03-11-2008, 10:58 PM
One item I would like to point out is before anyone can really determine who destroyed all the books we really should realize that we dont even know how many manuscripts we are talking about.
I have heard 250,000 thrown around as the number of manuscripts held at the various libraries of Rome but that is a very vague number since we dont know if that is total scrolls, collections of scrolls, does it count redundent copies.
In addition we do not know how many manuscripts existed in other cities beyond the main one.
All we really know is that violence destorys books and close minded extremists like the early church destroys books even more because they target the books as opposed to general warfare that will destroy books as collatoral damage.
So I really want to know how someone can say things like 8% of Medievel texts have survived to modern times. There is really no way of knowing what was there to begin with to be able to compare it to what is left.
I have heard 250,000 thrown around as the number of manuscripts held at the various libraries of Rome but that is a very vague number since we dont know if that is total scrolls, collections of scrolls, does it count redundent copies.
In addition we do not know how many manuscripts existed in other cities beyond the main one.
All we really know is that violence destorys books and close minded extremists like the early church destroys books even more because they target the books as opposed to general warfare that will destroy books as collatoral damage.
So I really want to know how someone can say things like 8% of Medievel texts have survived to modern times. There is really no way of knowing what was there to begin with to be able to compare it to what is left.
Timothy Hanna
