S.C.Carlson

You're aware that the monastery in question sits on the side of a cliff in the middle of a desert?

Stephen

Aerik

Perhaps this one was, but most monasteries in general? No.

S.C.Carlson

Are you also aware of Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus? Did the monks who made that palimpsest have "clear disrespect" for the undertext?

Nazaroo

Yeah I would have to object to this 'smearing'. It is natural to recycle valuable material, especially parchment (durable sheep and antelope skins).

Both secular and Christian material was recycled. Animal skins weren't "plentiful", they were obivously rare and expensive materials, even in the hills of Greece and Turkey.

For instance, to make one 'bible' like Codex Vaticanus would take many hundreds of sheepskins (about three pages per animal). So a book of say 1000 pages would require the killing, skinning, curing, and preparation of 400 fullgrown animals. That would be a small fortune even for a Feudal Lord.

This of course hardly takes into account the time required to grow such herd and collect the skins in a practical way without wasting expensive meat and other materials used for clothing and tool-manufacture etc.

Normally even efficient setups and specialized industries meant to provide these materials could only operate on a slow, piecemeal production basis, also fitting into an egrarian feudal economy that had to make sense to the people being supported by the resources.

Not only seasonal restraints, but also periodic famine, war, and plague (rampant problems for inefficient economies and unprotected cultures) all of which ravaged Medieval Europe and the Middle East, severely limited the manufacture of parchment.

Most monasteries were much as they are now, barely productive enough to sustain their own populations, and forwarding the cause of learning etc., out of whatever was left over.

An idea of the expense and effort to produce books out of animal skins (also while following strict religious and methodological procedures) can be had by investigating the time and cost of making modern Torahs in Israel today.

These books are ordered years in advance, and bought by synagogues all over North America, but there are long waiting lists, and the cost (thousands of dollars per scroll) is covered by pooling resources within each congregation.

To think that Christians went out of their way to destroy obscure mathbooks simply ignores the practical necessity of recycling in all historical economies.

The fact is, while Christians certainly valued their religious texts higher than Aristotle, they were among the only groups who managed to preserve many of these ancient writings at all.

Even book burning of Pagan magical texts were given a serious second look after 400 A.D., when pragmatism overcame enthusiasm, and materials were bought, sold, and recycled, rather than burned.

Had there been a real systemic campaign against ancient Greek mathematical and philosophical treatises, we would not have palimpsets of them at all, or in some cases even know of their existance.

Certainly Christians destroyed some books, particularly those identified as magic texts or heretical works. But for the most part Christians, like everyone else were far too busy dealing with pragmatic matters like food, clothing and shelter to be efficient 'destroyers of mathematical knowledge'.

Agemegos

So which is it? Archimedes or Aristotle?

Toto

oops- Archimedes. I'll fix the title