Scroll/Roll

The book form of the scroll was and is used in various manuscript cultures. Its defining element is that one or more elements of the writing support, attached to each other, are rolled up when the written artefact is stored or not currently being used for reading.

The opening orientation of scrolls can be either horizontal, i.e. rolled from right to left or from left to right, or vertical, i.e. rolled from top to bottom or from bottom to top. The orientation of the scroll is not to be confused with the orientation of the lines of writing on the scroll, which may also be vertical or horizontal, and thus either parallel or orthogonal to the opening orientation of the scroll. There is no established, uniform and unambiguous terminology for scrolls in the English research literature. Depending on the field of study and the language, both scroll and roll or emic terms are used. For mediaeval European scrolls, the Latin rotulus (pl. rotuli) is often used for vertical scrolls.

The writing support may be papyrus, leather, parchment, paper, various metals, cloth, silk, bark, bamboo or wood. If a scroll consists of several folios, they may be stitched together (as is common with parchment), glued together (as is common with papyrus), or bound together with strings (e.g. hemp strings in the case of bamboo slips). The writing support may be reinforced, for example with silk in the case of Chinese paper handscrolls. Handles or unwritten folios may be attached to the beginning and end of the scroll to make it easier to use and to protect it from excessive wear during use.

The scroll was the main book form used in the Mediterranean region in antiquity. Compared to clay or wax tablets, scrolls could contain significantly longer portions of text in a self-contained written artefact. From Antiquity to the early Middle Ages, scrolls were replaced in most contexts in the region by the codex. The codex allows for much easier and quicker navigation through the text, especially when compared to longer scrolls. However, scrolls continued to be used in some religious contexts (cf. the Sefer Torah ‘Torah Scroll’ and the Five Megillot ‘Scrolls’ in Judaism or the Christian Exultet rolls in southern Italy), in legal and administrative contexts, but also in everyday writing. In South, Central and East Asia, the book form of the scroll has a history of its own. Before the invention and use of paper for writing, Scrolls composed from slips of bamboo or wood may have been used in China as early as 5th or 4th century BCE. To this day, in the East Asian context, a distinction is made between what are known as horizontally oriented handscrolls and hanging vertical scrolls. In South Asia, the earliest written attestations of Buddhist scriptures are found on birch bark scrolls hailing from the historic region of Gandhāra and are dated between the 1st c. BCE and the 2nd/3rd c. CE (Baums 2014). Later on, scrolls made of cloth mixing images and script became popular in northern India (Chanchani forthcoming).