alt Hacker NewsSo why would they bury a man with a book?
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Many cultures bury their dead with objects that the person enjoyed during their lifetime.
This is present even today, I saw a burial in Eastern Europe where the parents put a game of chess and toys in the coffin. While it will do no good to the deceased my theory is that it is a way for the living to deal with the loss.
Maybe it's more like how they used to wrap fish and chips in newspaper
Maybe he liked that book? Not different from modern day burials
https://notebookofghosts.com/2016/11/21/a-list-of-weird-thin...
While the collection is now termed by modern scholars as "Book 2 of the Iliad", there was no such thing as a "book" as we know it, in those times; there were codices and scrolls and manuscripts, etc., and everyone's favorite: the palimpsest!
It wasn't a whole book, it was cartonnage: scrap paper from discarded books and documents, assembled and glued together like papier-mâché. The cartonnage was used to make funerary masks and some other parts of the mummification apparatus. There is a whole subfield of archaeology that deals with deciphering and identifying book fragments found in the form of scrap paper in Greco-Roman era Egyptian mummies.