Antique book (statistics)

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In ancient tradition, the term book as an object denotes either the scroll or the codex . Whether a role or a codex is meant in an ancient source can usually only be deduced from the context. The papyrus roll was common in antiquity, the parchment codex had been in use since late antiquity , but was not unknown even in the Roman Empire . In general, a book is considered to be a title and a volume. This is common today, but did not apply to the codex before 1500.

role

In antiquity, the role was a book with literary content (as opposed to a certificate or letter ) made of papyrus and usually described on one side. You can roughly equate a role with a title (see below). The most important finds for statistical information on ancient books are the scrolls of oxyrhynchos , which come from an ancient garbage dump. The scrolls among the finds from Oxyrhynchos were made in the 1st to 7th centuries. On the basis of this find, the distribution of literature in the population and its thematic weighting can be estimated. The finds from the period after 400 are in sharp decline. There are no finds from the time before the 1st century AD, as the increasing depth of soil moisture at the site probably destroyed the deeper, older material.

According to the data from William A. Johnson, the average length was 10.3 m. However, this is an extrapolation of fragments, also influenced by some presumably large roles (19–29 m) Herodotus , Plato and Thucydides . The existence of such large roles seems to be proven elsewhere. Axon mentions a 120 foot (40 m) long Homer scroll, written in gold letters, as a holdings in the Palace Library of Constantinople around 400. It was probably an exhibit from a school or library that was always spread out.

Dieter Hagedorn estimates the average roll at 3–4 m, but believes that “Rolls of 10 m length should not have been uncommon.” Based on literature research, Egert Pöhlmann comes to a value of 6 to 11 m. Perhaps one can assume an average length of the scroll of 6 to 8 m. However, this value is only particularly relevant for calculating the inventory of cabinets in wall niches if only the remains of an ancient library are left and the inventory figures have not been recorded.

More important is the average number of letters per roll. It was 83,300 per roll on Johnson's Oxyrhynchos record. Values ​​of 150,000 seem to have been common for 10–12 m long rolls of large works such as Herodotus. The average letter width was 3.3 mm, but could also range from 5 to less than 2 mm. The number of letters per roll is therefore independent of the average size of the roll.

Axon compiled a statistic of 14 works by seven traditional famous Latin authors. They are only passed down as a codex, but since the works are divided into roles (“books”, “volumes”), one can easily deduce the number of roles. There were a total of 141 scrolls with a total of 7,755,903 letters. Axon received an average of 53,860 letters per roll. The assumption is that the Romans, wealthier and more practical than the Egyptians, preferred somewhat smaller roles. In the following, the value of Oxyrhynchos with 83,300 letters per roll is used because it is based on a larger data set.

Codex

The codex, which is similar to our today's books, was already common in Rome in the 1st century for trivial literature. Usually made of parchment, the codex was sometimes more handy, but always more expensive than the papyrus roll. Codices with papyrus pages were also common. Most of the ancient codices are known from finds from Egypt and contained around four papyrus rolls. However, the size of the codex changed drastically in late antiquity.

Up to the 3rd century there is no known codex that had more than 300 pages (150 leaves), most of them had fewer. Codices have survived from the 5th century that had at least 638, 1460, 1600 and 1640 pages. Ulpian's 35 rolls of “Ars Edictum” were found in three codices of 14, 11 and 7 rolls each. Gregory the Great mentions that he has placed the text of 35 scrolls in six codices. Roberts and Skeat reckon with an average of six roles per codex by the end of Late Antiquity.

The great codices of late antiquity were unwieldy, oversized monsters weighing 10 to 20 kg. A value of four rolls per codex fits much better with the Latin-medieval codex, which around 800 also comprised this amount of text (4 × 83,300 letters) and number of titles. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the number of titles could have decreased further with the transition from parchment to cheaper paper. With the spread of printing, only one title was common. The term codex should be reserved for handwritten books. They still existed into the 18th century, as copying individual books was significantly cheaper than printing them.

Title number in roll and codex

Great works, very popular in antiquity, contained a few roles per title. The Latin list of Axons (see above), which he considers representative, came to an average of ten roles per title with 14 titles (works). However, this value only relates to traditional books. From antiquity itself there are for the time around 235 BC. A clear statement. According to this, the Alexandria library at that time contained 400,000 (81.6%) of 490,000 rolls with “mixed content”. This could mean not only several titles, but even several authors per role. Multiple titles on one roll could also indicate unusually large roles in the early days of the library. Our data on the size of the scrolls come mainly from the economically better, more pragmatic Roman-Imperial period. If one sees the roll size of the ancient Greek classics (Homer, Herodotus, etc.) in relation to the values ​​of Oxyrhynchos or the Latin statistic of Axon, this shows a decrease in the average size of the roll. This would rather lead to only one title per role.

How can the discrepancy between the ancient value of one roll per title and the traditional inventory of an average of ten rolls per title be explained? It could have something to do with the transmission through great late antique codices. The editions around 400 will have included the most famous (legal) works of their time. These were mainly great works by Pliny , Livius and Aulus Gellius with 37, 35 and 20 roles. The three titles of Tacitus , each comprising a role, were probably only passed down because they were combined in a codex with the Annales (twelve roles) and Historia (five). In the case of a personal selection of titles with a tendency towards the most famous and therefore mostly largest works, a significant increase in the number of roles per title can be expected in the corpus obtained in this way.

According to John O. Ward, however, the medium that circulated in the Middle Ages was not the codex that is in the library today, but the “ booklet ”. It was no bigger than a roll or two in size. Several booklets were then tied together to codices in the Middle Ages, usually even later. Since a circulating booklet had to contain at least one title, the typical title size seems to have been one or two rolls even in the Middle Ages. The size of an average work, a title before the printing era, was therefore more in the range of a larger magazine article than that of a book today. The equation of a title with a role should at least be sure of the order of magnitude for ancient times.

Frequency of magic books

Today, a magic book is understood to be a grimoire . They supposedly contain secret knowledge about magic, demons and witchcraft. Typical are collections of magic spells, instructions for rituals or for the production of non-working miracle cures.

Notes that were written as part of rituals are to be strictly separated from such books. They contain petitions to gods, incantations or curses. Hundreds of such notes have been found on lead, stone, wood or papyrus. Individual short magical texts such as recipes for a ritual are also not covered by magic books.

Little can be said about their frequency from the existence of magic books in tradition or in individual papyrus finds.

The papyrus finds from Oxyrhynchus come from a time when there was little or no persecution of magic books. Since they come from a garbage dump, they probably show a cross-section of the books used at the time. The topic comparison with the titles of the Varro (see above) supports this assumption.

The study by Julian Krüger on the reception of literature in Oxyrhynchos presents contents of 1,485 papyrus texts on pages 227–245.

Of these, only 14 are associated with sorcery:

  1. PSI 1290 Initiation rite to mysteries
  2. P. Oxy. 1380 Invocation of Isis
  3. P. Oxy. 1381 Praising Imuthes-Asklepios
  4. P. Oxy. 885 treatise on divination (fortune telling)
  5. P. Oxy. 2332 pottery oracle
  6. P. Oxy. 886 Magical Text
  7. P. Oxy. 887 Magical Text
  8. P. Harr. 55 Magical Text
  9. P. Laur. 123 Magical Text
  10. P. Oxy. 658 Pagan sacrifice
  11. P. Oxy. inv. 50 4B 23 / I (1–3) b love magic
  12. P. Oxy. 2753 magic spells
  13. PSI 29 Magical Sayings
  14. P. Osl. 76 About divination (fortune telling)

These 14 would be less than 1% of the total. On closer inspection, however, most of them are likely to be simple pleading or incantation notes. Even nos. 1, 4, 5 and 14 seem to be at most individual topics, but not collections. If you count them as magic books, you get a share of 0.3% of the total collection. This shows that the proportion of magic books among the books of antiquity was very small. Probably one in a thousand rather than one in a hundred.

See also

Remarks

  1. ↑ A physical book is called a volume in German, but this does not have to apply to the English "volume".
  2. ^ William A. Johnson: The literary papyrus roll. Format and conventions; an analysis of the evidence from Oxyrhynchus . Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut 1992.
  3. ^ William EA Axon: On the Extent of Ancient Libraries . In: Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom . Second Series, Vol. X., London 1874, pp. 383-405.
  4. ↑ Dieter Hagedorn: Papyrology . In: Heinz-Günther Nesselrath (Ed.): Introduction to Greek Philology . Teubner, Stuttgart 1997, ISBN 3-519-07435-4 .
  5. ^ Egert Pöhlmann: Introduction to the history of transmission and the textual criticism of ancient literature . Darmstadt 1994, p. 124.
  6. ↑ Around 85 AD, Martial advertises Codex editions from his publisher Secundus in two of his books, the Proömium and the 14th book of the epigrams, and also gives his address. He praises them as being more manageable, recommends them as a travel book, but also calls them more extensive, since they can contain the complete works of an author, Homer's Odyssey or Iliad in a codex each. In addition to the famous Greek and Latin classics, Secundu's Codex offer also contained works by Martial.
  7. ^ Roberts and Skeat (1983), p. 48.
  8. ^ Colin H. Roberts, Theodore C. Skeat: The Birth of the Codex . London 1983, p. 76.
  9. ↑ From the illuminated manuscript of Tzetzes , reproduced and analyzed by Parsons (1952).
  10. ↑ John O. Ward: Alexandria and its medieval legacy. The book, the monk and the rose . In Roy MacLeod (ed.): The Library of Alexandria . London 2000.
  11. ^ Edward A. Parsons: The Alexandrian Library. Glory of the Hellenic World. Its Rise, Antiquities, and Destructions . London 1952, p. 165.
  12. ↑ They certainly didn't work, otherwise they would have been in a medical or engineering book. It would then not have been able to be sold as "secret knowledge" in a magic book. This is the special difference between a magic book of the early Roman Empire and one about 1000 years older. In such earlier times, relevant knowledge, such as medicine, could have been kept secret as knowledge of power to legitimize a caste of priests.
  13. ↑ They could appear frequently as evidence of persecution in late antiquity. Or because of the criminality from AD 400, it was hardly handed down. Similar for finds: Were they buried in heaps because of the criminal liability or were they hardly available as a result? A statistical statement would only be possible if one correlates the time of creation and time lost with the total number of all papyri finds. Graf provides an overview of the state of research on magic papyri. Since he does not mention such quantitative statements, they probably have not yet been made. (Fritz Graf: God's closeness and magic damage: magic in Greco-Roman antiquity . Munich 1996).
  14. ↑ Julian Krüger: Oxyrhynchos in the imperial era . Frankfurt a. M. 1990.
  15. ↑ Krüger (1990), p. 161: 891 items described on one side with literature, 180 on both sides with literature and 234 with literature on one side and documents on the other. That results in 891 + 180 × 2 + 234 = 1,485 text pages with literature.