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sible for the loss of portions of the manuscript; on the other hand, neglect could also be the reason why so much survived in its original state rath- er than, for example, as palimpsests. Assuming that the manuscript spent many centuries at St. Catherine’s, we may attribute survival to the protected location, to the constancy of operation of the remote monastery over the centuries (which in itself is a remarkable survival), and probably also to the benign climate of the region. Undoubtedly an element of luck was also in- volved.
By circa 500 CE the transition from the papyrus roll to the codex was essentially complete, and with it came other changes in the form and func- tion of the book. In papyrus bookrolls the author and title were custom- arily named in a colophon at the end of the roll, as that portion was better protected when the papyrus was rolled up. The colophon was often set out with larger script or ornamentation. Initially this style of drawing graphic emphasis to the information in the colophon at the end of the text was continued in the codex form, but by about 500 CE the ornamentation of codices, including the author’s portrait, and for the gospels the canon tables, had shifted towards the opening pages of the codex.84
E: Loss of Information from Late Antiquity to the Thirteenth Century
So many books and so many texts of all kinds—especially from the an- cient world—were lost between Late Antiquity and the thirteenth century that when we contemplate the unknown extent of this loss we face the likelihood that what was lost, impossible as it may be to quantify, may nevertheless overshadow the immense body of knowledge accumulated by scholars from traditional study of the period, based on the physical, paleo-
84 “Various factors worked together here with varying rhythm. Thus connected with the colo- phon was a specifically Christian ornament, the cross as a staurogram, with Rho-bow on the shoulder, plus alpha and omega. It has already shifted to before the text in the miniature codex of John’s Gospel. Following the example of the arch-framed canon tables, lists of contents are set under coloured arcades in the sixth century, and from the fifth /sixth century on they also acquire greater emphasis through such formulae as ‘In hoc corpore (codice) continentur. . .’” (Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and Middle Ages [1990] 188-89).
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