Manuscript fragments of the famous Merlin legend among the oldest of their kind

For anyone who didn't get the reference: https://youtu.be/t2c-X8HiBng

Or perhaps it was scrapped because the scribe had purposefully censored the sexy bits of the original story, so it was known to be less valuable. After all, Han shot first!

It's actually not that surprising. Writing media like paper was extremely expensive. Artists too recycled canvasses.

Fun fact: in Italy before the Romans there were people who spoke a language called Etruscan. It remains untranslated to this day because there are so few written samples of it, usually confined the markings on tombs and such. This was U suspect exacerbated by the Gallic sacking of Rome around 387 BC [1]. It's for this reason that the very early history of Rome is fuzzy other than apocryphal tales such as Romulus and Remus.

But the longest Etruscan writing sample was a recycled linen text used as a mummy wrapping in Ptolemaic Egypt [2].

Cheap paper is still a relatively modern invention.

[1]: https://www.worldhistory.org/article/910/the-sack-of-rome-by...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus

Well you’ve just explained to yourself why they were recycled - book-making materials were rare.

Rareness is relative--there weren't a lot of books, but there weren't a lot of people who could afford or read them, either. So an old book was just an old book. Printing was increasing the number and affordability of books, so saving an old manuscript may not have seemed a high priority. Possibly the rest of it was already lost/damaged.