Honestly, I don't. This was just a given in literature I read and chats (about Greco-Roman antiquity, can't answer for other cultures). You may come across it i

Honestly, I don't. This was just a given in literature I read and chats (about Greco-Roman antiquity, can't answer for other cultures). You may come across it in books about literacy in GR antiquity, but honestly that'd be a lot to read through to find a nugget or two. Btw it's not that all scribes were illiterate, but definitely some were or perhaps they were just substantially less literate. For their job, copying out sheet after sheet of text, they just needed to know the alphabet. It'd be like learning to copy an alphabet you might not know, like Cyrillic or Arabic. And decent money too. IIRC the argument for scribal illiteracy had to do with the kinds of scribal copying errors you would see. There are some errors that suggest a person can read, like homoteleuton. That's when someone sees the phrase "I love you" in a love letter, copies it, and then starts copying from after a second "I love you" lower in the paragraph. "I love you. I'm a terrible person and I know I slashed your tires but... I love you, we should get married" —> "I love you, we should get married". Other kinds of scribal copying errors betray a lack of reading ability. Like homearchy, where they skip a line because of similarities at the start of the line. If you're reading along, it becomes obvious the sentence stopped making sense because you skipped a line. But if you're not reading along because you can't, you won't catch the change in meaning. https://sites.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/ms-course/course/scbl-err.htm https://sites.ualberta.ca/~sreimer/ms-course/course/scbl-err...