THE LIBRARY
From 282 to 133 BC, under the rule of the Attalid dynasty, Pergamon stood out for its wealth and for its great power as a kingdom.
The city was built on terraces along the steep slopes of the hills, with a balanced layout that emphasised the contrast between its handsome architecture and its open spaces.
The library stretched out to the north, at the level of the first floor of the porticoes, and comprised several rooms in which manuscripts, scrolls and works of art were gathered.
In the second century BC, King Attalus I Soter founded the library, and his son Eumenes II expanded it, turning it from that point onwards into the largest and most famous of its time, surpassed only by that of Alexandria. Whereas Alexandria's school of grammatical studies specialised in literary texts and grammatical criticism, Pergamon's leant towards philosophy, particularly Stoicism. Its energy went more into logic than into philology.
The grand Library of Pergamon, which came to hold between two hundred and three hundred thousand volumes, underlined the cultural capital status the city had earned, to the point of rivalling Alexandria, whose library was destroyed in the fire of 47 BC.
According to Plutarch, Mark Antony is said to have ordered the transfer of the Library of Pergamon to Alexandria as restitution for the Romans' alleged destruction of its library. The usurped library is said to have been housed in the new, smaller Alexandrian library built in the Serapeum by Ptolemy II.
Hadrian would inherit the Hellenistic devotion to libraries. He was a great patron of them, including that of Athens.
PARCHMENT
Unlike Alexandria, which relied on papyrus, Pergamon used for its volumes a material called parchment — so named precisely because it was spread and made famous from this city.
Parchment was obtained from animal skins through a process that produced smooth, thin sheets. Beyond its primary role as a writing surface, it was also used for binding and other purposes.
Its origin as a writing medium is rooted in a legend recounted by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. According to it, the use of animal skin for parchment came from Ptolemy V of Egypt's fear that Eumenes II's library would overtake the holdings of his own. Exercising his state monopoly, Ptolemy ordered the export of papyrus to be halted. Eumenes is said to have found the solution to this shortage by establishing parchment as a writing surface.
Animal skins for writing had, however, been in common use in Asia from time immemorial. What was likely achieved in Pergamon was an improvement in quality, not the invention itself — hence the name parchment.
There is no doubt that the prestige and fame of parchment lay in the advantages it offered over papyrus. First, the raw material — animal hide — did not require any special cultivation; second, it was more abundant; third, it was more durable than papyrus and, unlike papyrus, could be used on both sides. Finally, its use prompted the replacement of the scroll by the codex, made of several leaves bound together in book form.
The terms membrana pergamena or pergamenum appeared after Diocletian's Edict of 301, since classical Latin writers had referred to parchment as membrana. In the Middle Ages parchment came to be called charta and, depending on the type of hide used, charta vitulina, charta caprina, charta ovina and charta montonina.
The first, charta vitulina or virginia, was a luxury parchment, prized for its quality and obtained through the meticulous treatment of the skin of newborn lambs.
The process was as follows: once the skins had been selected they were macerated in salt for three days, hair and remaining flesh were scraped off with a knife and the edges were trimmed. Once clean, they were soaked in salt again; for drying they were stretched on a frame and, once dry, they were treated with pumice stone to achieve a uniform surface and, finally, rubbed with chalk.
The quality, however, was not always the same, regardless of the value of the hides used: depending on the care taken in the work, the result could be rougher, more porous, darker or differently coloured. Until the thirteenth century, parchment was produced in the scriptoria of the great monasteries.
Fragments and literary testimonies confirm its use during the classical Roman period. The manuscripts that survive, however, do not go back beyond the fourth century, and the surviving documents do not exceed the year 670.
Although parchment continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages, almost without rival, the arrival of paper and the printing press confined its use to legal and ceremonial documents. Beyond that, it disappeared from book production.
The codices purpurei were manuscripts on parchment dyed purple. Others were dyed deep blue. They were written in gold or silver ink on the purple, and in white or pink ink on the blue. Few of these lavish codices were produced over the course of the Middle Ages.
The palimpsests or codices rescripti were the way, during the Middle Ages, of reusing already-written parchment by erasing what had been written before. The procedure was as follows: the writing was washed out by bathing the leaves in milk and then rubbing them with a sponge. They were left to dry and, once dry, rubbed again, this time with pumice stone, in an effort to remove every trace of what had been written before. Once that was achieved, the parchment was adapted to whatever new use was wanted.
The writing on medieval palimpsests could be recovered from the nineteenth century onwards, when the method to restore it was found and it became readable again.