Roger Pearse

Please tell us more!

No, I'm posting from memory (I'm away from home and don't have access to my books)

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Lucretius

And I was being a bit lazy and hoping you had checked it
I will have to find the notes I made at the time regarding those palimpsests to see exactly what they were
I will see what I can do, I do remember that they were being worked on at Cambridge University in 1980- 1981 thoughk

Clivedurdle

http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/

Minimalist

True, but slaves cost money, both to buy and maintain. Further, there is no reason to think that literate slaves would have been any more prevalent in the general population than anyone else so, in a sense they were "specialists".

There has always been a school of thought which holds that had the American Civil War not broken out when it did that the Industrial Revolution would have made agricultural slavery obsolete in a few more generations. Who knows? We may all have been better off if it had.

Roger Pearse

I'd be very interested to hear about these. Any discoveries of texts and manuscripts seems to me deserving of far more attention than they seem to receive.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Gamera

I believe scribes cut across class lines, with some being slaves, some being professionals. I suspect then as now, you got what you paid for.

See Guardians of Letters, Literacy, Power, and the Transmission of Early Christian Literature.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Njg...sORc0o#PPA7,M1

I can say that by the mediaeval period, an illustrated vellum MS was immensely valuable, with estimates ranging in the tens of thousands of dollars in current terms. Clearly that was not the case with workaday papyrus MSS in antiquity, like the epistles. But I wonder what the copying industry was like in antiquity. Although producing papyrus and hiring a scribe to pen a letter seems to have been relatively inexpensive, I'm not aware of well-defined industry for copying MSS in antiquity (it of course took off as Christianity spread and monastic copying became an industry). There seems to have been little need for that in the Roman Empire, as there didn't seem to be much of an interest in archiving official documents (near as I can tell), so that scriptoria were a later development.

So maybe copying was a specialty that involved more expense because it simply wasn't done much.

Jeffrey Gibson

As Jim West has informed me over on the ANE-2 List, the issue of the cost of papyrus is discussed on p. 19 of Karel van der Toon's Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible (or via: amazon.co.uk) (Harvard University Press):

"The cost of a papyrus scroll in antiquity is estimated to have been equivalent to one to two weeks' wages for an ordinary worker." (p. 19).

For contents of this book, which seems to describe scribal identities and practices, see here.

Jeffrey

Gamera

Thanks.

Roger Pearse

These are untypical, tho; the normal manuscript is not illustrated. The renaissance mss that fill our collections are all more or less the same; plain, workaday copies.

At the university of Paris in the middle ages students could hire pieces of manuscripts of textbooks (the 'pecia' system) so they could copy them themselves.

There was an Italian book trade, I believe, which involves shops full of scribes. These would be of a higher standard than the copy made privately, of course.

Let's be very wary here. People think of mss as expensive. They were not nearly as expensive then as they are today, when collecting them is purely a rich man's hobby.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

I was wondering on what this estimate is based.

All the best,

Roger Pearse