Re:Saharan Village Is Home to Thousands of Ancient Texts
by ngold on Friday August 16, 2019 @08:00PM
(#20720848)
Never thought about it, but some of the first erasers were just a sharp edged tool.
Re:Saharan Village Is Home to Thousands of Ancient Texts
by thaumasiotes on Friday August 16, 2019 @04:17PM
(#20719288)
So... I said early books are unlikely to be vellum, and you're saying you don't want to talk about early books?
Re:Saharan Village Is Home to Thousands of Ancient Texts
by jacobolus on Friday August 16, 2019 @06:05PM
(#20720167)
The material used in the Kingdom of Kush or at the Library of Alexandria (or whatever) is 100% irrelevant to this discussion.
It seems unlikely to me that there was ever any significant number of papyrus books in the western end of the Sahara desert, since as far as I understand the papyrus plant doesn’t grow anywhere within 2500 miles.
Some kind of parchment would be the obvious local material to use.
But apparently there started to be trade in paper (another non-local material) starting about 1000 years ago.
We are talking about books from no earlier than the 10th century. Apparently the oldest book in the city is a Quran written on gazelle skin, https://en.qantara.de/content/cultural-heritage-endangered-i...
But there’s at least one 11th century book written on Chinese paper, https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-africa/tradit...
Edit: here we go http://worldlibraries.dom.edu/index.php/worldlib/article/vie...
> Paper in particular became as valuable as salt or slaves (the two top commodities of the trans–Saharan trade), especially after the eleventh century, when it replaced parchment, and even more after the introduction of Italian paper in the thirteenth, which significantly raised the standards of quality for this type of material. Paper was more practical to use but also more difficult to recycle since, unlike parchment, it could not be scraped and overwritten; besides, it came from farther away than parchment, salt or slaves (all North or West African commodities), and it was more perishable than any of them.