As I noted above, it’s clear that most papyrus codices were made up of bifolia cut from rolls. So, I am still at a loss as to Birt’s source for the idea that papyrus was sold by the single sheet rather than the roll.īut this brings me to a second problem less directly related to Birt. In another book, he wrote as follows: “In order to describe a roll as a roll per se, the Greeks used the words βύβλος, βυβλίον (or βίβλος, βιβλίον), χάρτης, χαρτίον (Um die Rolle als Rolle zu bezeichnen, …etc.)” (Birt, Kritik und Hermeneutik nebst Abriss des antiken Buchwesens, 1913, p. But now I see that Birt quite clearly regarded χάρτης as “roll” already in the early twentieth century. Second, I had thought one explanation could be that Birt believed, as many scholars did in those days, that the word χάρτης (Latinized charta) generally meant “sheet of papyrus” rather than “roll of papyrus” (the latter is the consensus view today). It’s odd that he does not do so here, and I wonder what he may have had in mind. Birt knew the literary and iconographic evidence very well, and he regularly cites his sources.
It’s certainly understandable that views change over time as new evidence accumulates, but there are a couple things about this quote from Birt that give me pause. XLII 3057 image source: The Oxyrhynchus Papyri Online It’s a letter (likely of the first or second century CE) with a prominent kollēsis running down the right side of the papyrus. 42 3057 is a nice example of this phenomenon. And we also find kollēseis in documentary letters, which suggests that these too were cut from rolls. In some cases, we can even reconstruct the rolls from which the bifolia of papyrus codices were cut (scroll down at the link here). The fact that we find kollēseis (the overlap where sheets are joined together) in the bifolia used to make up papyrus codices would seem to be decisive evidence that papyrus was purchased in rolls rather than individual sheets, at least in the Roman period. The common view now is that the unit of sale for papyrus was the roll and not the individual sheet.
After a description of the production of papyrus sheets, Birt states that “the resulting sheets were sold individually (Die so entstandenen Blätter kamen einzeln zum Verkauf)” (Birt, Die Buchrolle in der Kunst, 1907, p. I recently came across the reference in Theodor Birt that reminded me of an old problem.
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