Minimalist

Absolutely. Plus, papyrus was not particularly well-suited to the more humid conditions in Europe. Books were expensive to copy out and a buyer would want them to last.

Gamera

Thanks guys. I appreciate the information.

Cheerful Charlie

Large numbers of Christian manuscripts werre destroyed during the Diocletian persecutions.


CC

mountainman

Note that this is the claim of Eusebius, and his continuators.
Constantine is depicted as "the liberator" of Rome.
However Diocletion never once mentions "christians",
independent of the Eusebian claims.

Ancient historical citations and evidence support the
notion that Diocletion destroyed the manuscripts and
the followers of the Manichaean religion by fire, but
there exists no independent evidence that Diocletion
so persecuted the "christians".

Perhaps Eusebius somehow confused the Manichaeans
and "the Christians"? We know this was still happening
centuries after Eusebius (eg: Nestorius et al)


Best wishes,



Pete Brown

mountainman

The provinces were taxed in many ways.

M.I. Finley's The Ancient Economy does not mention
anything about this, and I cannot find any ancient sources
on this subject (this does not mean they dont exist).

Perhaps, if this knowledge is presently not known,
it will become known in the future. For example, it
might be recorded in one of the scrolls of the Pompei
Herculaeum, being examined by new technology.

Best wishes,



Pete Brown

hatsoff

This article does a fairly good job of making a case for 16:8 as the original ending, and that Mark probably did not write a different ending which has been lost to time.

Roger Pearse

This would certainly be true in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages. The advent of printing -- editions of a couple of hundred copies -- caused prices to fall to 20% of what they had been (Reynolds and Wilson, "Scribes and scholars").

Were books expensive to copy out in antiquity, I wonder? The copyists are slaves, remember, which everyone owned in profusion. Anyone could make a book. The existence of quantities of cheap copies is attested by the finds at Oxyrhynchus.

Papyrus would be fine for a century perhaps, but would then become brittle. The loss of individual pages of codices and thus lacunae in the text of a particular size is sometimes attributed to the text having passed through a stage when it was in a papyrus codex.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Julian

Nitpick: The word is 'palimpsest' from the Greek meaning 'scrape again.' Although it was mainly a technique used for parchment, it was occasionally used on papyrus.

Roger Pearse

A book can indeed be palimpsested more than once. Some texts are found at the bottom of two other texts.

One of the great discoveries of the 19th century was that large numbers of the books from the Dark Ages Irish abbey of Bobbio in Northern Italy were palimpsests, where parchment from ancient codices had been reused. The books are mostly in the Ambrosian library in Milan. The prefect of the library, Cardinal Angelo Mai, was able to recover a considerable number of classical texts, including the Letters of Fronto and the remains of Cicero's Republic using chemicals which brought up the underlying writing. He then went to the Vatican library and did the same there.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Lucretius

In 1981 I had the privilege of seeing and holding (well they were sealed in clear plastic bags but that was a s close as most people can get to them ) some recently discovered palimpsests and saw all the photographs taken at each stage of the "restoration",while they were not fantastically significant being mainly works of relatively minor Latin poets I do remember the excitement of actually being able to examine them myself if only superficially .
I was going to suggest that Scribes and Scholars may be a good source of information and dig my copy out but I see that Roger Pearse has already referred to it, so I assume it may not have any relevant information regarding prices of papyrus.