A parchment is a skin that is used as a writing medium.
A parchment is a piece of skin that can be written on. The term, which has its etymological origin in the Latin pergamīnum , is also used to name the document that has been developed on one of these skins .
For example: “Archaeologists found an ancient parchment that describes the development of a religious ceremony” , “The conservation of the parchment was a real challenge for specialists” , “The king did not hesitate to send the parchment to his brother, who was exiled in the Northlands .
Origin of the scrolls
About thirty kilometers from the Aegean Sea , in the territory of what is now Turkey , there existed in ancient times a city called Pergamon .
In that land, the technique for cleaning and conditioning animal skins was perfected and popularized so that they could be written on. These already treated skins soon began to be called parchments .
Historical documents
There are many highly valuable scrolls that have existed throughout history. However, among all of them several elements can be highlighted. Like the well-known Dead Sea Scrolls , which were discovered at the end of the 1940s and are considered the oldest biblical testimonies that have managed to reach our days.
Of this group of documents, it is worth highlighting these characteristics:
- It is made up of a total of 972 manuscripts.
- It is also known as the Qumran scrolls , because they were found in the caves of this name, in the middle of the Dead Sea .
- They are dated to the period between 250 BC. C. and 66 BC. c.
- Most of the texts are in Hebrew and Aramaic, although some are in Greek.
- They are currently part of various museums around the world such as the Rockefeller in Jerusalem , the Israel Museum or the Amman Archaeological Museum .
- Among the most important scrolls of that group are the Damascus Document , the Book of Tobias , the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs or the Book of Enoch .
There are scrolls of great historical relevance.
Creating a scroll
To create a scroll, it was necessary to clean the skin of the animal (usually a cow), removing the fur and successive layers until only the dermis was left. After this process, the skin was stretched and its thickness was reduced.
Parchments, over time, managed to replace papyrus , made from a plant and much more fragile.
The term in different scope
In the field of literature, we find numerous works that revolve their plots around mysterious scrolls. This would be the case, for example, of the historical novel “The Scroll of Seduction” , written by Gioconda Belli . In this book, a historian and a young convent intern, through various documents, thoroughly investigate the figure of Juana la Loca , to discover if she really fell ill with love or was the object of dark plots.
Currently, the notion of parchment is also used to name the professional or other type of background of a subject: “The new foreigner hired by the Unión y Esperanza Club has great parchments: he played in Spain and in the NBA.”
Pergamino , finally, is the name of a city and a district in the Province of Buenos Aires ( Argentina ).