A codex is a hardbound book, often used to refer to ancient manuscripts. It was developed by the Greeks in response to a shortage of papyri and has writing on both sides of the page. The term is also used for books of laws and Mesoamerican manuscripts.
Simply put, a codex is a hardbound, printed book, which technically renders most, if not all, code books on the shelves. However, this term is usually used in a very specialized way, to refer to ancient, medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. Studying these codices can provide very interesting information about the people who lived during these times and contain a variety of information from religious texts to accounts of historical events from people who lived through them. Many museums have a collection of codices for the public to view on display.
This word comes from the Latin caudex, which means “tree trunk”. This word was also used to refer to wooden tablets used to store temporary information, and when the Romans were introduced to the code, they simply reused the word, associating it with book-like objects that held written information. You may also hear the word used in the modern sense to refer to books of laws and vast collections of information.
The codex appears to have been developed by the Greeks, in response to a shortage of papyri which led them to turn into parchment, a form of paper made from sheepskin. Because parchment was time-consuming and very expensive to produce, the Greeks began writing on both sides of the page and binding parchment into a format that we would recognize as a book, replacing the scroll, which had been the previous storage medium for material printing.
A true codex, therefore, has a binding that allows readers to open the book at any time, and it also has writing that covers both sides of the page. This is why ancient Asian books are not considered codices, although the Chinese probably developed bookbinding techniques earlier than the Europeans. In early Asian books, the writing was only on one side of the page. The term “codex” is also sometimes used to refer to Mesoamerican manuscripts, although they were not bound like traditional books.
It is no exaggeration to say that the code totally changed the use of the written word. Before the development of code, people relied on scrolls and tablets to store information, and these methods were cumbersome and space-consuming. The code represented a compact and highly efficient way to store information, laying the groundwork for the dissemination of knowledge and the development of printing.
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