Printing was expensive and not accessible

The world of antiquity was famous for its large libraries, the most famous and largest of which was the Library of Alexandria. There is a certain irony that most of the scrolls that were kept in these huge storage all over the ancient world were lost forever. They were either burnt in fire or destroyed during wars and turmoil.

Yet, there was another reason for the loss of all those invaluable scrolls. Generally, papyrus scrolls don’t last more than a couple of centuries. Those scrolls that were chosen not to be copied on parchment during the times of Christianity did not survive.

Even with the invention of printing European hand-written manuscript writing kept on going for another century. Printing was expensive and not accessible for everybody at those times. Each time when a copy of a document was created more and more errors were introduced with each copy. That is why, specialists have to compare different versions of the same document to figure out the most authentic parts of a document. As for private and governmental documents, they remained handwritten until the invention of the typewriter in the 19th century.