So let me get this straight. Western writing from Greece and Rome was only preserved by:

So let me get this straight. Western writing from Greece and Rome was only preserved by:

>Byzantines
>Irish monks
>Muslims

What in the actual fuck were Europeans doing where they couldn't save their own writings?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#Ancient_and_Post-classical_literacy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Someone made the terrible mistake of fucking your ancestor.
And now we have to deal with you.

Are you implying German tribes could write?
The early European Kingdoms had to use the clergy to write documents, reason why Christianity was a big part in the early centralization prossess.

>Are you implying German tribes could write?

The fucking ROMANS could, and their empire was all over the Medeteranian. No one in Rome could keep all these documents?

Rome was a second tier city of little account (beyond the emotional and the papal) since the third century. And yes people could read and write in the italian city states but they weren't exactly the depositories of ancient wisdom. During the late imperial days northern italy was more focused towards the military. IIRC Milan was the imperial capital primarily because its location was great for acess to both Gaul and Italy and not because it was one of the economical powerhouses of italy.

they were too busy burning anything that they couldn't interpret and mistaking it for witch runes

Writing was never universal in the roman empire AFAIK and the schools weren't free so the poorer people didn't have any real education. When the germanic people supplanted the roman nobility they didn't have the same educational culture which left the clergy as a scholastic class.
The writings of the roman state wasn't something people had readily acess to even in the roman period. If you wanted to read it you'd had to either hire a scribe to copy a work or visit one of the larger cities' libraries. Ofc in any proper roman education the classics were incorporated.
This is why, atleast to my understanding, why the romans' writings came to be 'exclusive' to the ERE, monks and the muslim world.

Rome had already fallen by the time the Germans started sacking everything in the western half of the empire. It was a corrupt cesspool well into cultural decline, and none of your average Roman citizens were going to be keeping track of Greek texts and the like. The remaining portion of Rome that cared about that kind of shit moved east when they moved the capital, becoming the Byzantine empire after the west fell shortly thereafter.

The German tribes (Franks, Goths, etc.) were mostly illiterate, so the reason for their not caring about old books is self-explanatory.

Remember that germanics destroyed everything, brainlet

>becoming the Byzantine empire after the west fell shortly thereafter.
Well meme'd my friend!

this. fuck g*rmany

Germanics not germans

Do you know that the people in germany dont anything to do with the fall of the roman empire?

Fuck you and fuck g*rmany

then who did?
The Goths, Burgundians, and Lombards were all from Germany.
>inb4 brainlet says Goths are really from Sweden

access to papyrus was lesssened.

also the pope was to busy rewriting history and forging documents and time periods to justify his temporal power, so several centuries didn't happen.

>Irish monks
?? There were monks all over Europe copying ancient texts.

Hmm... this actually makes me wonder what fraction of the Roman Empire's population was literate.

Well, when we're defining 'literacy' we usually mean a series of standardized tests to determine whether or not someone is fluent with reading and writing the native tongue.

That didn't exist in the Roman Empire. Ability to read seems far more common then writing ability, since most edicts were carved into stone and broadcast for the whole colonia to witness.

Almost everyone, it was basic knowledge, that's why there are a lot of Roman graffiti and very few Middle Age ones.

colleges you moron. Though, libraries were often present at them, they were never public.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#Ancient_and_Post-classical_literacy

In early Greece, like way back when, I'm talking Mycaeneans and the like, all writing was done on clay tablets, which are very impermanent.

The idea of writing for posterity was introduced at a later point.

The only reason we have some of these early Greek writings is because some people's homes burned down with clay tablets inside, preserving the clay.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest

Daily reminder Western Euroniggers *scraped off the ink* of classical writings to write bibles n shit on them.

Literally ISIS tier.

More ignorance than malice. They had no clue what they were doing. They would even the understanding to know what they were destroying. They just needed some new writing material.

getting curbstomped by snowniggers

>save their own writings
Byzantine were Greeks so it was their ancestors writings, not those of western euros

From Poland and Bornholm actually

Oh wow, ten manuscripts were lost due to the monks while thousands were more were preserved by them and with millions being destroyed by the Romans themselves during their civil wars.

You should realise the documents they scrubbed were more often than not copies they themselves had written because the extant roman papyrus ones had long since decayed. Romans rarely wrote on parchment to begin with.

My house catches on fire
My whole family dies
My last thought
>I didn't clear the history on my tablet
>TFW I am immortalized 2000 years later who found my erotic poetry in my cold dead hands

Most people were "functionally literate", that is, able to scratch out a few things and read signs and such. Historians masturbate over the few written works produced by the Greeks and Romans (compared to today, they were disinterested amateurs) and ignore the fact that their cultures retained a large oral element. The european barbarians were even more invested in oral instead of written transmission (reading Caesar's description of the druids will show you that the ancient world saw a real debate between oral and written transmission of knowledge), and the emphasis wasn't exactly eradicated by being absorbed into the empire. It's simply a matter of people focusing on other things and the infrastructure that sustained a class associated with relatively high amounts of reading and writing. Despite the fact that there were libraries and such, written works were distributed and preserved in a rather haphazard way, with copies being made due to the interest of individuals who had to hear of a work in the first place. Even Homer's seems to have simply went unwritten for a long time until a tyrant supposedly decided that he wanted to have a written copy of a rendition that he liked.
In this way texts accumulate over time when people passed a certain threshold of ability to and interest in preserving in writing a work, and not until then.
Socrates, remember, didn't write down a god-damned thing, if I may use such language to illustrate my point.

* the infrastructure that sustained a class associated with relatively high amounts of reading and writing withering away