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on papyrus may have been a fraction of the information that was written down on less expensive media that were understood to be less permanent, such as ostraka (potsherds), or thin pieces of wood or bark such as have been excavated at the fort of Vindolanda built in Roman Britain, at the most re- mote reaches of the Roman Empire where presumably papyrus was scarce. Some of the most widely used media for everyday writing were wooden tablets, which when coated with wax and inscribed with a stylus could be used for notes and erased, but which were also used in ancient Greece and in the Roman Empire for legal or financial records intended to last. Loss of preserved and organized information—through the destruction from un- certain causes of possibly tens or even hundreds of thousands of rolls in the Royal Library of Alexandria, the Library of Pergamum, the Serapeum of Alexandria, later institutional libraries, archives and private libraries—was not necessarily for lack of durability of the media. Papyrus had a useful life of hundreds of years, and it continued to be used to a limited extent into the Middle Ages.
The difficulty of arriving at accurate estimates seems to have fueled spec- ulation rather than restraint regarding the amount of information that may have been lost from the ancient world. Estimates of the number of papyrus rolls held by the famous ancient libraries vary widely. Unfortunately, there is no way to estimate accurately how many rolls might have been stored in any of the ancient institutional libraries. Furthermore, the Library of Al- exandria presumably preserved literary, philosophical and scientific works rather than business or archival records. If so, its holdings might have been significantly smaller than some guesstimates. As for the causes of the loss of so much information, papyrus is preserved best in a dry climate, and it has been suggested that the humidity of the port of Alexandria may have contributed to its decay. It has also been pointed out that another cause of the loss of ancient papyrus rolls which might have survived into the Middle Ages, as well as a cause of the loss of medieval papyrus codices, was deterio- ration in the damp European climates. Besides the issues of permanence of the storage medium and the climate, other factors were inevitably involved
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