Do religions have scolls? For example, Prahlada is a Hindu scroll because its not mentioned in the two main Hindu books (Ramayana and Mahabharata). Shakespeare also is like a scroll. Atmanandam also. Thank you in advance.
Christian here. No, we have the Bible, which is basically the Old Testament (the Torah for the Jews -- the first five books) and the New Testament (the story of Jesus, the Acts, the Letters, then Revelation) stitched together.
In the ancient world there were scrolls and there were codices (plural form of codex), which looked like modern books but were made of papyrus or vellum or something similar, and hand written. Often bound in leather. I don't know where or when scrolls were used as opposed to codices, but here's a wiki article. There were the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels (which were buried in codex form). So no telling why one form was used in some places and the other form elsewhere. Probably a matter of choice or custom, or maybe available technology and knowledge. I suppose making codices was pretty complicated and required skills not available everywhere. The Nag Hammadi Gospels (Gnostic Gospels, in codex form): I believe the earliest available versions of the Torah (first five books of the Old Testament) would have been in scroll or codex form. By the time Shakespeare's plays were being published it would have been in much more modern book form, printed on something like a Gutenberg press, since it was the Renaissance. Books were commonly much bigger then, in forms like the verso, the quarto, and the folio. This shows the size of a folio edition:
Another ancient form of books were illuminated manuscripts, used often in the Roman Catholic church. Again, generally much larger than most modern books (except maybe large coffee table editions) and hand lettered and illustrated. Wiki article. It seems to me that making elaborate books like this requires a very stable and high-technology civilization like the Roman Empire, with a thriving sector of artisans capable of putting in the massive time and effort and skills necessary to make something like this by hand (which is just insane to think about). In the much earlier time when the books of the Old Testament were being first recorded in writing, the Hebrews lived rather primitively, and certainly didn't have anything like the level of tech required for such an undertaking. I think scrolls and codices would have been their main options.
