P.Hib. 113, the papyrus kept at Graz that has recently been proposed as being the earliest surviving remains of a codex, continues to be in the news. I made a brief post about it some days ago, and in the comments to that post, David Kelsey raised an interesting question:

“If I were to take three sheaths of paper, fold them in the middle and insert inside each other to form a quire, then stitch the sections together, as a finished product I essentially have a booklet. But is this a codex? At what point does folded sheets gathered become a codex? Could this papyrus from Graz University be the front page of a booklet only and can it is so proved to have other associated pages written on both side be an actual codex?”

This is a good observation and really boils down to this: What do we mean by the term “codex”? Is it something more than a series of leaves linked together in some fashion? I tend to think of the codex as an example of a kind of technology, so it is indeed these physical characteristics that are most interesting to me. I would answer David’s question affirmatively. What he describes, a stack of three sheets folded together and stitched through the middle, is a small, single-quire codex.

But other questions remain. What about less flexible materials like wood or ivory–can these form codices? What about, say, a diptych joined by hinges rather than threads or tackets–is that a codex?

For some bookbinding specialists, the method of binding is the key element. J.A. Szirmai, for example, has pointed to the method of joining the “leaves” as a determining factor and a firm point of separation between tablets and codices:

“Hardly any textbook in which the origin of the codex is discussed, fails to assure us that it [was] wooden tablets from which the construction of the codex was derived. Even authorities proclaim this with great certainty, so Roberts and Skeat (The Birth of the Codex, 1983, p. 1): ‘There has never been any doubt about the physical origin of the codex, namely that it was developed from the wooden writing tablet. . . ‘. The certainty with which the validity of this statement is taken for granted is in marked contrast with the lack of any substantial evidence or explanation as to the exact nature of this genetic relationship. Yet the assumption is being repeated again and again without any sign of intellectual discomfort about the weakness of the argument. . . The analogy in the geometrical shape of the composing elements or of their ability to be turned along one side is merely superficial; the primitive methods of connecting the elements of the writing tablets (using hinges, metal rings or lacing) have scarcely anything in common with the codex structure.”

Still other specialists also factor in the textual contents. In his reflections on “Les origines du codex,” Joseph van Haelst defined “codex” as follows: “The term ‘codex’ . . . designates a collection of sheets of papyrus or parchment folded in two, grouped into a quire (or quires), sewn together along the spine, and usually protected by a cover. Its content, unlike that of the so-called documentary codex, is a composition, i.e. a text designed for distribution and preservation. This may be literary (classical works) or professional-technical (biblical, legal, magical, medical, scholarly, etc.).”

I don’t really like this division between the (real) codex and “documentary codex,” but for better or worse, it is a part of the scholarly discussion. So, we really have three intertwined issues–physical form (leaves), method of joining (binding), and contents (documentary vs. literary).

Part of the reason for these overlapping categories has to do with etymology. The Latin caudex originally meant “tree trunk” or “block of wood,” and was later used to refer to bound sets of wooden tablets, which were themselves cut from blocks of wood (Greeks seem to have used the words δέλτος or πίναξ to refer to these tablets). We don’t have surviving examples of this kind of artifact from very early periods, just some iconography, such as the famous Douris School Cup of the early fifth century BCE:

Surviving examples of wooden tablets from later in the Roman era, however, are plentiful. The images below show a well-preserved set of wooden tablets dating from the fourth century CE that were found in the Egyptian city of Kellis. They were excavated intact with the “binding” thread in place (left and center), and they are shown in a stack after the thread was removed (right).

We can get a glimpse into how these tablets were made by looking at another artifact found at Kellis in proximity to woodworking tools, namely a wooden block that appears to be an off-cut from a block that had been sawn into a similar set of thin slabs:

So we can see the etymological connection to the caudex as “block of wood.” But there is also the question of how the slabs are held together after they were cut from the block. We don’t have a full picture of how these tablets were usually bound. The example shown above from Kellis has a pretty simple “binding” of a thread looped through the holes that were drilled in the wood slabs and tied off. But other surviving tablets have “covers” (outer slabs) that show evidence of a somewhat more elaborate lacing of the threads, and a 2018 book by Georgios Boudalis offers some speculative but very intriguing ideas about exactly what such lacing might have looked like, and indeed how closely it might resemble the bindings of multi-quire papyrus and parchment codices.

While these bound groups of wooden slabs are sometimes described as “codices,” some scholars (most scholars?) tend to reserve the term for bound groups of leaves made of more flexible materials like parchment, papyrus, and later paper. As noted earlier, in many studies of codices, we find a kind of evolutionary narrative that is based on contents as much as physical characteristics. These wooden tablets often contained documentary writing. The tablet found at Kellis shown above, for example, contained agricultural accounts. Other tablets contained legal documents, wills, public records, writing exercises, or other sorts of “non-literary” writing. We also have papyrus and parchment books that contain similar non-literary sorts of material. But such manuscripts are often described not as codices proper, but rather as “notebooks.”

A typical example of such a “notebook” (the one used as an illustration by Roberts and Skeat in The Birth of the Codex) is a parchment bifolium in Berlin, P. 7358 + P. 7359 (SB 26 16551) that contains some notes on labor carried out and payments made. Roberts and Skeat assigned the manuscript to the second century CE, but the editor of the papyrus preferred a date in the third century (on p. 21, footnote 2 Roberts and Skeat also assign the manuscript to the third century):

In The Birth of the Codex, Roberts and Skeat present the arrival of the “notebook” as a turning point in the story of the codex, as indicated by the chapter title “From Writing Tablet to Parchment Note-Book.” They use the terminology of a transition and name the agent: “Certainly it was the Romans who took the decisive next step, that of replacing the wooden tablet by a lighter, thinner and more pliable material” (p. 15). Now, I’m not sure at present how much I like this linear, evolutionary way of thinking about wooden tablets and papyrus and parchment codices, but if we momentarily allow this scenario, it is at this point in the narrative that the Graz papyrus might shake things up. If the Graz papyrus really is an example of a papyrus codex/notebook from the third century BCE produced by Greek-speakers in Egypt, then the Roberts-Skeat story about the Romans’ invention would require some significant revision.

Sources cited:

Roger S. Bagnall et al., The Kellis Agricultural Account Book (Oxbow, 1997).

Georgios Boudalis, The Codex and Crafts in Late Antiquity (Bard Graduate Center, 2018).

Günter Poethke, “Ein Berliner ‘Notizbuch’ aus Leder,” in C.-B. Arnst et al., Begegnungen: Antike Kulturen im Niltal (Verlag Helmar Wodtke, 2001), 399-403.

C.H. Roberts and T.C Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (Oxford University Press, 1983).

Joseph van Haelst, “Les origines du codex,” in Alain Blanchard, Les débuts du codex (Brepols 1989), 13-35.

J.A. Szirmai, “Wooden Writing Tablets and the Birth of the Codex” Gazette du livre medieval 17 (1990), 31-32.