The Codex Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

The Codex - Essay Example By describing brief history of different codices, an attempt has been made to highlight the importance of codex history. Such history will not only provide a better understanding of past work but it will also provide an understanding of the development of ideas as well as a base for future research. Today’s physical form of the book took a series of severe changes of about 5000 years. However, its most popular format has been in the shape of codex i.e. a collection of bounded and covered pages. Just after few hundred years of its creation, the codex book gained a distinct domination over the past well-liked format of papyrus scroll. One important factor that brought the supremacy of codex on scroll was the effective role of Christianity. Christian church took revolutionary steps to distinguish the writings of its holy books from the Jewish influence. They implemented several unique codex formats for its scriptures. Consequently, Christianity spread throughout the history and its codex formats as well. The Romans civilization is considered as the pioneer that used the codices (plural of codex) as personal notebooks e.g. their use in the form of mail etc. For this purpose they used wax-covered pills of wood and stylus. These codices were ephemeral and informal because after using once, they were washed out for their use again. In the history, the first occurrence of the use of the codex is the later part of 1st century when The Romans used the codex for the circulation of educational works. At that time, literary works were carried out through scrolls media which remained dominantly effective till the 4th century. Later on Chinese remained in practice in using of scroll for their literary purposes. Christians also widely used the papyrus codex during 2nd century. Evidences revealed that the most primitive surviving fragments from codices came from Egypt during the 1st and 2nd century (Turner, 1977 and Roberts & Skeat, 1983). An example of egypt