It's actually not that surprising. Writing media like paper was extremely expensive. Artists too recycled canvasses. Fun fact: in Italy before the Romans there

It's actually not that surprising. Writing media like paper was extremely expensive. Artists too recycled canvasses. Fun fact: in Italy before the Romans there were people who spoke a language called Etruscan. It remains untranslated to this day because there are so few written samples of it, usually confined the markings on tombs and such. This was U suspect exacerbated by the Gallic sacking of Rome around 387 BC [1]. It's for this reason that the very early history of Rome is fuzzy other than apocryphal tales such as Romulus and Remus. But the longest Etruscan writing sample was a recycled linen text used as a mummy wrapping in Ptolemaic Egypt [2]. Cheap paper is still a relatively modern invention. [1]: https://www.worldhistory.org/article/910/the-sack-of-rome-by-the-gauls-390-bce/ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/910/the-sack-of-rome-by... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus