Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Roger Pearse · 11-17-2007, 02:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

Is not the fact that so much was scraped off and used as prayer books a clue it was expensive?

I don't know whether there are any papyrus palimpsests. All those known to me are parchment.

The reuse of ancient parchment for prayer books is a characteristic of the Dark Ages in the west, when books were usually found in monasteries while the rest of the world was an illiterate hell. At that time, of course, conditions were very different to antiquity. You had to make your own parchment, from the abbey sheep. Thus any that you could reuse saved you a messy and difficult job.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse · 11-17-2007, 02:58 PM

An amphora of wine is twenty sesterces; a bushel of wheat is four.

Lucretius · 11-18-2007, 06:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roger Pearse

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

Is not the fact that so much was scraped off and used as prayer books a clue it was expensive?

I don't know whether there are any papyrus palimpsests. All those known to me are parchment.

The reuse of ancient parchment for prayer books is a characteristic of the Dark Ages in the west, when books were usually found in monasteries while the rest of the world was an illiterate hell. At that time, of course, conditions were very different to antiquity. You had to make your own parchment, from the abbey sheep. Thus any that you could reuse saved you a messy and difficult job.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

There are some papyrus palimpsests but for the same reason that most other papyrus documents have been lost i.e fragility ,susceptibility to insect and rodent attack,general wear and tear etc. they are few and far between

Quote:

Roger Macfarlane is a papyrologist and associate professor of classics at Brigham Young University. Since 2001, he has directed BYU's Herculaneum Papyrus Project, designed to use NASA-developed multispectral imaging technology to decipher ancient papyrus fragments too charred or stained to be readable by the naked eye. As chief investigator for Herculaneum, Macfarlane has overseen the digital imaging of over 30,000 fragments, working with an international team of scholars from France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and the United States. Macfarlane has also published numerous papers on ancient literature and astronomy, with a special interest in Republican and Augustan Latin literature. He recently received a grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation to continue his work with the Latin papyri from Herculaneum........

Since medieval texts tend to be written in iron-based ink, one standard method of reading erased texts, or "palimpsests," is to use ultraviolet light, because the traces of the iron-based ink tend to fluoresce in those conditions. The work of the Brigham Young University team has concentrated on papyrological texts, although we have the relatively simple equipment necessary to read later texts as well. In fact, we are working with one palimpsest papyrus text—a rarity, but not unheard of—and have found success using our infrared technology

Excerpt from
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/science...18/04-ask.html

I seem to vaguely remember that papyri were "washed" ,I think with urine, to remove traces of the ink but that this left small traces or even scratches on the fibres that can now be seen through modern technology.

I was planning to get my copy of Scribes and Scholars out today but it appears Roger beat me to it.

Roger Pearse · 11-19-2007, 02:10 AM

Interesting indeed.

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11-17-2007, 02:58 PM	#42
Roger Pearse Veteran Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: N/A Posts: 4,370	An amphora of wine is twenty sesterces; a bushel of wheat is four.

11-19-2007, 02:10 AM	#44
Roger Pearse Veteran Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: N/A Posts: 4,370	Interesting indeed.

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