Bret Devereaux covers this is in much greater detail than I can ever hope to do,[0] but essentially it's often because writing of the "Dark Ages" is dismissed b

Bret Devereaux covers this is in much greater detail than I can ever hope to do,[0] but essentially it's often because writing of the "Dark Ages" is dismissed because it is overly religious in nature. There is not less writing from this period, but since scribes of that era was primarily monks, they obviously had a bias in their choice of works they chose to scribed. The reason pagan writing of pre-Christian Roman and Greek writers remain is because these works were often considered good examples for learning Latin or Greek. (Also helps that a lot of Greek writing was preserved by Arab scribes.) Indeed, the majority of the material that survives to this day was scribed in the "Dark Ages", because of the invention of parchment (which has a much better longevity than its predecessor papyrus). Devereaux also points out other materials, that were generally just used for everyday things, were bad for longevity, and therefore few of those survive to this day. But climate here helps a lot with preserving copies,[1] hence why Egypt is generally overrepresented in everyday material from the Roman world. [0] https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-fall-part-i-words/ https://acoup.blog/2022/01/14/collections-rome-decline-and-f... [1] https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-was-such-a-strange-province/ https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-wa...