Page 118 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

in the losses, including the usual suspects: war, fire, politics, religious bias, natural disasters and plain neglect. Perceived obsolescence was probably also a reason for the destruction of papyri. In libraries like the Imperial Library of Constantinople ancient papyrus rolls, including some from Alexandria, written in the difficult to read majuscule in scriptio continua, without word spacing or punctuation, might have been discarded after their texts were copied in the new, more legible minuscule onto more permanent parchment codices beginning in the mid-eighth century. What percentage of the texts preserved in the Royal Library of Alexandria might have been copied cen- turies later, and preserved in the Imperial Library of Constantinople, will, unfortunately, never be known, because of the loss of inventories of both libraries. For the many other libraries and archives that were lost over the millennia, or which only partially survived, specific causes for loss, and ac- curate knowledge of what books or records were actually lost, may remain unavailable if inventories and other pertinent records were also lost with the passage of time.
. . . papyrus books and documents had in ancient and medieval times a usable life of hundreds of years. Aristotle’s manuscripts, many of them in bad condition through neglect, were part of the loot taken by Sulla to Rome, where they were edited by Andron- icus of Rhodes some 250 years after they were written. Pliny tells of seeing papyrus documents 100 and 200 years old. Searching in books 300 years old is mentioned by Galen. Cardinal Deusdedit, working the papal archives c. 1085, consulted papyrus rolls of the Lateran library going back by his specific citation to c. 1000 and by inference to c. 950. In 1192 the papal chamberlain Cen- cius searched “in thomis charticiniis et voluminibus regestorum antiquorum pontificum,” which included archives of the period 600-1000. Papal documents up to 330 years old were handled in AD 1213, and there are references in the fourteenth century to documents contained in volumes (papyrus rolls) of the fifth to tenth centuries. The historian Tristano Calchi, working in Milan
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