Natalie Nguyen & Alyssa Lopes

February 9, 2012

Greek Essay

Ancient Greek scrolls were used to send messages, record information, to date important events and were used to be able to read on. In ancient Greece, scroll’s  were  usually  written , painted  or  drawn  on for the purpose of transmitting letters or messages or just for decoration  a scroll is usually divided into pages when you unroll the scroll it shows one page at a time to be able to read or write the text is also to either be written form the top to the bottom or depending on the language from left to right, many scrolls sizes were about 1ft wide and  about  30ft long when unrolled.  Scrolls were first found or began Mediterranean in Egyptian civilizations. Ancient scrolls were used just like a notepad; they were used scholarly to record information. They were also used to write poems and paint. They were used to make life easier like a way to transport written material. The Greeks tied strings so the scroll will be closed tightly. Ancient Greek books were written on scrolls.

The Greek alphabet has only twenty-four letters. The scroll (that we made) was made of parch paper and 8 square sticks (with corners trimmed) (4 on each side) and 4 beer corks (2 per side). Individual sheets were overlapped and pasted together to form a long roll, or charta, a term that came to signify any form of paper, whether written or unwritten. It was the inner, horizontal layer that was used for writing. The outside of the roll was usually left blank, although Pliny did bequeath to his nephew, Pliny the Younger, one hundred-sixty rolls on which both sides have been written( opisthograph). The manufactured papyrus roll, says Pliny, comprised no more than twenty sheets (about fifteen feet). The book roll or volumen (from volvere, to roll), on the other hand, could be as long or short as needed, but tended to average thirty to thirty-five feet (sufficient to contain a single book of Thucydides). The standard way of reading it was to unroll (explicare, to unfold) the scroll with the right hand, while winding the portion that had been read back up with the left. To give the roll stiffness and to prevent bending, it was wound around a wooden or ivory rod, or around rollers, forming a cylinder that could be handled by the projecting knobs on the ends. Often, too, another sheet of papyrus (protocol) was attached at the front to protect the roll when wound. A tag or titulus, written on a separate piece of paper and affixed to the roll, identified its contents.

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