Comment

Comment by jmyeet

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...

parent jmyeet 6 months ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton