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Biblical manuscripts, with a few minor exceptions such as verses written on amulets and pots, are written on one of three materials: Papyrus, Parchment, and Paper. Each had advantages and disadvantages. Parchment (treated animal skins) was by far the most durable, but also the most expensive, and it's difficult to get large numbers of sheets of the same size and colour. Papyrus was much cheaper, but wore out more quickly and, since it is destroyed by damp, few copies survive to the present day, except from Egypt (and even those usually badly damaged). Paper did not become available until relatively recently, and while it was cheaper than parchment once paper mills were established, the mills had high overhead costs, so they were relatively few and far between; paper was by no means as cheap in the late manuscript era as today (when paper is made from wood pulp rather than rags).

The following sections discuss the various types of ancient writing materials and how they were prepared.

Papyrus

Papyrus [the writing material] is made from the papyrus plant by dividing it with a needle into thin [strips], being careful to make them as wide as possible. The strips are then "laid upon the table lengthwise" and trimmed to length, after which "a cross layer is placed over them." These cross-braced sheets are then "pressed together, and dried in the sun." Papyrus sheets came in all sizes, depending on the size of the usable strips cut from the plant. The best papyrus could be sliced thin enough that the final product was flexible and even translucent, like a heavy modern paper, though it could not be folded as easily.Scrolls also have the advantage that they allowed a continuous curve, which did not excessively stress any particular point of the papyrus. It is widely stated that scrolls were only written on one side, and that this was always the side where the strips ran horizontally. While this seems to be nearly always true of Greek papyri, Egyptian papyri sometimes used both sides, and we are told that some papyri had their texts written on the inside and a summary on the outside.

Parchment

The history of parchment is among the most complicated of any writing material. The historical explanation, both for the material and for the the name, comes from Pliny (Natural History xiii.11), who quotes Varro to the effect that a King of Egypt (probably Ptolemy V) embargoed exports of papyrus to Pergamum.

The difficulty with this theory is that skins were in use for books long before the nation of Pergamum even existed.

Parchment must really be considered the result of a long, gradual process. Leather has been used as a writing material for at least four thousand years; we have from Egypt the fragments of a leather roll thought to date to the sixth dynasty (c. 2300 B.C.E.).

But leather is not truly parchment. Leather is prepared by tanning, and is not a very good writing material; it is not very flexible, it doesn't take ink very well, and it will usually have hair and roots still attached.

Parchment is a very different material, requiring much more elaborate preparation to make it smoother and more supple. Ideally one started with the skin of young (even unborn) animals. This skin was first washed and cleansed of as much hair as possible. It was then soaked in lime, stretched on a frame, and scraped again. (The scraping was a vital step: If any flesh at all remained on the skin, it would rot and cause the skin to stink terribly.) It was then wetted, coated in chalk, rubbed with pumice, and finally allowed to dry while still in its frame. This process obviously required much more effort, and special materials, than making leather, but the result is a writing material some still regard as the most attractive known to us.

Certainly it was the best writing material known to the ancients. Smoother than leather or papyrus, it easily took writing on both sides, and the smoothness made all letter forms easy.

This does not mean that parchment was a perfect writing material. It is denser than papyrus, making a volume heavier than its papyrus equivalent. And the pages tend to curl. Plus it was always expensive.

And, just as with papyrus, there are differences between the sides: The flesh side is darker than the hair side, but it takes ink somewhat better. The differences in tone caused scribes to arrange their quires so that the hair side of one sheet faced the hair side of the next, and the flesh side faced the flesh side. It is reported that Greek manuscripts preferred to have the flesh side be the outer page of a quire, while Latin manuscripts tended to arrange their quires with the hair side out.

Another disadvantage of parchment, from our standpoint, is that it was reusable. Or maybe it's an advantage. The very smoothness and sturdiness which make parchment such a fine writing material also make it possible to erase new ink, and even old writing. 

Paper

There is little that needs to be said about paper, except that early paper was made from rags, e.g. of linen, rather than wood pulp, and that it became popular as a writing material only around the twelfth century. Some additional detail can be found in the section on Books and Bookmaking.

Clay

It may seem odd to include clay as a writing material, since there are no clay New Testament manuscripts. But there are ostraca and talismans, some of which are clay, and of course there are many pre-New Testament writings found on clay: The cuneiform texts of Babylonia and Sumeria, plus the ancient Greek documents in Linear B. Since these give us our earliest linguistic evidence for both Greek and the Semitic languages, it is hardly fair to ignore these documents.