The survival rate of ancient literature

[Timotheus]

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.

Hi Timotheus. I cited Dr. Kwakkel's sources for the 8% and 15% figures. We have a pretty good understanding of medieval book production, and how long medieval MSS lasted in use. Unfortunately I don't read German, but I very much respect his opinion. If you look at the German Wikipedia article I linked to (using Google Translator or such) they have lots of numerical evidence there. For example, there were ancient libraries of tens or hundrds of thousand of book-equivalents but no medieval ones of over 1,000 or so until after 1200. Both my estimates (no more than 1%, probably around 0.1%) are orders of magnitude in the scientific sense.

I just feel that this is something one could not really quantify. How much literature was produced by hand in monastaries all over Europe? How much was destroyed when the monastary then fell or its members were persecuted? Too many variables from a time when records were not kept to really make an accurate assessment.