Comment by stingrae
1 hour ago
This reminds me of a piece I just saw at the Legion of Honor (SF) special exhibit on the etruscans. They have a Etruscan manuscript, written on linen, that was used to wrap a mummy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_Linteus
Ironically a huge percentage of the historical documents we had came from "the garbage", and/or other cases of people reusing documents for other purposes.
In large part this was because paper was incredibly expensive back then, so it got used for one purpose, used again for another, and that continued until you were out of room ... at which point it may get used yet again (for say mummy wrapping).
Another classic example: Jews believed you couldn't burn a piece of paper once you wrote the name of God on it, so there were special towers in ancient cities for Jews to throw away their paper. But again, because paper was so expensive, each paper often had lots of other things on it.
Because these towers were sometimes preserved better than libraries were, historians have found huge treasure troves of saved papers in them. Like the mummy wrappings, they only still exist due to a special quirk of ancient peoples ... but because of the price of paper they have lots of other non-mummy-wrapping/non-God's name stuff.