I’ve been meaning to ask this question for years. I can’t believe I never got around to it, but I can’t seem to locate it via “search” today. Then again, I live in fear that the Hague will institute a “three strikes, you’re out” law for idiots like me.
The depictions and reproductions I’ve seen of the “Dead Sea [Qumram Essene] Scrolls” show the text laid out in’pages’ at right angles to the axis of the roll. It’s as if the scribes were so accustomed to bound books that they automatically laid out the text like pages cut from a book, to be held horizontally rather than vertically (which is a more natural way to read/write a scroll, taking advantage its physical layout). Even the proportion of the pages is roughly what we later came to expect from a book.
Of course, bound books were not the norm in that era (or many centuries to come). In fact, I can’t think of any bound books from that era, except perhaps Roman tax ledgers (and I’d have to double check that). I can think of many ancient scrolls that were written vertically, but none that were written in “pages” set at right angles to the roll.
a) Could someone who has seen the scrolls or the reproductions in the Dead Scroll Museum please confirm their actual text layout for me?
b) Could someone point me to roughly contemporaneous documents or fragments (preferably written by Jewish religious scribes) laid out in such “pages”? Links to photographs/site would be fine -and perhaps best, since I just need to confirm the layout, not read the documents themselves
c) Does anypone know, offhand, the early history of the conteporary book/page layout in Europe and the Middle East? Clearly it didn’t happen at once with the Gutenberg press, but had spread geographically over time, well before that.
I apologize for asking questions I could probably answer with an hour or two of searching (perhaps that’s why I never posted this before), but I’m hoping an overview by a knowledgeable Doper will be a more balanced starting point for continuing my inquiries. The first several pages of a Google search might return a misleadingly unrepresentative sampling of documents even at 100/page
Hmmm…I might be wrong, but it seems to me that scrolls weren’t held vertically. They would have a rod at each extremity (right and left) and you would roll the scroll around the rod while reading (I’m probably unclear, sorry).
I’ve seen the Dead Sea Scrolls in the museum in Jerusalem, and they are not paginated as if in a book…they were written on a scroll in the same way that Jewish Torah scrolls are written, which is, I imagine, pretty much what you’d expect.
Scrolls, like modern reading material (i.e., bound books) were typically read lying horizontally on a table rather than held up vertically. The reason has nothing to do with the physical layout of the material. It has to do with the light source you’re reding by. If you held it up to the light, the light could shine through the page, making it difficult to read. Place the paper/parchment on a flat, opaque surface with light shining from above, and the written word is clear.
For comparison, the Torah is a double scroll (rollers at both ends) that scrolls horizontally. The text is in columns, like a newspaper; the reader normally opens the Torah wide enough so that they can read to the bottom of the current column and jump to the top of the next (leftward!) column, without needing to immediately scroll the Torah.
I would not be surprised if the Dead Sea Scrolls were laid out the same way.
Aside: The Hebrew word for a double scroll, seifer, also has the more modern meaning of “book.” The word for a scroll with one roller, megillah, has no contemporary equivalent, at least as far as I know.
Keep in mind that the scrolls are probably not Essene. That was just some nonsense an early “expert” insisted on. There was also no Essene community anywhere near the Roman fort at Qumram. One BBC program on this (hosted by Roemer?) delved into the issue of whether the scrolls were actually those of a Jerusalem sect fleeing during one of the revolts. See the entries under 1995 and ff. here.
