So why would they bury a man with a book?
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Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
11–20 of 274 posts
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#12So why would they bury a man with a book?
Why do we bury men in a suit?
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#13So why would they bury a man with a book?
Maybe it's more like how they used to wrap fish and chips in newspaper
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#14Sadly, the article says nothing about how old the fragment is or how it compares to other early copies of the Iliad. Somewhat amazingly, the earliest complete copy of the Iliad is from around 950 C.E.
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#15So why would they bury a man with a book?
Maybe he liked that book? Not different from modern day burials
https://notebookofghosts.com/2016/11/21/a-list-of-weird-thin...
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#16So why would they bury a man with a book?
Many cultures bury their dead with objects that the person enjoyed during their lifetime.
This is present even today, I saw a burial in Eastern Europe where the parents put a game of chess and toys in the coffin. While it will do no good to the deceased my theory is that it is a way for the living to deal with the loss.
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#17for some reason this read like the "Headless Body in a Topless Bar" headline...maybe the antiquities equivalent
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#18I Hope more and more fragments of anything lost is found. The burn down of Alexandria library was a pity
This is a common refrain but in reality I'm not sure it made much difference. Papyrus just doesn't age well and most manuscripts from this era would've been on papyrus. What really decided what texts survived and what didn't was monastic traditions in in the Dark Ages and Middle Ages [1]. At this time, a monk might spend their entire life transcribing a particularly long manuscript. The materials were also expensive.…
It was a little before that even.
Greek was the language of most fields of learning besides law in the Roman Empire. But the Greeks themselves wrote works on these papyrus scrolls that crumbled fast, so anything not actively used by the Romans was quickly lost.
There's a good chance that if the papyrus scrolls in any library (Alexandria or otherwise) weren't being copied regularly they were crumbling even before they burned or were lost to time for other reasons.
Towards the end of the Roman Empire, a few philosophers took the time to transmit Greek knowledge in Latin as knowledge of Greek faded in western Europe. What these guys happened to translate was the basis of most of European learning in philosophy, math, and other fields for centuries.
But they weren't monks (the most famous, Boethius, was not Christian either but a lot of later writers thought he was), the monks in scriptorium came later and grew slowly.
St. Benedict said that monks should be taught to read and do so regularly, which required copying books, but he prioritized physical work (to create self-sufficient communities) and prayer. But future Benedictines responded to the incentives of the time and began scaling up the copying and doing less agricultural work as the years went on.
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#19So why would they bury a man with a book?
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.
Re: Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
#20So why would they bury a man with a book?
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.
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.