[thecodont]

When Rome held Egypt there was a thriving paper industry and people learned to read if only to read the latest cheap thriller. (Yep they had those too!)

Seriously? You mean pulp was once printed on papyrus?

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Yes.

Not much of it survived but there was a lot of cheap fiction written and published back then. The idea that they sat around reading philosophy, history and what we would consider literature is based on the fact that those were the books that were copied onto parchment. “The Adventures of Zorbator the Great” was not worthy of being copied.

We do have a few of the most popular that survived like "Daphnis and Chloe" but mostly what we have are scraps.

[The_Reader_David]

Yup, though not printed, written out long-hand. Papyrus was cheap and universal throughout the Mediterranean world until the rise of Islam shut down trade between Egypt and Europe. The collapse in literacy (dating to the mid seventh century) was due to the sudden rise in the cost of anything to write on (parchment is very expensive compared to papyrus), not the Latin church, nor the Germanic barbarians. Visigothic Spain and Merovingian France were literate societies that still maintained Roman social organization complete with a bureaucracy -- dependent on papyrus.

I commend to all of your attention Henri Pirenne's Mohammed and Charlemagne, now available in an inexpensive Dover paperback, and the follow-up by Emmet Scott, Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited new with year, which uses more recent archeological evidence to support and extend Pirenne's thesis that the collapse of classical civilization in the West was caused by the rise of Islam, not the Germanic barbarians (who by and large signed up to be Romans, so long as they got high places in government -- except for the Vandals, all of the Germanic kings in the West still owed at least theoretical allegiance to the Emperor in Constantinople, issuing coinage with the Emperor's picture, rather than their own, and even the Vandal kingdom in North Africa organized its administrative, economic and cultural life in the Roman pattern).