Sammendrag
Early Christian codices have received a great deal of careful study from scholars over the last century. Equally ancient (and perhaps even more ancient) examples of the codex format containing writings that are not identifiably Christian have attracted somewhat less attention, but the studies of these non-Christian codices that have appeared are intriguing. For instance, a recent article (O’Hogan in Scriptorium 2021) has argued that P.Oxy. I 30, a fragment of a folium of a parchment codex containing a Latin account of Rome’s Macedonian wars, ought to be reassigned to the first half of the first century CE. This redating invites a renewed consideration of the place of these books in the overall history of the development of the technology of the codex. This paper will survey examples of the corpus of surviving papyrus and parchment codices from the first centuries CE that contain non-Christian texts, taking note of the relative certainty of the dating of these books, their physical features, and the nature of their contents.
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