In case anyone doesn't know, Oxyrhynchus is a major source of archaeological discoveries. Particularly ancient (Ptolemaic/Roman Egypt) papyrus fragments recovered from an ancient landfill on the outskirts of the city. Notably some of the earliest-known Christian textual artefacts were found there (the actual earliest fragments came from elsewhere in Egypt). It turns out that Egypt's hot and dry climate provides the perfect environment for their long-term preservation.
Is this true? Paper (and I assume papyrus) expands and contracts with varying humidity even below the saturation point, and this motion embrittles and cracks it, no? So consistent humidity is key, and "consistently dry" is much more achievable than "consistently at an arbitrary other point."
Sadly, the article says nothing about how old the fragment is or how it compares to other early copies of the Iliad. Somewhat amazingly, the earliest complete copy of the Iliad is from around 950 C.E.
It's not that surprising. The earliest complete copies of many ancient texts is similarly dated. For example, the earliest copy of the Rg Veda is dated to about that age as well. It's hard to keep complete copies of big books.
This is a common refrain but in reality I'm not sure it made much difference. Papyrus just doesn't age well and most manuscripts from this era would've been on papyrus.
What really decided what texts survived and what didn't was monastic traditions in in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages [1]. At this time, a monk might spend their entire life transcribing a particularly long manuscript. The materials were also expensive. So monasteries were selective in what got retain and unsurprisingly it skewed heavily to texts of religious significance and then to texts of significance to, say, Roman and Greek tradition and history given that monasteries were European.
Greek was the language of most fields of learning besides law in the Roman Empire. But the Greeks themselves wrote works on these papyrus scrolls that crumbled fast, so anything not actively used by the Romans was quickly lost.
There's a good chance that if the papyrus scrolls in any library (Alexandria or otherwise) weren't being copied regularly they were crumbling even before they burned or were lost to time for other reasons.
Towards the end of the Roman Empire, a few philosophers took the time to transmit Greek knowledge in Latin as knowledge of Greek faded in western Europe. What these guys happened to translate was the basis of most of European learning in philosophy, math, and other fields for centuries.
But they weren't monks (the most famous, Boethius, was not Christian either but a lot of later writers thought he was), the monks in scriptorium came later and grew slowly.
St. Benedict said that monks should be taught to read and do so regularly, which required copying books, but he prioritized physical work (to create self-sufficient communities) and prayer. But future Benedictines responded to the incentives of the time and began scaling up the copying and doing less agricultural work as the years went on.
People say this without any evidence. This ai-post is just regurgitating hn-thread "received wisdom". The evidence for the existence of a library is thin and hard to piece together, but points to more than a myth.
I appreciate that people want real proof of anything, but dumping an ai-slop summary is hardly doing any better than accepting the existence of a large library.
For some reason, there is a gigantic and ancient monastery on Mount Sinai with a commensurate collection of ancient manuscripts and papyri. Totally coincidence.
those are certainly Christian curated documents. The previous six hundred+ years had seen the development of vivid and exotic religion, philosophy and arts. The Christians famously slew the Dragons, condemned Herod as a sorcerer and astrologer, and replaced the Apollo cults with the scripture that many know well.
I imagine that the Library of Alexandria was plural and diverse with respect to the traditions and inquiry that was represented there.
Many cultures bury their dead with objects that the person enjoyed during their lifetime.
This is present even today, I saw a burial in Eastern Europe where the parents put a game of chess and toys in the coffin. While it will do no good to the deceased my theory is that it is a way for the living to deal with the loss.
I wonder now and then about the extent of dissent and cynicism in ancient Egypt. This is a vague question, I know, not least because the scope covers thousands of years. But officially, everybody gets grave goods in proportion to their status, especially their closeness to royalty, and these are provided so that they can have chairs and games and sports and clothes and food and so on in the next world, to make approximately four out of their eight forms of soul feel comfortable. Then these grave goods are often immediately stolen, probably by the same priestly officials who organized the burial. I wonder if ancient Egyptians silently thought their own religion ridiculous.
It wasn't a whole book, it was cartonnage: scrap paper from discarded books and documents, assembled and glued together like papier-mâché. The cartonnage was used to make funerary masks and some other parts of the mummification apparatus.
There is a whole subfield of archaeology that deals with deciphering and identifying book fragments found in the form of scrap paper in Greco-Roman era Egyptian mummies.
I find it interesting how uncommon it is for this to yield new works.
It seems like it's always the same handful of texts. Ancient readers liked what they liked and weren't out for variety it seems.
At the same time, Juvenal has a whole satire about how everyone is trying their hand at writing books and mentions in another how booksellers are always getting new volumes.
I spend way too much time pining for the chance to read the other parts of the Trojan Cycle, even though the ancient said they were much lower quality. Like your favorite show getting canceled.
You are falling victim to frequency bias. Popular books are popular – and especially before mass printing technologies, really popular. A lot of people may have tried to write books doesn't mean they're writing books good enough to dedicate an actual person's time towards copying them down.
Also, Juvenal was a poet. He most likely knew other poets, or aspiring poets, or at least people who liked writing. Your average, generally functionally illiterate, individual at the time is not trying their hand at writing books.
While the collection is now termed by modern scholars as "Book 2 of the Iliad", there was no such thing as a "book" as we know it, in those times; there were codices and scrolls and manuscripts, etc., and everyone's favorite: the palimpsest!
In case anyone doesn't know, Oxyrhynchus is a major source of archaeological discoveries. Particularly ancient (Ptolemaic/Roman Egypt) papyrus fragments recovered from an ancient landfill on the outskirts of the city. Notably some of the earliest-known Christian textual artefacts were found there (the actual earliest fragments came from elsewhere in Egypt). It turns out that Egypt's hot and dry climate provides the perfect environment for their long-term preservation.
> It turns out that Egypt's hot and dry climate provides the perfect environment for their long-term preservation.
Cold and dry would be just as good. It's the dryness that matters.
heat speeds up oxidation/ accelerates reactions but also decreases relative humidity for a constant moisture constant.
Only because humidity is measured relative to the vapor pressure at a given temperature. It only matters for preservation when humidity reaches 100%.
Is this true? Paper (and I assume papyrus) expands and contracts with varying humidity even below the saturation point, and this motion embrittles and cracks it, no? So consistent humidity is key, and "consistently dry" is much more achievable than "consistently at an arbitrary other point."
Sadly, the article says nothing about how old the fragment is or how it compares to other early copies of the Iliad. Somewhat amazingly, the earliest complete copy of the Iliad is from around 950 C.E.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetus_A
It's not that surprising. The earliest complete copies of many ancient texts is similarly dated. For example, the earliest copy of the Rg Veda is dated to about that age as well. It's hard to keep complete copies of big books.
I Hope more and more fragments of anything lost is found.
The burn down of Alexandria library was a pity
This is a common refrain but in reality I'm not sure it made much difference. Papyrus just doesn't age well and most manuscripts from this era would've been on papyrus.
What really decided what texts survived and what didn't was monastic traditions in in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages [1]. At this time, a monk might spend their entire life transcribing a particularly long manuscript. The materials were also expensive. So monasteries were selective in what got retain and unsurprisingly it skewed heavily to texts of religious significance and then to texts of significance to, say, Roman and Greek tradition and history given that monasteries were European.
[1]: https://spokenpast.com/articles/medieval-monks-erased-preser...
Thanks for sharing. Maybe not as common as you think. I never heard that before.
It was a little before that even.
Greek was the language of most fields of learning besides law in the Roman Empire. But the Greeks themselves wrote works on these papyrus scrolls that crumbled fast, so anything not actively used by the Romans was quickly lost.
There's a good chance that if the papyrus scrolls in any library (Alexandria or otherwise) weren't being copied regularly they were crumbling even before they burned or were lost to time for other reasons.
Towards the end of the Roman Empire, a few philosophers took the time to transmit Greek knowledge in Latin as knowledge of Greek faded in western Europe. What these guys happened to translate was the basis of most of European learning in philosophy, math, and other fields for centuries.
But they weren't monks (the most famous, Boethius, was not Christian either but a lot of later writers thought he was), the monks in scriptorium came later and grew slowly.
St. Benedict said that monks should be taught to read and do so regularly, which required copying books, but he prioritized physical work (to create self-sufficient communities) and prayer. But future Benedictines responded to the incentives of the time and began scaling up the copying and doing less agricultural work as the years went on.
What’s the evidence Boethius wasn’t Christian? Wikipedia says he was.
Evidence for this common myth is lacking.
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/the-great-library-of-a...
People say this without any evidence. This ai-post is just regurgitating hn-thread "received wisdom". The evidence for the existence of a library is thin and hard to piece together, but points to more than a myth. I appreciate that people want real proof of anything, but dumping an ai-slop summary is hardly doing any better than accepting the existence of a large library.
The Library almost certainly existed. It is the destruction (by deliberate fire) that is probably myth.
For some reason, there is a gigantic and ancient monastery on Mount Sinai with a commensurate collection of ancient manuscripts and papyri. Totally coincidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery#...
How did all that stuff get up there? It was holy angels. #itsalwaysangels
those are certainly Christian curated documents. The previous six hundred+ years had seen the development of vivid and exotic religion, philosophy and arts. The Christians famously slew the Dragons, condemned Herod as a sorcerer and astrologer, and replaced the Apollo cults with the scripture that many know well.
I imagine that the Library of Alexandria was plural and diverse with respect to the traditions and inquiry that was represented there.
Everybody knows it's under Uncle Scrooge's money bin. Spoiler alert.
for some reason this read like the "Headless Body in a Topless Bar" headline...maybe the antiquities equivalent
So why would they bury a man with a book?
Why do we bury men in a suit?
Maybe it's more like how they used to wrap fish and chips in newspaper
Maybe he liked that book? Not different from modern day burials
https://notebookofghosts.com/2016/11/21/a-list-of-weird-thin...
Many cultures bury their dead with objects that the person enjoyed during their lifetime.
This is present even today, I saw a burial in Eastern Europe where the parents put a game of chess and toys in the coffin. While it will do no good to the deceased my theory is that it is a way for the living to deal with the loss.
Well, sure. All of our death rituals are for the living left behind, not for the dead.
I wonder now and then about the extent of dissent and cynicism in ancient Egypt. This is a vague question, I know, not least because the scope covers thousands of years. But officially, everybody gets grave goods in proportion to their status, especially their closeness to royalty, and these are provided so that they can have chairs and games and sports and clothes and food and so on in the next world, to make approximately four out of their eight forms of soul feel comfortable. Then these grave goods are often immediately stolen, probably by the same priestly officials who organized the burial. I wonder if ancient Egyptians silently thought their own religion ridiculous.
It wasn't a whole book, it was cartonnage: scrap paper from discarded books and documents, assembled and glued together like papier-mâché. The cartonnage was used to make funerary masks and some other parts of the mummification apparatus. There is a whole subfield of archaeology that deals with deciphering and identifying book fragments found in the form of scrap paper in Greco-Roman era Egyptian mummies.
I find it interesting how uncommon it is for this to yield new works.
It seems like it's always the same handful of texts. Ancient readers liked what they liked and weren't out for variety it seems.
At the same time, Juvenal has a whole satire about how everyone is trying their hand at writing books and mentions in another how booksellers are always getting new volumes.
I spend way too much time pining for the chance to read the other parts of the Trojan Cycle, even though the ancient said they were much lower quality. Like your favorite show getting canceled.
You are falling victim to frequency bias. Popular books are popular – and especially before mass printing technologies, really popular. A lot of people may have tried to write books doesn't mean they're writing books good enough to dedicate an actual person's time towards copying them down.
Also, Juvenal was a poet. He most likely knew other poets, or aspiring poets, or at least people who liked writing. Your average, generally functionally illiterate, individual at the time is not trying their hand at writing books.
While the collection is now termed by modern scholars as "Book 2 of the Iliad", there was no such thing as a "book" as we know it, in those times; there were codices and scrolls and manuscripts, etc., and everyone's favorite: the palimpsest!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest
Imagine digging in that material. Tunnelling that out would be awful.