Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 9.djvu/666

 M M U W lEiCTS 61

Poichment {diarta pergamena), made of the Bkin of •heep, Koata', ixXvea (B«&uni), ums, etc., woe med by the lonianH and the Asiatics as early as the rizih osn- tury ». c. (Herodotus, V, 58) ; the anecdote related by Pliny (Hist. Nat., XIII, 11), according to wbjoh it was Invented at Pergamus, seems li^endaiy; it would seem that its maDufacture was simply perfected there. Im- ported to Rome in ancient times, parchment sup- planted pspyrus but elowly. It wasonly at theendof the third century a. ». that it was preferred to papyrus for the making of books. Once prepared, the paroh' ment (membrana) was cut into leaves which were folded in two; four leaves together formed a book of Jcht folios {quaternio) ; all the books fonnod « tvdex. -.'^ere was no paging before the fifteenth century; writera merely numbered first the books (signature), then the foiios. The dimensions of the leaves varied; that most in use for literary texts was the large quarto. An Urfoino oatalogue (fifteenth century) mentions a

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16) oonfesses that he n«ver saw a papj^rus MS.

wera euoh, nevertheless, in sotoe archives, but it was only in the eighteenth century, after the discovery of the papyri of Herculaneum (1762) that attention was devoted to this class of documents. The first dis- covery took place in Egypt at Gizeh in 1778, then from 1816 the discoveries m the tombs have succeeded one another without interruption, espedally since 1880. The hieroglyphic, demotic, Creek, and I«tin papyri are at present scattered among the great librarieB (Turin, Rome, Paris, Lejfden, Strashur^ Berlin, London, etc.). The publication of the princn- pal collections has been begun (see l>elow), and the

served at Stockholm a gi^ntlc Bible written on i. skin, the dimensions of which have won for it the name of " Gigaa librorum". The page was ruled in dry point so deeply that the mark was visil)le on the other side. Parchments were written on both sides (opistographs) . As parchment became very rare and eoatly during the MiadleAges, it became the custom in some monasteries to scratch or wash out the old text in order to replace it with new writing. Those erased manuscripts ore called palimpsests. With the aid of reacting chemi- cals the old writing bos been made to reappear and lost texts have been thus discovered (the Codex Vaticonus 8757 contains under a text of St. Augustine the "De Republica" of Cicero, recovered by Cardinal Mai). Manuscripts thus treated have been nearly always in- complete or mutilated; a complete work has never been recovered on a palimpsest. Finally, by sewing strips of parchment together, rolls (ratali) were made similar to those formed of papyrus (e. a. Hebrew Pen- tateuch of Brussels, ninth century, on fifty-seven sewn skins, forty yards in length; "rolls of the dead", used by the associations irf prayer for the dead i

ment, ete.).

Paperissaid tohavebeeainvent«dinChinain A. a. 105 by a certain Tsai-Louen (Chavannes, "Joum. Asiatique", 1805, 1). Specimens of paper of Uie fourth century a. d. have been found in Eastern Turkestan (expeditions of Stein and Sven Hedm). It was after the tAkinK of Samarkand (704) that the Arabs learned to make paper, and mtroduced it to Bagdad (795), and to Damascus laharta damtueena). It was known in Europe as early as the end of the eleventh century, and at this early date it was used in the Norman chancery of Sicily; in the twelfth century it began to be used for manuscripte. It was sold even then in quires and reams (Arabic, raxmah) and in the thirteentn century appeared the liligranea or water- marks. According to cheniical analyses, the paper of the Middle Ages was mode of hempen or linen rags. The expression "charta Bombyoma" ocaoBa from the Arab manufactory of Bombyce, between Antioch aiul Aleppo. The copyist of the Middle Ages used chieflv blank mk, incmikvm, composed of a mixture of ^1 nuts «id vitriol- Red ink was reserved from ancient times for titles. Gold and silver ink were used for man- uHcripta de luxe (see Evanoeuaria). The method of binding oodices has varied little since ancieat times. The books were sewn on ox sinews placed in rows of five or six on the back. These sinews {chorda) served to attach to the volume wooden oov- era, which were covered with panhmmt or dyed diin. Covers of the manuscripts de luxe were made of ivory or braae. ornamented with carvings, precious atones, cut and uncuf.

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edition of a "Corpus papyrorum" is projected, which may be one of the greatest undertakings of eruditioD of the twentieth century. The importance of theae discoveries may be estimated from the consideration of the chief kinds of papyrus published to-dav.

(1) Egyptian Fapyri.^~'Tim greater number are religious documents relating to the veneration of the dead and the future life. The most anoieat date from

celebrated is the "Book of the Dead", of which sev- eral copies have been recovered. Moml and philt^ sophical treatises have also been found (the Prisse Papyrus, in the Biblioth^ue Nat., Paris) as well as sdentifio treatises, romances and teles, and popular songs.

(2) Greek Papyri.— They are distributed over ten centuries (third century b. c.-seventh century a. D.) and oontaln registers from archives (giving a very exact idea of the administration of Eg;i-pt under the Ptolemies and the Roman and Byiantiiie em^rors; their study has given rise to a new diplonu-ti^ieiKtAiiKi