From papyrus to parchment: The more probable version of the story
That the citizens of Pergamum invented parchment has since been refuted, for writings on stretched animal skin already exist from much earlier times. What is more probable is that the citizens of Pergamum improved the methods of manufacturing and writing on parchment, and thus it became a material which was preferred as a long-term storage medium over papyrus.
Papyrus is a material of which there is evidence of it first being used at the beginning of the third millennium BC. It was the preferred material of the Pharaonic Era in Egypt, despite its complex manufacture from the stem of the papyrus plant. And yet papyrus, stored in rolls, was not exactly a space-saving medium and, outside of Egypt’s dry and warm climate, it was fragile and not particularly long-lasting.
On the other hand parchment is obtained from animal skins, mostly from calves, young sheep or goats, since the skin of adult animals is too thick. For this reason the German figure of speech “das geht auf keine Kuhhaut” (literally, that can’t be done on cowskin) is not entirely correct. The skin is soaked in a lime solution, which softens it, then dried and stretched, so that it can be smoothed and powdered with chalk. Parchment is not only long-lasting, it is also reusable. It can be used again by scraping off the inscriptions and thus becomes “palimpsest”: the Greek word palimpsestos means “scraped again”.
Even in ancient times there was the trend towards data compression on ever smaller space-saving storage media: parchment could be cut up to form layers which were stored between protective bindings, also known today as books. Papyrus was not suitable for this, since it was too thick and had an irregular surface. Hence the fate of papyrus was sealed: it “disappeared … so thoroughly from the market, that the formula for its manufacture had to be rediscovered as recently as in the 20th century” writes Joachim Willeitner.
