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The correct Latin plural is codices, although codexes is also often used as a plural form in English. The codex was an improvement over the scroll, because it can be opened flat at any page, allowing easier reading, and pages can be written on both sides. The codex also made it easier to organize documents in a library because it had a stable spine on which the title of the book could be written, and later read when books where arranged upright on shelves. The spine could be used for the incipit, before the concept of a proper title was developed, during medieval times.
Medieval book makers used parchmentParchment is a material for the pages of a book or codex, made from fine calf skin, sheep skin or goat skin. Parchment is named after the city Pergamon where it was first invented. One sort of parchment is vellum, a word that is used loosely to mean parch or vellumVellum was originally a translucent or opaque material produced from calfskin that had been soaked, limed and unhaired, and then dried at normal temperature under tension, usually on a wooden device called a stretching frame. Today, however, vellum is gen for their pages, which made them very durable, but extremely expensive. Early codices were made also made from papyrusPapyrus is an early form of paper made from the stems of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus a wetland sedge that grows to 5 meters (15 ft) in height and was once abundant in the Nile River delta. Papyrus was first used in Ancient Egypt around 3000 BC, but, however papyrus is too fragile to be repeatedly folded. The scholarly study of manuscriptA manuscript ( Latin manu scriptus written by hand), strictly speaking, is any written document that is put down by hand, in contrast to being printed or reproduced some other way. Manuscripts in history Before the invention of the printing press, all wris from the point of view of book-making is called codicology . The study of ancient documents in general is called paleography.
The books of Pre-ColumbianThe term Pre-Columbian is used to refer to the cultures of the New World in the era before significant European influence. While technically referring to the era before Christopher Columbus, in practice the term usually includes indigenous cultures as the MesoamericaMesoamerica is the region extending from central Mexico south through the northwestern border of Costa Rica that gave rise to a group of stratified, culturally related agrarian civilizations spanning an approximately 3,000-year period before the European had basically the same form, with long folded strips of paper (usually made from either wood bark or plant fibers, often with a layer of whitewash applied before writing), hence the ancient books of the MayaThis article is about the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. See Maya people for a discussion of the modern Maya. The Maya are a people of southern Mexico and northern Central America with some 3,000 years of rich history. The Maya were part of the Mesoamer, Aztec, and Mixtec peoples, among others, are also known as codices.
A legal text or code of conduct is sometimes called a codex (for example, the Justinian Codex), since laws were recorded in large codices.
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The codex is the songbook used at a cantus.
Books