Excerpting: the ancient remix culture

When you think of a book, you probably imagine a neatly bound volume with a clear author’s name on the cover. But in the ancient world, books, or rather manuscripts, were often something quite different. They were messy, collaborative, and sometimes more like scrapbooks than single works of literature. And as a new study by Noam Maeir of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reveals, these messy collections might hold the key to understanding how entire cultures organized knowledge.

Published in PLOS ONE, Maeir’s paper dives into the hidden world of Syriac manuscripts. Using digital tools and quantitative methods, Maeir starts from the question: how did ancient scribes and compilers decide what to include, cut, and rearrange in their manuscripts? The answer turns out to be a story about how people in late antiquity, particularly between the 6th and 9th centuries, understood learning, memory, and cultural authority.

Manuscripts as compilations

For a long time, scholars treated manuscripts as mere containers for older works. If you found a medieval Syriac manuscript with a sermon by a church father, the instinct was to look past the messy compilation and focus only on the “original” text. But material philology, a modern movement in manuscript studies, flips that view on its head. Instead of seeing manuscripts as passive vessels, it treats them as creative works in their own right. Imagine a YouTube playlist: someone selects clips, orders them, maybe adds commentary, titles, or decorative touches. That act of curation is itself meaningful.

Maeir argues that the same was true in ancient Syriac literary culture. Scribes, editors, and even readers didn’t just copy texts; they actively reshaped them by excerpting, reordering, and annotating. In doing so, they created new works that reflected the intellectual and spiritual priorities of their communities.

What is “excerpting,” anyway?

Excerpting is the practice of pulling out short passages (or sometimes longer chunks) from existing works and stitching them together into a new collection. Think of a “best of” mixtape or a modern anthology. In late antiquity, Christian scholars leaned heavily on this method. Instead of writing entirely new books, they often built compilations of excerpts from the Bible, theological treatises, or earlier debates.

In Syriac culture, excerpting became a dominant mode of writing. Entire manuscripts, known as multiple-text manuscripts (MTMs), were essentially giant scrapbooks. These included everything from biblical commentary to saints’ lives, hymns, and theological arguments.

Maeir shows that excerpting was a cultural engine for preserving, organizing, and transmitting knowledge. And it’s measurable. Here’s where the study gets innovative. Maeir used the digitized catalog of Syriac manuscripts from the British Library (a massive collection with nearly 1,000 datable manuscripts) to count how many excerpts appear in each manuscript. He coined a new metric: Excerpts Per Manuscript (or EPM).

Most manuscripts had very few excerpts, typically fewer than 20. But a small number stood out, containing hundreds of excerpts each. The two champions were especially jaw-dropping: one had 660 excerpts, another an incredible 1,190. These were not random scrapbooks; they were monumental compilations, the Wikipedia pages of their time. These high-excerpt manuscripts cluster in a specific period, between the 6th and 9th centuries CE. That’s exactly when Christian, Jewish, and Greco-Roman cultures were wrestling with questions of canon—deciding which texts would define orthodoxy and which would fade into obscurity.

At first glance, counting excerpts might sound like dry statistical work. But it actually tells us something profound about how cultures manage knowledge.

In an era before printing presses, excerpting was a way to condense and organize vast amounts of information. A scribe could take snippets from dozens of authors and combine them into a single, digestible manuscript. These compilations were teaching tools, theological arsenals, and cultural memory banks.

Maeir’s study also challenges how we think about authorship. We’re used to celebrating “authors” as solitary geniuses. But in Syriac manuscript culture, the real creative labor often lay with the compilers, the unsung editors who decided which voices would be heard and how they would be arranged. Their fingerprints are everywhere, even if their names are not.

The role of the British Library

The treasure trove Maeir studied comes from the British Library’s Syriac collection, one of the largest in the world. These manuscripts were cataloged in the 19th century by William Wright, whose detailed descriptions remain indispensable today. But Wright, like many of his era, was mainly interested in tracing Syriac texts back to lost Greek originals. In the process, he often downplayed the compilatory artistry of the manuscripts themselves.

Now, thanks to digitization projects led by scholars like David Michelson and the Syriaca.org team, these old catalogs are being reoriented. By tagging and structuring Wright’s data, researchers can now analyze manuscripts at scale, spotting patterns that earlier generations simply couldn’t see.

Peaks in the landscape of knowledge

Maeir’s charts reveal a fascinating topography. Most manuscripts cluster in the “lowlands,” with very few excerpts. But then, here and there, mountains rise: manuscripts bursting with hundreds of selections. These high-EPM manuscripts weren’t confined to one genre. They appear in theology, history, liturgy, even in biblical commentary. This suggests that excerpting wasn’t a niche habit but a cross-cutting cultural practice. Still, the towering compilations seem to have been rare, concentrated in specific centuries and likely requiring extraordinary intellectual effort.

Maeir describes them as “pinnacles” of Syriac literary culture, sites where non-authorial creativity reached its height. They deserve closer study, not just as containers of texts, but as monuments to the way human communities once organized their knowledge worlds.

What makes this research exciting is the method. By applying “distant reading”, a technique coined by literary theorist Franco Moretti to describe large-scale, computational analysis, Maeir shows how digital humanities can transform even the most traditional fields like philology.

Instead of focusing on a single manuscript, distant reading allows scholars to see the “big picture.” It’s like switching from examining brushstrokes under a magnifying glass to flying over the entire landscape. Patterns emerge that were invisible before.

Of course, Maeir is careful to stress the limitations. The data comes from 19th-century catalog descriptions, and many dates need updating with modern paleographic techniques. Still, the study points toward a future where quantitative and qualitative methods enrich one another.

Why We Should Care

In a digital age flooded with information, the idea of excerpting feels oddly familiar. We clip quotes, make playlists, assemble feeds, and remix content. Our culture, like that of the Syriac scribes, thrives on curation as much as creation.

Maeir’s work reminds us that organizing knowledge is itself a creative act. Ancient scribes weren’t just passive copyists; they were active shapers of intellectual history. Their compilations shaped what survived, what was taught, and what became authoritative.

And perhaps, centuries from now, future historians will look at our playlists, anthologies, and even our Twitter threads with the same lens: not as random scraps, but as curated snapshots of how we made sense of the world.

If you want to learn more, the original article titled "Material philology and Syriac excerpting practices: A computational-quantitative study of the digitized catalog of the Syriac manuscripts in the British Library" on Plos one at [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320265] (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0320265)