One Thousand and One Conjectures

In Roman and Byzantine Egypt, clerks routinely wrote new documents on the blank backs of obsolete ones — the opisthograph, papyrology's scrap paper. Join that habit to price history: the opisthograph share of dated documentary papyri is a high-frequency papyrus price index,…

Ostraca — broken potsherds picked up for free — and papyrus competed at the bottom of the everyday writing market of Greco-Roman Egypt. Join them as substitute goods: the ostracon-to-papyrus ratio among short dated documents is a local price gauge, rising with…

Everyone knows books were expensive before print and cheap after; the standard picture adds a slow medieval cheapening in between. Join the ancient and medieval price records instead into one series and the conjecture is starker: measured in unskilled day-wages, a plain…

Papyrus could be made only in Egypt; parchment could be made anywhere animals were slaughtered. Join that asymmetry to price geography: papyrus prices should climb steeply with distance from Egypt while parchment prices stay geographically flat, so the timing of any region's…

Diocletian's Price Edict tariffs copying by the hundred lines; medieval Hebrew colophons occasionally record what the scribe was paid for the codex. Join these scattered piece-rates through the one deflator every pre-modern economy shares — wheat — and the conjecture is that…

A papyrus roll was a standardized manufactured unit — twenty glued sheets of graded charta — while a finished book was a bespoke object of variable script, size, and finish. Join the two to the economics of commodities versus custom goods: attested…

Papyrus production was a concentrated, licence-hedged Egyptian industry with a Ptolemaic monopoly in its ancestry; wheat was the freest market the ancient world had. Join them through price behaviour: papyrus prices should look administered — nominally rigid for decades, then jumping in…

Cost disease — the modern observation that string quartets and haircuts get relatively dearer because their productivity cannot rise while wages elsewhere do — is usually thought a phenomenon of industrial economies. Join it to the copyist: hand-copying was the archetypal stagnant…

Copying manuscripts, teaching letters, and writing documents for the illiterate look like three occupations; the conjecture is that economically they were one, because the same modestly literate people did all three and arbitraged between them, so the effective hourly earnings of copyist,…

Papyrus was sold in named quality grades cut from different parts of the same plant by one fixed process; parchment quality depended on animal, age, region, and finishing skill, all of which could diverge over time. Join the two quality ladders through…

Loan documents from the papyri onward show borrowers pledging movable goods — cloth, tools, jewellery, and sometimes books. Join the book to the pawnshop: books were premier collateral, pledged at loan-to-value ratios near those of silver plate and well above cloth or…