Page "Codex" Paragraph 6

The Romans used precursors made of reusable wax-covered tablets of wood for taking notes and other informal writings.

Two ancient polyptychs, a pentatych and octotych, excavated at Herculaneum employed a unique connecting system that presages later sewing on thongs or cords.

Julius Caesar may have been the first Roman to reduce scrolls to bound pages in the form of a note-book, possibly even as a papyrus codex.

At the turn of the 1st century AD, a kind of folded parchment notebook called pugillares membranei in Latin became commonly used for writing in the Roman Empire.

This term was used by both the pagan poet Martial and the Christian apostle Paul.

Martial used the term with reference to gifts of literature exchanged by Romans during the festival of Saturnalia.

According to T. C.

Skeat “… in at least three cases and probably in all, in the form of codices " and he theorized that this form of notebook was invented in Rome and then “… must have spread rapidly to the Near East …” In his discussion of one of the earliest pagan parchment codices to survive from Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, Eric Turner seems to challenge Skeat ’ s notion when stating “… its mere existence is evidence that this book form had a prehistory ” and that “ early experiments with this book form may well have taken place outside of Egypt .” Early codices of parchment or papyrus appear to have been widely used as personal notebooks, for instance in recording copies of letters sent ( Cicero Fam.

9. 26. 1 ).

The pages of parchment notebooks were commonly washed or scraped for re-use, called a palimpsest ; and consequently writings in a codex were considered informal and impermanent.