Between us and the ancient world stand a series of innovations that have made it progressively easier
to write and reproduce texts. At the recent end of that series is the digital revolution, which has
made it possible to generate and store information on a scale unimaginable even a few decades ago.
But before the typewriter or the printing press, before paper or parchment,
cursive script, or the first bound book, there was the papyrus scroll.
The papyrus reed is native to the marshes of the Nile Delta.
Early in their history, the Egyptians discovered that the fibrous inner pith of the plant’s stem
could be cut into strips and pressed together to make a smooth and durable writing surface.
Sheets of papyrus were pasted together to make scrolls.
The average height of a scroll was about 10 inches (or 25 cm). The length ranged from 10 to more than
80 feet – that is, from about 3 to 25 meters. The scroll was often wrapped around a wooden or ivory
rod, to which an identifying tag might be tied. The Greek or Latin text in a scroll was written
as a continuous string of capital letters, with only cursory attempts at punctuation.
Scientific works, like the Vienna Dioscorides manuscript, were illustrated.
So were deluxe editions of literary classics, like the Vatican Virgil.
There were many grades of papyrus, ranging from the polished “royal” sheets on which
sacred texts were inscribed to the rough scraps that wrapped fish and chickpeas in Roman markets.
Although good papyrus was never cheap, it was affordable and abundant enough to fuel
the production of what was – by premodern standards – an incredible number of books.
The extant works of the great Roman doctor Galen, for example, run to more than three million words.
The tireless Alexandrian scholar Didymus (nicknamed “Bronze Guts” for his inhuman
work ethic) wrote more than 2,000 books – so many that he reportedly forgot half of them.
The city of Rome had a thriving book market, in which dozens of sellers
produced new editions and sponsored author readings to capture customers.
So many Roman connoisseurs browsed shops for rare editions that unscrupulous sellers
took to producing faux-antique scrolls, artificially aged by being buried in grain.
By late antiquity, the city of Rome could boast 28 major public libraries, and most substantial
provincial cities had at least one. These could be very substantial: the library of Timgad,
on the edge of the Sahara, may have contained over 20,000 volumes. Some private libraries
were even larger: one third-century scholar reportedly owned more than 60,000 books.
The greatest of all ancient libraries, of course, was the Library of Alexandria.
Our sources disagree on the number of scrolls it contained.
One Byzantine scholar claimed that were 400,000 books containing multiple works, 90,000 devoted
to a single work, and an additional 42,800 outside the main complex – a total of 532,800.
Two Roman texts record that no fewer than 700,000 volumes were lost when the library burned.
However many books the Library of Alexandria contained, and however many of those books
were lost when it went up in flames, the loss of all but a tiny fraction of
ancient literature was not brought about by the disappearance of a single library.
It was, instead, a consequence of the basic fragility of texts before the advent of printing.
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Back to our topic. Papyrus scrolls could last a long time. Some of the scrolls found in the Villa
of the Papyri at Herculaneum were more than 300 years old when Vesuvius carbonized them.
Alcuin of York – writing at the end of the eighth century – saw papyrus scrolls at Tours that
must have been at least half a millennium old. In the humid climates of Western Europe, however,
most papyri had to be recopied every century or so. When the economy was healthy and there was
strong demand from a prosperous and cultivated elite, this wasn’t a problem; large workshops
of professional copyists efficiently produced more than enough texts to supply the market.
But when the Roman Empire collapsed, the elites who had traditionally commissioned new copies all
but vanished. Far fewer manuscripts were produced, and those that were tended to
serve the particular purposes of religion, education, and the technical disciplines.
Authors who wrote in unfamiliar dialects, on topics repugnant to the church,
or at inordinate length were not recopied, and faded into oblivion.
Another barrier to survival was the invention of the codex, the prototype of the modern book.
From the first century onward, to keep personal notes and accounts, the Romans used notebooks
with leaves of parchment, a writing material made from the tanned skins of sheep, goats, or cattle.
The codex format was adopted by the growing Christian community, which preferred
codices to scrolls for the ease of referencing scripture. Partly through Christian influence,
codices definitively displaced scrolls over the course of the third and fourth centuries.
Any text not copied to a codex by the end of antiquity was unlikely to survive the Middle Ages.
Another “technological” change occurred over the course of the ninth century when, in both Greek
and Latin, cumbersome ancient scripts were replaced by cursive hands that facilitated
copying and reading. Texts not reproduced in the new miniscule scripts were forgotten.
For all these reasons, the population of manuscripts was much smaller in the Middle
Ages than it had been in antiquity. A single manuscript found at the Abbey of Monte Cassino,
for example, is responsible for our knowledge of Tacitus’ Histories, and the first six books of
the same author’s Annals existed only in another manuscript found at the German Abbey of Corvey.
Many Greek classics, likewise, were preserved only in one or two copies at Constantinople. A single
disaster could thus be extremely destructive. The sack of Constantinople in 1204, for example,
destroyed the final remaining copies of dozens of ancient works that had survived to that point.
But the last examples of most lost Greek and Latin classics died quietly,
decaying for centuries on monastery shelves until they were swept away with the dust.
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