10 THE N E-W-Y ORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY a total length of the commercial roll about 320 inches (26 feet 8 inches). If our papyrus was of the usual original commercial length,1 we have then lost a little over 135 inches, or some thirteen and a half columns. It is written on both sides, seventeen columns (377 lines) on the front and five columns (92 lines) on the back. At present, therefore, there are preserved on both front and back twenty-two columns of writing, making a total of 469 lines, or, with the fragments and the additional column demonstrably lost, the document contained at least nearly 500 lines. The arrangement in columns, made up of horizontal lines, it may Fig. 4. DIAGRAM SHOWING THE ORIGIN OF THE MODERN BOOK AND THE MODERN PRINTED PAGE IN OLD EGYPTIAN MANUSCRIPTS Roll AB shows the original arrangement of Egyptian manuscripts,—j so vertical lines of writing, which^may . be expanded to many hundred lines without any interruption in the text. Roll CD illustrates the necessity of. division into columns after writing in horizontal lines had been introduced. It finally proved more convenient to cut up these columns than to keep the.m in roll form. When thus cut up and bound at one edge they formed pages as in modern books. be worth while to note, is the origin of the modern printed page. An examination of the two reconstructed rolls in Figure 4 will make this clear. The exposed portion of roll AB is covered with fifty vertical lines of writing numbered from right to left. This was the earlier Egyptian arrangement of a papyrus manuscript. It will be observed that it required no division or interruption in the text. After 2000 B.C., however, the Egyptian scribes began to write more commonly in horizontal lines, each line necessarily of limited length, 1 Although the full length commercial rolls known to us are somewhat later than the Edwin Smith Papyrus, it is nevertheless highly probable that they were already current in the earlier time.