As ancient as the Torah and as current as your computer screen, scrolling has been part of the reading process for several thousand years.

If people who read text on the screen today are sometimes annoyed with scrolling through long documents, that’s nothing new. Handling papyrus scrolls was an inconvenient process, and finding any particular place in the text was difficult. A cataloguer at the famed library in Alexandria, Egypt, was known to say, "A big book is a big nuisance."

Perhaps he would appreciate today’s hyperlinks and complete document viewing within the space of an ordinary monitor, with no rewinding required.

Writing in the ancient Near East was preserved on sheets of papyrus (from pressed layers of plant fibers) or parchment (from animal skins) glued or sewn together in long strips. The strips were rolled on two sticks, side by side, like two connected rolls of paper towels. To find and read material written on the scrolls, people had to use both hands, holding one rod and rolling the material onto the other.

Greek and Roman scrolls, of Old and New Testament books for example, were usually 9- to 11-inches high, but the length could be up to about 35 feet. Some ancient scrolls found have measured more than 100 feet, but the Egyptian Book of the Dead, for example, was not intended for reading. It was buried in tombs.

In the Far East in more recent times, scrolls of paper and silk were used for both writings and paintings. Some rolled vertically and some horizontally. The oldest of the Chinese landscape hand-scrolls date from the late fourth century. They were designed for viewing about two feet at a time, from right to left. Japanese narrative scrolls showed stories popular in the Middle Ages.

People reading from computer screens today typically have both vertical and horizontal scroll bars available. With a mouse, a person clicks and drags the scroll bars to see different sections of a document. People who prefer not to use scroll bars have other options, such as an added utility or a special mouse that allows scrolling from within the display area. Scrolling with arrow keys and keyboard shortcuts also works for computer users with or without a mouse at hand.

Sometimes text itself scrolls past without any effort on the reader’s part. We’re used to that on outdoor signs and advertisements on the screen. Sometimes there are special effects, such as text that moves along like an inchworm, stretching out with spaces between the letters and then closing the gaps. Also, scrolling messages can be adjusted to flow either left to right or right to left.

Of course, reading from right to left is as old as biblical scrolls written in Hebrew. Even with familiar English, I’ve been confused at times about which way to move a scroll bar to see what I want to see next on a screen. If I slide a scroll bar to the right and the text appears to move left, that’s backwards in a way; likewise, if I move down and the words go up. It depends on whether I think of the text or the viewing window as the part that stays in one place.

Before I had a mouse or scroll bars in my computer setups, my arm sometimes got tired from using the arrow keys to move up and down through documents. With a mouse and scroll bars, I’ve noticed a tendency to veer off the bar into the document display area, especially in long documents. I think I get off the straight and narrow track because I’m looking toward what I’ll read next instead of focusing on the scroll bar. I’m really not interested in practicing eye-hand coordination when I’m trying to read. My eye continually returns to the left-hand margin where the lines of text start, and my hand follows to some extent.

Probably readers today aren’t as patient as scroll readers long ago, even though we usually have the advantage of various speedy ways to scroll through the text. However, studies by Jakob Nielsen have shown that within the last five years or so people have become more used to scrolling. For a while, only about 10 percent of Web viewers would scroll beyond a site’s initial display screen. I guess we’ve caught on that there might be more below the horizon, and maybe we’re more adept with the scrolling process itself.

Like computers, which have been a significant investment for people in recent years but provide access to a world of information, the scrolls of the ancient world also represented a major investment in time and effort, since the text was written by hand. It’s still worth a little extra effort from readers to scroll through the text at hand. It’s part of a long tradition.