Why Do So Many Early Christian Manuscripts Come from Egypt?

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:01]Why do we find so many early Christian manuscripts in Egypt?

[00:00:05]Hi everybody, my name is Robyn Walsh.

[00:00:07]I'm a scholar of New Testament and early Christianity and part of Paideia Biblical Studies. And this is a great question that came up over at the Biblical Studies Academy, the BSA. And it's a really actually a pretty simple answer. It's because it's an arid climate.

[00:00:22]So, the material that uh were the materials used for writing in the ancient world, sometimes you would have people write on what's called ostraca.

[00:00:32]And this is essentially like if you had a broken piece of pottery. Um sometimes I think of this as people could send letters on ostraca, like really um short ones. And it would be sort of like a postcard >> [laughter] >> in a in a sense uh in the ancient world.

[00:00:45]That was certainly one way people could write. People also could write on wax tablets, which have very little permanency because wax um for reasons you can imagine. Usually this was for note-taking. Um they were relatively small, like maybe think about like a mini iPad. Uh and you could make an impression into the wax. Um and sometimes again do it for note-taking or for some short notations. But generally writing took place on pieces of papyrus, which comes from this idea of papyri, these reeds um essentially or this organic plant material that you could weave together into sheets of paper. Uh and this generally was something that was a product that you found in North Africa and more arid regions. The other material that you could write on was something called vellum, which is animal hide. And so those are really the two categories, the predominant categories where you would find something either especially with say papyri, you might find um papyri woven into individual pages um to be put into what's called a codex, which essentially looks like the books that we use today, or into a long scroll. Now, again, these two materials, just keeping it simple, they are organic material.

[00:02:00]They are plant-based or animal-based, and so they're going to degrade very easily. And you need an arid climate to preserve them, and that's why we find so many things in Egypt. And this isn't confined to writing, by the way. There are also things like the so-called Fayum portraits, which are made on wood, also another organic >> [laughter] >> material. But painted on wood with a certain kind of wax paint, and they would have been placed on the essentially like the the caskets of people in the ancient world to preserve what they had looked like in life, more or less, somewhat idealized. But we do have a lot of these Fayum portraits as well, which gives us great information about how people styled their hair, the kind of clothing they wore, what they thought was idealized anyway in terms of signs of wealth, even things like education and social standing. So they do provide this, you know, terrific cache of information. And those come from North Africa, as well. So anything on organic material, anything on something that would again degrade if it were to get wet or to have extreme temperature variations, it's not going to survive. Particularly, we know, for example, people used to construct wax masks in antiquity, especially of departed individuals, sort of like a life or death mask that used to be done before the advent of photography. We only have one that still exists in a museum in Naples, because wax, they break, they melt. And so anything that was made on organic material, sometimes, you know, fire, too. It's just happenstance, combination of luck and circumstance that these things survive outside of again a very arid climate. And so we do tend to find ancient writings and things like Oxyrhynchus, also North Africa, which had a huge trash pile or several of them of pieces of scraps of ancient texts. And so that's where we tend to find these things.

[00:04:06]If you are interested in other details about the ancient world, please go over to the Biblical Studies Academy. That's bartairman.com/bsalearning and check us out. We have a variety of different talks, lectures, and other materials to get you caught up on issues like this in antiquity. So that is bartairman.com/bsalearning.