3 ms·
Sufficiently old books are more likely to be vellum or similar, which will indeed decay if sufficiently dry.
by Arubis 7y ago
Sufficiently old books are more likely to be vellum or similar, which will indeed decay if sufficiently dry.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoYou mean sufficiently recent books. Old books in the Sahara Desert are unlikely to be vellum; they're much more likely to be papyrus.
- jacobolus 7y agoDo you have evidence for that or are you just speculating? 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-in-mauritania-the-koran-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/tradition-destruction-lost-libraries-chinguetti-009651 https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-africa/tradit... Edit: here we go http://worldlibraries.dom.edu/index.php/worldlib/article/view/159/114 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.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoSo... I said early books are unlikely to be vellum, and you're saying you don't want to talk about early books?
- noselasd 7y agoHe's just saying earlier books does not exist in this village.
- jacobolus 7y agoThe 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.
- ngold 7y agoNever thought about it, but some of the first erasers were just a sharp edged tool.