Ancient scrolls were made from three main materials: papyrus (a plant fiber), animal skin (parchment or vellum), and silk. The specific material depended on the region, the era, and what was locally available. Each required a surprisingly involved manufacturing process to turn raw plant or animal material into a smooth, flexible writing surface.
Papyrus: The Original Scroll Material
The earliest and most iconic scroll material came from the Cyperus papyrus plant, a tall reed that grew abundantly along the Nile. Papermakers cut the plant’s stem into thin, sponge-like strips, laid them side by side horizontally, then placed a second layer of strips vertically on top. The layered sheets were pressed together, and the plant’s natural sugars acted as a binding agent as they dried. The result was a smooth, pale surface that held ink well.
Individual papyrus sheets were then glued end to end with wheat or barley flour paste to form long continuous rolls. Microscopic analysis of ancient papyri has found starch layers and actual grain residue at the seams where sheets were joined. A standard manufactured roll in both Pharaonic Egypt and the later Greco-Roman period contained about twenty sheets and measured roughly eleven to twelve feet long. The sheets themselves stood between nine-and-a-half and ten-and-a-half inches tall.
Writers didn’t fill the scroll edge to edge. Text was arranged in narrow columns, typically about three inches wide and eight to ten inches high, with each column holding twenty-five to forty-five lines. Thin margins separated the columns, with wider margins at the top and bottom to protect the text from wear.
Parchment and Vellum: Animal Skin Scrolls
Parchment is the general term for any animal skin prepared for writing, most commonly from calves, goats, or sheep. Vellum refers specifically to calfskin parchment (the word comes from the French “veau,” meaning calf). Both were more durable and flexible than papyrus, which made them attractive for important texts meant to last.
Turning a raw hide into a writing surface was labor-intensive. After the skin was removed from the animal, all hair and flesh had to be cleaned away. The skin was then stretched tightly on a wooden frame, and a craftsman called a parchminer scraped it repeatedly with a special curved knife. Between scrapings, the skin was alternately wetted and dried to build tension and bring it to the right thickness. The final surface was sometimes polished with pumite and then dusted with chalk to help it accept ink evenly.
DNA analysis of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are roughly 2,000 years old, confirmed that those particular scrolls were made from cow, goat, and sheep skins. Researchers used modern genetic sequencing to identify the species without damaging the fragile fragments. This kind of analysis has helped scholars understand which scroll fragments originally belonged together, since pieces made from different animal species likely came from different manuscripts.
Silk and Paper in East Asia
In China, silk served as a prestigious writing and painting surface for centuries. Chinese paintings were typically created in ink on paper and then mounted on silk for display and protection. Hanging scrolls used a thin wooden strip along the top edge for suspension and a heavier wooden rod at the bottom to keep the painting taut and smooth when displayed on a wall. Bamboo also played a role as a structural element in related formats like stiffened silk fans.
Starch-based adhesives made from wheat and rice were used in East Asian scroll-making, painting, and calligraphy, serving the same joining function that wheat paste served in Egyptian papyrus production. When paper eventually became the primary writing surface in China (and later spread westward), it was often still mounted on silk backings for strength and longevity.
How Papyrus Gave Way to Parchment
The shift away from papyrus scrolls happened gradually over several centuries. Parchment had clear practical advantages: it was tougher, could be written on both sides, and didn’t crack or crumble the way aging papyrus did. By roughly the fourth century CE, parchment codices (books with bound pages) had begun to outnumber papyrus scrolls. Early Christians were especially quick to adopt the codex format because it was stronger, more compact, and easier to navigate than a long roll.
The scroll format itself didn’t vanish overnight. Religious traditions in particular preserved it. Torah scrolls, for example, are still written on specially prepared animal skin to this day, following rules about material preparation that echo ancient parchment-making techniques.
What Survives and What Doesn’t
The material a scroll was made from largely determines whether it survived to the present day. Parchment holds up far better over millennia than papyrus, which is why so many surviving ancient texts come from animal skin. Papyrus survives mainly in extremely dry climates like the Egyptian desert, where moisture never had a chance to break down the plant fibers.
Some scrolls survived through catastrophe. The Herculaneum papyri were carbonized, essentially turned to charcoal, when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE. For centuries they were too fragile to unroll. Researchers have recently used high-energy X-ray scanning combined with machine learning to generate “unrolled” images of the charred layers, reading the text without ever physically opening the scroll. The carbonization that made them unreadable to the naked eye also preserved them in a way that normal storage never could have.