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LateInTheAfternoon t1_iuyam9v wrote

Wax tablets were only for temporary notes. You wiped it clean when you were done, and then it was ready to be reused, so you only needed one. Books, and more permanent texts, were written on papyrus scrolls and later also on parchment. Scrolls were stored in wooden boxes with labels, one scroll per box. Scrolls could not have as much texts as our books today (that they only wrote on one side made sure of that) and literary works of considerable length made up several scrolls. For example, nowadays we can get Plato's Republic in one book, but back then it consisted of 10 scrolls (and also ten wooden boxes). As a vestige Plato's Republic is still divided not in chapters, but in books (marked with Roman numerals; this is also the case with many other works from antiquity).

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petalised OP t1_iv01cf4 wrote

But none of them survived till our days, right? We only know about it from Medieval sources?

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LICK_MY_SCROTUM t1_ivhhfsh wrote

I recently visited the papyrus museum in Vienna. Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome both used papyrus for paper, and if my memory serves me, a reed pen with a special type of ink. However, much of the documents didn't survive because papyrus is biodegradable and Europe has historically a lot of soil.

Egypt and Arabia both have tons of remaining papyrus documents from thousands of years ago, but that's because it's such an arid climate that stuff stays preserved for much longer.

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