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Concept
Parchment
Summary
Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared untanned skins of animals—primarily sheep, calves, and goats. It has been used as a writing medium for over two millennia. Vellum is a finer quality parchment made from the skins of young animals such as lambs and young calves.
It may be called animal membrane by libraries and museums that wish to avoid distinguishing between parchment and the more-restricted term vellum (see below).
The word is derived from the Koinē Greek city name, Pergamum in Anatolia, where parchment was supposedly first developed around the second century BCE, probably as a substitute for papyrus which was then becoming less easily available. Animal skins are more labor intensive to process manually than plant based papyrus (and were therefore probably more expensive). However, as well as being more readily available, parchment probably also had several practical advantages over papyrus, including having a smoother writing surface. It would also have been more durable if reasonably conserved, and would have been more resistant to occasional mishandling.
Today the term parchment is often used in non-technical contexts to refer to any animal skin, particularly goat, sheep or cow, that has been scraped or dried under tension. The term originally referred only to the skin of sheep and, occasionally, goats. The equivalent material made from calfskin, which was of finer quality, was known as vellum (from the Old French velin or vellin, and ultimately from the Latin vitulus, meaning a calf); while the finest of all was uterine vellum, taken from a calf foetus or stillborn calf.
Some authorities have sought to observe these distinctions strictly: for example, lexicographer Samuel Johnson in 1755, and master calligrapher Edward Johnston in 1906. However, when old books and documents are encountered it may be difficult, without scientific analysis, to determine the precise animal origin of a skin, either in terms of its species or in terms of the animal's age.
Official source
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