[Publius6961]

Uh . .for me this article mostly highlights the modern glut of plentiful paper and how we mostly take it for granted; and I’m sure there’s a wealth of academic enlightenment that I’m not quite all that sure about.

You're not the only one.

To me the story underscores the "taken for granted" aspect of our modern existence.

(And the related idiotic tendency to judge historically distant events by our current cultural state, but that's another story.)

Just suppose that paper did not exist, or that it existed in outrageously expensive form; say, $1000 a page.

You have stacks and stacks of old books and you need to write a new one.

It is surprising that you would recycle the handiest thing you could find?

If you were an ordinarily educated person of the time, at that particular place, Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias weren't on your top 10 hit parade list.

[blam]

"Just suppose that paper did not exist, or that it existed in outrageously expensive form; say, $1000 a page."

The oldest paper ever found was found with these (The Curse Of The Red-Headed Mummy) 4,000 year old Caucasian mummies found in China. It had the extinct Indo-European language Tocharian A written on it.