The upcoming auction of the Crosby-Schøyen Codex prompted me to revisit the edition of the codex and think a bit about the book’s construction. One datum that didn’t really register with me before I started making papyrus rolls is the length of the kollēmata, the individual sheets of papyrus pasted together to make up a papyrus roll. Pliny the Elder provides descriptions of different classes of these sheets, and the largest that he mentions is the macrocolum, which is 1 cubit long (about 44.4 cm).
Papyrus codices that are sufficiently well preserved sometimes allow us to reconstruct the rolls from which their bifolia were cut. The kollēmata of the rolls reconstructed from some codices do fall below the maximum width reported by Pliny. For example, in 1956 Jean Scherer reconstructed the rolls from which the bifolia of one of the Tura codices of Origen (TM 62347) were cut.
Each individual kollēma was about 20 cm long. The Beatty-Michigan codex of the Pauline epistles (P46, TM 61855) has kollēmata that average about 20 cm long (though they range in length from about 10 cm long to about 33 cm).1 There are usually two kollēseis (pasted joins) on each surviving bifolium.
But a number of codices were constructed from rolls that have much longer kollēmata. The conservator Hugo Ibscher (1874-1943) reported that some of the kollēmata used to make the rolls used for the Berlin “Gnostic” codex (P.Berol. 8502, TM 107765) were over 1.6 meters long. Rodolphe Kasser reported that the Bodmer Menander codex (TM 61594) was made up of cut from a single very long kollēma measuring at least 4.20 meters!2 This seems implausible given the usable length of a stalk of papyrus. I have not been able to verify or refute Kasser’s claim, but from the digital images now available online, one can reconstruct quite long kollēmata. Here is a set of bifolia certainly from a single kollēma that was at least 75 cm long:
When the rolls used to make the Nag Hammadi codices were reconstructed, it was found that these kollēmata were also quite long, with lengths of up to 1.62 meters.3 So, there is good evidence for rolls composed of kollēmata much longer than Pliny’s macrocollum. This suggests that the mode of manufacturing papyrus must have undergone a change from Pliny’s day. Eric Turner drew out the implications:
“A roll without kolleseis of a length of about 2 m. would have been constructed using the full height (about seven feet) of the papyrus stem. If such rolls were made, they would appear to be a novelty designed to meet the requirements of codex-makers. It is to be noted that most of these supposed rolls with kollemata 2 m. wide are of very coarse, thick papyrus.”4
Turner located this shift in the fourth century. It is thus possible that the presence of these long kollēmata may be an indicator that a codex was produced no earlier than the fourth century.
The kollēmata of the Crosby-Schøyen codex fall into this later, longer group. The editors of the codex reported kollēma lengths between 1 and 1.5 meters.5 Radiocarbon analysis of the papyrus of this codex would allow for a date anywhere from the middle of the third century to the middle of the fourth century. It may be that the presence of the long kollēmata in the Crosby-Schøyen codex suggest a date in the later part of that range. But some caution is necessary. The number of samples we have is small. And the existence of the relatively short kollēmata in the Tura Origen papyrus noted above (which is assigned to the sixth or seventh century) suggest that shorter kollēmata continued to be used throughout late antiquity. So, shorter kollēmata may not necessarily be indicative of an earlier date, but longer kollēmata (over about 45 cm) may perhaps be an indicator of production in the fourth century or later.
- See the data gathered in E.B. Ebojo, A Scribe and his Manuscript: An Investigation into the Scribal Habits of Papyrus 46 (P.Chester Beatty II – P.Mich. inv. 6238) (Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 2014), 79-86. ↩︎
- R. Kasser, Papyrus Bodmer XXV, Ménandre: La Samienne (Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, 1969), at 11-12: “En effet, un examen attentif des pages du P. Bodmer XXV-IV-XXVI nous a convaincu du fait suivant: tous les folios de ce codex ont été découpés dans un même rouleau. …Ce volumen devait avoir une longueur de 4,20 m au moins.” ↩︎
- J.M. Robinson, The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices: Introduction (Brill, 1984), 67-70. ↩︎
- E.G. Turner, The Typology of the Early Codex (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 53. ↩︎
- J.M. Robinson, “The Manuscript’s History and Codicology,” in James E. Goehring (ed.), The Crosby-Schøyen Codex Ms 193 in the Schøyen Collection (Peeters, 1990), xix-xlvii, at xlv-xlvi. ↩︎
Variant Readings 
Are long kollēmata less likely to crack when rolled, perhaps?
Yes, in general I would think that the fewer joins the better, but this would need to be weighed against the fact that using the whole length of the stalk of the papyrus to make the kollēma would mean using the less desirable parts of the stalk (the part near the root and the part near the top); see https://brentnongbri.com/2023/12/31/the-colors-of-papyrus-and-plinys-instructions/
There seems to be a contradiction between the fact that using long strips would produce papyri with different colours and mechanical properties at the ends, against the fact that there were some long sheets without this problem. Could the long sheets have been produced by staggering the lengths of the strips and continuing on, so that one could make an arbitrarily long roll without obvious kollēseis? It would be more challenging than making sheets of a fixed size, but surely not impossible.
Yes, it does seem like such an operation would be possible. I’ll keep an eye out evidence of that type of manufacture.