/lit/ - Literature

>>19468001
>>19468063
>>19468574

It gets much much worse

>The easier writing materials—papyrus in particular, but also parch- ment—were obviously more perishable than the tablets: we learn more from Niniveh about Babylonian and Assyrian culture than we can from most Greek and Roman sources about Greek culture.11 We cannot even chart precisely the streets of ancient Alexandria nor plot on an archaeologi- cal map the foundations of the library and its subsidiary collection. Papyrus was a great enabler; it made the act of writing easier, with the introduction of a simplified alphabet and, given the grain of papyrus, the ability to vary letter-forms. It was inevitable that a scroll-making industry should develop and the literary arts spread far and wide. But when a palace or library burned down, clay tablets were baked into stone; papyrus and parchment burned, stoking the flames. We possess substantially more textual material from the millennia before the Greeks than from the Greek periods themselves