Why did literacy in the West fall so hard post-Rome. A Mesopotamian tax office that predated the fall of Rome in the west by 2,500 years produced more records than all kingdoms of Merovingian France, Lombard Italy, Visigothic Spain, and Anglo-Saxon England combined. Was it just that the papyrus trade was cut and no one considered an ersatz?
>>18225012Rural people have little need for literacy.
>>18225012This is confusing writing material with literacy. Cuneiform tablets preserved much better than papyrus so we have more tax records from ancient Mesopotamia than we have from the Roman Empire and later. But alphabetic writing on parchment and papyrus was much easier and more widespread among the populace than cuneiform writing which was restricted to a small scribal class in Mesopotamia.
>>18225048Okay, fair point, let me reframe: why couldn't the entirety of Western Europe post-Rome summon the bureaucratic capacity of one Mesopotamian city that had predated it by 2500 years, or by a Greek city state that had predated it by 800?
Your post is so all over the place. You ask about the fall of literacy in the west, then apropos of nothing bring up preserved Mesopotamian tax records as if that has anything to do with literacy rates. Western Europe had preserved texts going back to antiquity as well, but they weren't original copies because they were recorded on paper, vellum, and papyrus, which have a much shorter shelf life than clay or stone tablets. And all of that has nothing at all to do with literacy rates. If you want to talk about the disappearance of literacy, then the Late Bronze Age Collapse actually had a far, far worse decline of literacy in the mideast than the fall of Rome did in western Europe. Because the fall of Rome simply caused the number of people actively writing to shrink, but didn't cause entire writing systems to be lost, which is what happened in the Collapse 3200~ years ago. The new masters of western Europe were ruled by a warrior elite who didn't exactly take pride in being able to read, so literacy in the west was kept alive by the Church and a much reduced collection of scholars, who mostly had to rely on patronage from the Church now that the old literate elite of the Roman Empire were gone.Charlemagne brought back public education in the West via churches and monasteries and literacy began climbing again during his reign. It wasn't so much philanthropy as it was that he found himself ruling over a vast territory and the old method of Frankish governance, of not having a capital city and just holding court in different cities as you travel around to visit different fiefs, wasn't going to cut it anymore. He needed literate people to employ as magistrates, tax collectors, and civil administrators.
>>18225099>why couldn't the entirety of Western Europe post-Rome summon the bureaucratic capacity of one Mesopotamian cityThis is a confused question. What are you even asking? What is "bureaucratic capacity"? Mesopotamian city states were highly centralized economies that employed armies of scribes to document productivity and commerce in minute detail, because that was the key to the wealth of those societies. The middle east during the Bronze Age was all about commerce between different empires and city states, who were all interconnected with one another in a way that wouldn't be seen again until modernity. Not even the Roman Empire at its peak had such a vast web of trade as the corner stone of its society. There were a few instances were imports were vital (like grain to Italy during the height of its population boom) but overall the Republic and Empire's provinces were self-sufficient. Which is one reason why rebellions were such a problem. It was very easy for a rogue legate to simply entrench in whatever province he was in and live off its self-sufficient agricultural product. By comparison, the mideast's agriculture was extremely centralized and bureaucratic. Comes from everything being focused on a few highly productive floodplains off one or two major rivers. Said rivers could be easily patrolled by the state, and all farmland carefully apportioned and regulated with irrigation systems. In Egypt they even controlled distribution of seed to be sown each planting season, so that farmers could not decide for themselves what to grow, or when to plant. Everything was regulated by the state. Hence the need for all the scribes to keep track of everything. It's also why most of those Bronze Age societies collapsed into total ruin once their governments toppled and their scribes ceased counting everything. In Rome life would go on. Farmers and their regional governors were autonomous of central control.
>>18225099They did though.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_fisco_Barcinonensi
