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MATERIALS OF ANCIENT BOOKS.
No material for books has, perhaps, a higher claim to antiquity than the
skin of the calf or goat tanned soft, and usually dyed red or yellow:
the skins were generally connected in lengths, sometimes of a hundred
feet, sufficient to contain an entire book, which then formed one roll
or _volume_. These soft skins seem to have been more in use among the
Jews and other Asiatics than among the people of Europe. The copies of
the law found in the synagogues are often of this kind: the most ancient
manuscripts extant are some copies of the Pentateuch on rolls
of leather.
Parchment--Pergamena, so called long after the time of its first use,
from Pergamus, a city of Mysia, where the manufacture was improved and
carried on to a great extent, is mentioned by Herodotus and Ctesias as a
material which had been from time immemorial used for books: it has
proved to be of all others, except that abovementioned, the most
durable. The greater part of all manuscripts that are of higher
antiquity than the sixth century are on parchment; as well as,
generally, all carefully written and curiously decorated manuscripts of
later ages. The palimpsests are usually parchments: "It often happened,"
says Montfaucon, "that from the scarcity of parchment, the copyists,
having erased the writing of ancient books, wrote upon them anew: these
rewritten parchments were called palimpsests--scraped a second time, and
often the ancient work was one of far greater value than that to which
it gave place: this we have on many occasions had opportunity to observe
in the MSS.
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