Books -The Last Chapter ?.

Books and literature  in the Western World have a long ,strange and wonderful history.The first great age of books,literacy and literature occurred during the Roman Empire.The books that existed then were papyrus scrolls called in Latin volumen hence our word volume.They were written in either Greek or Latin the two lingua francas of the empire.Latin being spoken in the West and  Greek in the East. The New Testament for example was written in Greek which Jesus of Nazareth would have spoken as a second language along with the rest of the inhabitants of Palestine at that time.These books were hand written but seem to have been produced in large quantities.The great library at Alexandria was said to contain 500,000 volumes and the library at Pergamum 200,000 volumes.Rome itself possessed 28 public libraries and many citizens are recorded as having private libraries.The Roman Empire was basically a primitive industrial civilization with large scale production of goods such as ceramics which included table ware ,amphorae for storage of goods ,roof tiles.metal objects such as nails and weapons and concrete for construction.In a modern touch many of these objects bear the brand name of the manufacturers on them.  It seems that book production by teams of scribes turning out volumes by dictation was also a feature of this economy.The levels of literacy among the urban populations seems to have been quite high.Pompeii and other excavated Roman sites  have been found to be full of graffiti commentating on daily life written by the working population.Any wet cement for example usually ended up with some message to posterity added to it by the workmen in charge.The literature of the ancient world eventually consisted of a vast archive of poetry, plays, novels,philosophy ,engineering,science and history.It is salutary to examine what eventually happened to this archive in the succeeding centuries.