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Comment by fngjdflmdflg | Hacker News Reader

>but the West had no paper to print them until it was reintroduced by... again, the Islamic civilization.

You don't need paper to write though – you can use animal hides (ie. parchment/vellum). Writing in Europe existed before Islam (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Brixianus). Most documents in that period in Europe used parchment and before that they were using papyrus.

Here's a chart of estimated manuscript production in Western Europe.[0]

  Century    6th      7th      8th      9th       10th      11th      12th      13th        14th        15th       
  Output     13,552   10,639   43,702   201,742   135,637   212,030   768,721   1,761,951   2,746,951   4,999,161  
  Increase            -21      311      362       -33       56        263       129         56          82

Paper was used started from the Twelfth century.[0] There is an increase to be sure, but not one large enough to support the claim that Greek texts were lost in Europe due to lack of paper.

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-...

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paper is much cheaper than animal parchment, and although animal parchment is longer-lasting than paper, paper is much longer-lasting than papyrus, so a given level of manuscript production can preserve many more texts. there are definitely many greek texts that were lost in europe during the dark ages because the only copies were on papyrus that deteriorated under conditions where paper would have survived

That argument about Greek works being lost due to use of papyrus in Europe in I assume the early middle ages is worth considering (any links would be appreciated). My argument above is about the claim that "if you have nothing to write on you cannot really have a school, library or university. And if you did there would be no material to study from. You would have to write on animal skin (parchment) and that doesn't scale at all." Specifically that the second sentence results in the first sentence being the case in Europe (ie. that there was nothing to write on in Europe).

unfortunately the texts i'd most like to link are not linkable because they were lost in medieval times

https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3290/long_paper3261.pdf says:

> It is to be noted, that historical and philological knowledge of loss rates is very scarce and elusive, but it can still be approached from various angles, such as the collection of data from ancient library catalogues, inventories, wills, as well as allusions and intertextuality [54, 4, 9]. Buringh [9] provides estimates for the Latin West, with a geometric mean of loss around -25% per century, with variations from -11% in the 9th to -32% in the 14th and 15th centuries (with local variations between medieval institutions from –3% to –71% per century). The global loss rate for non-illustrated manuscripts of several well known collections have been estimated around 93-97% [32, 38, 53, 40]. But there is a potential bias in accounting only for well known institutional collections, from which some manuscripts are known to have survived: trying to account for fully lost libraries, Buringh [9] is compelled to revise his estimates higher, to -25% by century until the 12th, up to -43% in the 15th.

(note that buringh's figures here are highest after the dark ages and the introduction of paper!)

i only have buringh's figures from this scholium because buringh's paper itself has not been preserved in sci-hub and will probably be lost in the next century

i agree that in the counterfactual history where there was no papyrus in europe there would have been even higher losses

>i only have buringh's figures from this scholium because buringh's paper itself has not been preserved in sci-hub and will probably be lost in the next century

I accessed it just fine. Try the doi link: 10.1163/9789047428640. The author is the same as the one I quoted above, and he gives the same 25% figure there. I don't see any specific argument about papyrus in the text you quoted though, which is what I was hoping you would link to. From what little I read about it, it seems parchment was the primary medium for manuscripts in Europe starting from the 4th century:

>Parchment, however, did not come into general use for book production until some centuries later, even though it had a marked advantage over papyrus in its greater durability; moreover, it was better suited than papyrus for writing on both sides. It was at about the start of the fourth century A.D. that it began to take the place of papyrus in the manufacture of the best books, and the works con- sidered worth preserving were gradually transferred from papyrus roll to parchment codex. It is in this century that the great parchment codices of the Greek Bible (the Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus; see p p . 62-7) were prepared; and the earliest extant parchment manu- scripts of pagan works date probably from the same century. But the use of papyrus did not cease then, and papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament have been found dating from the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries.[0]

So it seems difficult to blame the loss of Greek works in Europe on the lack paper specifically. An argument could be made that by the end of the Roman Empire, nobody cared about Greek science anymore, which meant they didn't feel the need to preserve it in parchment and instead only used papyrus, which later deteriorated. That is something I could agree to, as the Romans never really cared about science (or anything intellectual) in the first place. I would still want to see some links that actually make this argument (which I had assumed you had when I asked for them).

My main point here is that it is hard to say that Greek works were lost due to lack of technology (either in the strong form given by GP or the weak form you proposed here). More likely in my opinion is that literate Europe was not so interested in Greek works to begin with in the early middle ages. Most scribes were monks or part of the clergy generally, and they were mainly interested in ecclesiastical works, and that is what got written down, copied and studied. I would also suggest that Greek works were probably not universally seen as heretical at this point (early middle ages) as there was not such a strong central church/Pope which only developed in earnest starting in the 8th century (or so I recall). Although I have no evidence for that last claim.

[0] Metzger, Bruce (2005). The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 8. source found via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus full text here: https://ia600208.us.archive.org/9/items/TheTextOfNewTestamen...

this is great information, thank you!

unfortunately, no, i don't have a specific source making the argument that many texts were lost because they only existed on papyrus. to me, it seems like an almost inescapable conclusion from the widespread use of papyrus, its short lifespan (particularly in anything other than the driest conditions), and the limited supplies available of animal parchment—but i'm aware that many conclusions that seem inescapable are in fact wrong, so i too would like to see a deeper investigation

i concur that roman and clerical lack of interest in both science and other branches of philosophy was a causal factor. but i don't think such works were ever branded as heretical, at least by the organized church; no classical philosopher ever made it into the notorious index librorum prohibitorum

metzger also mentions some other media used for books: stone, bone, leather, and ostraca

>to me, it seems like an almost inescapable conclusion from the widespread use of papyrus, its short lifespan (particularly in anything other than the driest conditions), and the limited supplies available of animal parchment

I agree that papyrus would fare much better in eg. Egypt than in Europe, and Buringh mentions that some of the Greek works translated by Muslims in the 8th century were in fact written on papyrus:

>Muslim scholars and scribes translated Greek and Syriac rolls and manuscripts originally copied on parchment and papyrus into Arabic and transcribed them on sheets of paper that were afterwards bound into books.

He does also mention that some of them were in parchment, however, and from the author I quoted above it seems that important works were copied to parchment already starting from the 4th century. While not about Greek works, I find this quote on the subject relevant:

>Texts perished, not because pagan authors were under attack, but because no one was interested in reading them, and parchment was too precious to carry an obsolete text; [...] amongst those palimpsested we find Plautus and Terence, Cicero and Livy, the Elder and Younger Pliny, Sallust and Seneca, Vergil and Ovid, Lucan, Juvenal and Persius, Gellius and Fronto[0]

It also seems from the same book that Greek works were still available in the Byzantine empire:

>In the twelfth century the range of translations was increased substantially. Much of the credit belongs to Burgundio of Pisa (1110-93),who had spent the years 1135-8 in Constantinople as an interpreter and returned there later, taking the opportunity to collect books. [...] Slightly better known are the inelegant and literal versions of Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy made in Sicily c. 1160 under the aegis of Henricus Aristippus, archdeacon of Catania (d. 1162), who is said to nave acquired some manuscripts sent as a gift by the Byzantine emperor to the Norman king of Sicily

I doubt these survived from antiquity as papyrus (although perhaps I am wrong here). These also don't seem to be a re-translation from Arabic either(? would be strange for that not to have been mentioned). They were likely simply copied and maintained throughout the years. This implies to me that papyrus is not the significant factor here. I think the cause was 1. the lack of interest 2. the "cultural divide" (p.79) between what was the Western Rome Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire which limited the study of Greek and the import of Greek books, resulting in 3. almost nobody in Europe could read Greek. Although further investigation is needed.

>but i don't think such works were ever branded as heretical, at least by the organized church;

I think you are right here. I vaguely recalled when I wrote that that certain classical authors were considered heretical, but from a search all I found was the condemnations of some of Aristotle's ideas in the 1200s.[1]

[0] Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (1991)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condemnations_of_1210%E2%80%93...

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