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Comment by tollenda | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't a whole book, it was cartonnage: scrap paper from discarded books and documents, assembled and glued together like papier-mâché. The cartonnage was used to make funerary masks and some other parts of the mummification apparatus. There is a whole subfield of archaeology that deals with deciphering and identifying book fragments found in the form of scrap paper in Greco-Roman era Egyptian mummies.

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I find it interesting how uncommon it is for this to yield new works.

It seems like it's always the same handful of texts. Ancient readers liked what they liked and weren't out for variety it seems.

At the same time, Juvenal has a whole satire about how everyone is trying their hand at writing books and mentions in another how booksellers are always getting new volumes.

I spend way too much time pining for the chance to read the other parts of the Trojan Cycle, even though the ancient said they were much lower quality. Like your favorite show getting canceled.

You are falling victim to frequency bias. Popular books are popular – and especially before mass printing technologies, really popular. A lot of people may have tried to write books doesn't mean they're writing books good enough to dedicate an actual person's time towards copying them down.

Also, Juvenal was a poet. He most likely knew other poets, or aspiring poets, or at least people who liked writing. Your average, generally functionally illiterate, individual at the time is not trying their hand at writing books.

I imagine it's easier to attribute a fragment of writing to a well known work, rather than a previously unknown one.

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