Originally designed for blacking the surfaces of raised stone-carved hieroglyphics, the ink was a mixture of soot from pine smoke and lamp oil mixed with the gelatin of donkey skin and musk. The ink invented by the Chinese philosopher, Tien-Lcheu (2697 B.C.), became common by the year 1200 B.C. Later other formats came into use in China, firstly the ''sutra'' or ''scripture'' binding, a scroll folded

concertina A concertina is a free-reed musical instrument, like the various accordions and the harmonica. It consists of expanding and contracting bellows, with buttons (or keys) usually on both ends, unlike accordion buttons, which are on the front. The ...

-style, which avoids the need to unroll to find a passage in the middle. By about 1,000 CE, sheet-based formats were introduced, although scrolls continued to have a place. Traditional

painting Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

and

calligraphy Calligraphy () is a visual art related to writing. It is the design and execution of lettering with a pen, ink brush, or other writing instruments. Contemporary calligraphic practice can be defined as "the art of giving form to signs in an e ...

in East Asia is often still performed on relatively short latitudinal paper scrolls displayed vertically as a

hanging scroll A hanging scroll is one of the many traditional ways to display and exhibit East Asian painting and calligraphy. They are different from handscrolls, which are narrower and designed to be viewed flat on a table. Hanging scrolls are generally i ...

on a wall or horizontally and flat as a

handscroll The handscroll is a long, narrow, horizontal scroll format in East Asia used for calligraphy or paintings. A handscroll usually measures up to several meters in length and around 25–40 cm in height. Handscrolls are generally viewed startin ...

Replacement by the codex

The

was a new format for reading the written word, consisting of individual pages loosely attached to each other at one side and bound with boards or cloth. It replaced the scroll over time because it overcame at least seven problems that limited the scroll's function and readability. (1) Scrolls were relatively expensive to produce. Codices could easily be written and read on both sides of the page, halving the amount of paper or vellum required to hold the same amount of content. (2) Lengthy scrolls were bulky and heavy, both because they required double the writing surface, and because they also required at least one umbilicus (rolling stick) and a scroll case for protection. The use of codices with light paper or leather covers reduced the size and weight of the book by more than half. (3) Codices were easier to reproduce. It was possible to hold open a codex with one hand and copy text with the other. For early Christendom this was an invaluable asset, as the ability to mass reproduce their gospels was in high demand. (4) Codices were easier to read. Scrolls were very long, sometimes as long as ten meters. This made them hard to hold open and read, especially scrolls that were inscribed horizontally and unrolled vertically. (5) Codices were easier to index and annotate. As a scroll was continuous, without page breaks, indexing and bookmarking was impossible. Conversely, the codex was easier to hold open, separate pages made it possible to index sections and mark a page. (6) Codices were better protected. The covers of a codex protected the fragile pages better than scrolls. This made the codex particularly attractive for important religious texts. (7) The ink on codices could, in principle, last longer than the ink on scrolls. The ink used in writing scrolls had to adhere to a surface that was constantly rolled and unrolled, so special inks were developed. Even so, ink would slowly flake from scrolls. Codices involved much less flexing of the page, so they were less prone to this problem. The codex began to replace the scroll almost as soon as it was invented. Early Medieval Christians were some of the first to adopt the codex over the scroll. In Egypt by the fifth century CE the codex outnumbered the scroll or roll by ten to one based on surviving examples, and by the sixth century the scroll had almost vanished from use as a vehicle for literature. However, in other places the scroll lingered. Monarchs used "statute rolls" to record important legislation until well into the Middle Ages. Scrolls were also commonly used in theater productions, a practice from which the term "

role A role (also rôle or social role) is a set of connected behaviors, rights, obligations, beliefs, and norms as conceptualized by people in a social situation. It is an expected or free or continuously changing behavior and may have a given indi ...

" (of an actor) was coined.Lyons, M. (2011) ''Books: A Living History.'' Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications. p. 37

Modern era

Torah scrolls are still used today in Jewish religious observance with almost insignificant changes despite the thousands of years in practice. Some cultures use scrolls as ceremonial texts or for decoration—such as a

—without any obvious division of the text into columns. In some scroll-using cultures painted illustrations were used as header decorations above the text columns, either in a continuous band or broken into scenes above either a single or double column of text. One of the few modern texts the original of which was written on what is effectively a scroll is the manuscript of

Jack Kerouac Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian ...

's ''

On the Road ''On the Road'' is a 1957 novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagoni ...

'', typed onto what he called "the scroll", made of taped-together sheets of paper. Although it was more for utilitarian than ceremonial purposes, the

Marquis de Sade Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade ( ; ; 2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814) was a French writer, libertine, political activist and nobleman best known for his libertine novels and imprisonment for sex crimes, blasphemy and pornography ...

's '' 120 Days of Sodom'', which he intended to be the filthiest book imaginable, is written on a scroll. The verb " to scroll" is much used in the age of screen displays—

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

displays, rolling credits in

film A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, sinc ...

s and so on—with the screen filled with text moving (scrolling) up or down or sideways, appearing at one edge of the display and disappearing at the other as if being unrolled from one side of a scroll and rolled up at the other.

References

External links

{{Commons category, Scrolls
Encyclopaedia Romana: "Scroll and codex"
Manuscripts by type

Scrolls A scroll (from the Old French ''escroe'' or ''escroue''), also known as a roll, is a roll of papyrus, parchment, or paper containing writing. Structure A scroll is usually partitioned into pages, which are sometimes separate sheets of papyru ...