2) Where was parchment used?

3) When and where was parchment developed?

4) What is the origin of the word “parchment”?

5) Where are the earliest parchment documents stored?

6) What is the difference between parchment and vellum?

7) When and why was parchment replaced by paper?

8) Why was the skin soaked in water?

9) What could speed up the process of making parchment?

10) What for were the skins placed on a stretching frame?

11) What are palimpsests?

12) What did they use to make parchment smooth and white?

3. Describe the process of making parchment using the Passive Voice:

Example: The skin was flayed.

4. Find the English equivalents in the text:

5. Match the words on the left with their definitions on the right:

6. Do you know the translation of these words?

7. What do you know about these people and places? Find information and make a report:

Herodotus

Library of Alexandria

The British Museum

Gutenberg

Ramses II

1. Read the text and translate the words and phrases given in bold:

Birch bark manuscripts are documents written on pieces of the inner layer of birch bark. It was commonly used for writing before the advent of mass production of paper. Birch bark for writing was used for many centuries and in various cultures. The oldest dated birch bark manuscripts are numerous Buddhist texts from approximately the 1st century AD. The scientists believe that they have originated in Afghanistan. Russian texts discovered in Novgorod have been dated to approximately the 9th to 15th century AD. Most of those documents are letters written by various people in Old Novgorod dialect.

The Buddhist birch bark texts were stored in clay jars and acquired by the British Library in 1994. The British Library birch bark manuscripts were in the form of scrolls which were very fragile and already damaged. They were five to nine inches wide, and consisted of twelve to eighteen inch long. Overlapping rolls were glued together to form longer scrolls. A thread sewn through the edges also helped hold them together. The script was written in black ink. The manuscripts were written on both sides of the scrolls, beginning at the top on one side, continuing with the scroll turned over and upside down, so that the text concluded at the top and back of the scroll. The longest intact scroll from the British Library collection is eighty-four inches long.

The collection of texts includes a variety of known commentaries and sutras, including discourses of Buddha. The condition of the scrolls indicates that they were already in poor condition. The bark has been used for centuries in India for writing scriptures and texts in various scripts. In Kashmir, early scholars recounted that all of their books were written on Himalayan Birch bark until the 16th century. The Bakhshali manuscript consists of seventy birch bark fragments written in Sanskrit and Prakrit. The text discusses various mathematical techniques.

A large collection of birch bark scrolls were discovered in Afghanistan during the civil war around the turn of the last century. The approximately 3,000 scroll fragments are in Sanskrit or Buddhist Sanskrit, using Brāhmī script, and date to a period from the 2nd to 8th century CE. Birch bark is still used in some parts of India and Nepal for writing sacred mantras.

On July 26, 1951, during excavations in Novgorod, a Soviet expedition led by Artemiy Artsikhovsky found the first Russian birch bark writing in a layer dated to AD 1400. Since then, more than 1,000 similar documents were discovered in Staraya Russa, Smolensk, Torzhok, Pskov, Tver, Moscow, Ryazan, although Novgorod remains by far the most prolific source of them. In Ukraine, birch bark documents were found in Zvenigorod, Volynia. In Belarus, several documents were unearthed in Vitebsk and Mstislavl.