PARCHMENT
Sheep or goat skin, prepared for writing or for other uses.
The skin, first macerated in a milk of lime, was then stripped of all wool, washed, dried, spread and polished with pumice stone.
In the time of Herodotus the use of papyrus was common, but history relates that the ancient Ionians wrote on goat and sheep skins, due to the scarcity of papyrus (Herodotus 5:58).
According to tradition, the first scrolls came from Pergamum.
One of the Ptolemies would have prohibited the export of papyrus, so Eumenus II, king of Pergamum (197-160 BC) used skins for his great library.
These skins were called “chartae pergamenae”, from which the name “parchment” was derived. Despite this tradition, in 1923 a number of documents written on parchment were found in Dura, on the banks of the Euphrates, dating back to 196-195 and 190-189 BC.
This discovery has shown that parchments were already used at that time in places very far from Pergamon. In the time of Josephus, and before him, the Jews used parchments for their sacred writings (Ant. 12:2, 11).
The Talmud stipulated that the Law should be written on the skins of pure animals, domestic or wild, and even on the skins of pure birds.
Papyrus was commonly used (2 Jn. 12 = “paper”); but Paul speaks of scrolls, which he demands and desires with great interest (2 Tim. 4:13).