How Papyrus Scrolls Changed the Way We Navigate the Internet

Photo by Benjamin Sullivan on Unsplash

Scrolling is a fundamental aspect of digital interface. We read by revealing the text that follows, just as you are doing now. On a computer mouse, a scroll wheel spins to cycle through the document. With two-finger track pad gestures and phone touchscreens, we navigate through web pages vertically, dragging our fingers up to reveal the next line of text.

The experience of scrolling is fluid, elegant, and easily graspable because, like many other UI designs, it originates from previous technologies that have been adopted into digital formats.

Scrolling is intuitive user interface plucked right out of real-world experiences: put a piece of paper on a desk, push it forward with two fingers, and the paper will move with you. Aptly, this is where the story of scrolling begins: with paper, and not surprisingly, the scroll.

In the late 14th century BC, King Ramses II of Egypt ordered all Hebrew babies to be thrown into the Nile. The increasing population of the enslaved Israelite minority posed a threat to Ramses’ reign. Jochebed, a Hebrew woman, placed her son in a small papyrus basket and hid him among the reeds along the banks of the Nile.

The history of paper begins with the papyrus basket that protected baby Moses. This aquatic reed was abundant across the Nile Delta and the ancient Egyptians used the pith of the plant to create papyrus sheets since the third millennium BC. The fibrous stem layers were extracted, sliced into small strips, arranged in a lattice pattern, and pressed into a sheet. The product dried in the sun, forcing the plant’s sticky glue-like sap to cement the fibrous layers together. Sheets of papyrus were glued together and rolled into scrolls. The end product was a durable, cheap writing surface that eventually proliferated into the Mediterranean region.

During antiquity, the scroll was the pinnacle of information technology used for important works only: sacred texts, legal documents, history, literature. While the original scrolls were made of papyrus, other scrolls were made from cloth, tree bark, aloe, palm leaves, and even more…