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Materials like these are extremely rare. For one thing they belong to the immediate pre-Dark Age period (recalling that it began, on schedule, precisely in 538AD, more or less, but we lost track of the years things were so bad).

No doubt such collections existed all over the Roman world, even the West, prior to that year, but most of them were probably burned for heat in 539 AD, or used for mulch by 560 AD once literacy was mostly extinguished except in the Eastern Mediterranean.

These guys must have been turning cartwheels naked, rolling down the street in front of the museum where the manuscripts were found.

Truly amazing story!

"Materials like these are extremely rare. For one thing they belong to the immediate pre-Dark Age period (recalling that it began, on schedule, precisely in 538AD, more or less, but we lost track of the years things were so bad)."

Yup. One of my favorite threads.

The Dark Ages: Were They Darker Than We Imagined?

Of course in the Eastern Mediterranean, there was no "Dark Age" until the rise of Islam (though Greece itself outside the immediate orbit of Constantinople underwent one due to a Slavic invasion a bit later than the onset of the Western Dark Ages), and even then classical learning wasn't forgotten.

Not only were folks in the 6th century fully literate and conversant with classical literature as well as Scripture, the preservation of literacy and classical learning in the Empire persisted down until its fall in 1453, when the flight of Greek scholars to Venice and the surrounding region of Italy was the impetus for the Renaissance.

St. Photius the Great, Patriarch of Constantinople in the 9th century was a notable humanist, conversant with the pagan classics in literature and philosophy as well as Scripture and the writings of the earlier Church Fathers.

Anna Comnena's 11th century biography of her father the Emperor Alexis I, The Alexiad, is rife with classical allusions. (Note: at least in the greater houses, the women were both literate and well educated--indeed enough sources attest to women educating their children in grammar, that apparently literacy, though not formal education, seems to have been common among men and women in all strata of society.)

The Eastern Roman Empire held all the great cities and the bulk of the population a century after Constantine transferred the seat of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople.

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