Brodie Ramin, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

In the early hours of Jan. 1, 2026, a fire ripped through Le Constellation bar in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, killing 40 people and injuring 116, many of them severely.

Investigators believe the blaze began when sparklers on champagne bottles were held too close to the ceiling, igniting interior materials. The investigation is ongoing, and it is premature to draw conclusions about individual actions or responsibility. But fires do not need villains to be instructive.

What matters is not the spark itself, but the system into which that spark was introduced.

Fire safety, as history keeps reminding us, is not about eliminating ignition. We will always cook, heat, wire, decorate, celebrate and repair. Fire prevention is about ensuring that when ignition happens, as it inevitably will, it does not propagate.

My research has focused on how disasters are prevented, and how warning signs are missed when systems drift or protections are taken for granted. Fire safety is one area I have examined, and it reveals recurring patterns that are relevant to understanding this tragedy.

Fire as a contagion

For one thing, fire behaves less like an accident and more like a virus. It spreads through available fuel, follows paths of least resistance and accelerates when conditions are favourable. The historian Stephen Pyne describes fire as a “contagion of combustion.”

Like disease prevention, fire safety has never relied on a single safeguard. Instead, it depends on layers of them: materials that resist ignition, detection systems that identify problems early, compartmentalization that limits spread, suppression systems that slow or extinguish flames and trained humans who know how to respond when technology falters. When fires become destructive, it is almost always because multiple layers fail at once.

The Reason Model and fire prevention

The Reason Model, often visualized as slices of Swiss cheese, helps explain why disasters occur even in systems designed to be safe.

Each slice represents a layer of defence. Each slice also contains holes, imperfections, gaps and latent weaknesses. Most of the time, those holes do not line up, but when they do, harm passes through.

Latent conditions for fire exist everywhere: dry materials, electrical wiring, human fatigue, budget constraints, informal workarounds. These conditions are usually harmless until they align. The spark is not the cause of the disaster. It is merely the moment when all the holes line up.

Celebration and risk perception

The New Year’s fire at Le Constellation bar occurred in a celebratory setting. That matters, because celebration changes how we perceive risk.

Celebratory spaces often bring together the very conditions fire exploits: crowds, alcohol, decorations, reduced vigilance, temporary installation and informal rule-bending “just for the night.” When those conditions align with flammable materials or limited escape access, the margin for error shrinks dramatically.

Latent conditions are not evenly distributed across time. They cluster during moments of exception — holidays, renovations, special events when normal routines are suspended.

Notre-Dame: when multiple failures occur

When the Notre-Dame Cathedral nearly collapsed in a fire in April 2019, it shocked the world. The building was not neglected. It had a sophisticated fire detection system with more than 160 sensors. Fire wardens patrolled the attic three times daily. A firefighter was permanently stationed on site. The Paris Fire Brigade had trained for exactly such a scenario.

And yet, the fire still spread.

An alarm triggered at 6:18 p.m., but a misinterpreted code sent a guard to the wrong attic. A fatigued technician, covering a double shift, struggled to escalate the alert. The system detected the fire, but it did not automatically summon the fire department. By the time the correct location was identified, 30 minutes had passed. The roof timbers, made of centuries old dry oak, were already burning uncontrollably.

Notre-Dame did not burn because no one cared. It burned because multiple failures aligned: ambiguous alarm codes, human fatigue, delayed escalation and architectural features that lacked compartmentalization or sprinklers. A fire protection engineer later remarked that the only surprise was that the disaster had not happened sooner.

Rarity breeds complacency

One of the paradoxes of modern fire safety is that it works so well it becomes invisible. Between 1980 and 2024, the rate of reported fires per 1,000 people in the United States fell by more than 60 per cent, according to long-term data compiled by the National Fire Protection Association. Sprinklers, fire doors, smoke detectors, compartmentalization and education campaigns have made large fires rare.

But that rarity can breed complacency.

When a system prevents disaster hundreds of times, it becomes tempting to ignore precautions. Doors are left open. Materials are substituted. Alarms are misunderstood. Redundancies are trimmed.

The holes in the safety system widen quietly. Then, eventually, they all line up.

Learning from tragedies

The Swiss fire had its own specific causes, and those details matter. But the broader lesson is neither new nor obscure. Fires do not escalate only because people are reckless. They escalate because systems drift away from the conditions under which they were safe.

Fire safety is an engineering and organizational project. It requires constant attention to small details, especially when nothing seems wrong. It demands respect for fire and its destructive potential.

We have learned, repeatedly, how to prevent fires from spreading. Every major advance, from fire doors to sprinklers to automatic shutoff systems, came from studying failures where containment broke down.

The tragedy is not that we do not know what works. It is that, over time, we forget to be afraid.

Brodie Ramin, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Medicine, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Juan Luis Manfredi, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

On the back of every dollar bill, the phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum (“New order of the ages”) hints at the principle guiding the US’ new security strategy.

The attack on Venezuela and the capture of President Nicolás Maduro herald the decoupling of Trump’s United States from the rules-based international order, and the end of liberal order as a whole. A new international order is now emerging, based on the use of force, revisionism and security on the American continent.

Here are five keys to understanding the outcomes of the military intervention, and the new order it ushers in.

1. Expanded presidential power

The attack cements the new doctrine of an imperious president, one who executes orders without waiting for congressional approval, legal validation or media opinion.

With checks and balances weakened, the second Trump administration is free to present the new order as a question of urgent security: with the US at war against drug trafficking (or migration) and threatened by “new powers” (a euphemism for China), it has no need to respect proper procedures or timelines.

Trump identifies himself with historic, founding American presidents like Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt. All three were charismatic leaders, and with the 250th anniversary of the US republic approaching such comparisons feed into Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric.

Erosion of the US political and legal system is undeniable. The president has approved an extensive package of regulations that promote emergency powers, a permanent state of crisis, and suppression of political opposition and the judicial system. The attack on Venezuela is yet another milestone in the reconfiguration of the presidency’s relations to the legislative and judicial branches of power, in line with the Hamiltonian tradition of a strong and unifying executive branch.

2. (Latin) America for the (US) Americans

On the international stage, the attack on Venezuela advances a diplomatic agenda that is rooted in the defence of national interests. The concept of “America for the Americans” has made a strong comeback: Panama, Mexico and Canada have all been made to bow to Trump’s will, while the administration continues to push for control of Greenland.

In Latin America, Brazil and Colombia’s left-wing governments lead regional opposition to the US, while Chile’s newly elected José Antonio Kast and Argentina’s Javier Milei are Trump’s ideological allies. The continent as a whole is witnessing a broad shift towards nationalist, right-wing parties that oppose migration.

If Venezuela’s post-Maduro transition aligns with these values, any hope for national unity and a peaceful transition to full democracy will disappear.

3. Control of resources

Once again, it’s all about oil, but for different reasons than in Iraq. In a world where globalisation has shifted to geoeconomics, the United States wants to project its power in international energy markets and regulation. Venezuela’s infrastructure, ports and minerals are key to making this happen.

The US therefore doesn’t just want Venezuelan oil to supply its domestic market – it also wants to impose international prices and dominate supply. Its new vision aims to align energy sovereignty and technological development with trade and security.

Pax Silica – the international US-led alliance signed at the end of 2025 to secure supply chains for critical technologies such as semiconductors and AI – ushers in an era of transactional diplomacy: computer chips in exchange for minerals. For the “new” Venezuela, its oil reserves will allow it to participate in this new power dynamic.

4. Geopolitical realignment

The American view of territory fuels a revisionist foreign policy based on sovereignty – similar to those of China, Israel, or Russia – which is rooted in the concept of “nomos”, as defined by mid-20th century German philosopher Carl Schmitt. This is a worldview where the division of nations into “friend or foe” prevails over a liberal worldview governed by cooperation, international law, democracy and the free market.

Under this logic, spheres of influence emerge, resources are distributed, and power blocs are balanced, as the above examples demonstrate: without opposition, China would dominate Southeast Asia, Russia would scale back its war in exchange for 20% of Ukraine and control over its material resources and energy, and Israel would redraw the map of the Middle East and strike trade agreements with neighbouring countries.

5. Europe, democracy and Hobbes

Ideals like democracy, the rule of law and free trade are fading fast, and without effective capacity, things don’t end well for the European Union. As we have seen with Gaza, the EU often has strong ideological disagreement with other major powers but doesn’t command enough respect to do anything. The US’ military intervention revives Hobbesian political realism, where freedom is ceded to an absolute sovereign in exchange for peace and security.

In Trump’s new order, it is presidential authority – not truth, laws or democratic values – that has the final say.

US domestic politics

2026 is an election year in the US, with 39 gubernatorial elections and a raft of state and local elections to be contested between March and November.

Through its actions in Venezuela, the Trump administration is effectively debating its model for succession. One faction, led by JD Vance, wants to avoid problems abroad and to renew the industrial economic model. The other, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is committed to rebuilding the international order with a strong and dominant US. The outcome of the Venezuelan operation may tip the balance, and could determine Trump’s successor in the 2028 presidential elections.

The attack on Venezuela is not just an intervention in the region: it also reflects the changing times in which we live. While international Trumpism was previously confined to disjointed slogans, it has now taken its first step into military strategy. Gone are the days of soft power, transatlantic relations and peace in Ibero-America. A new order is being born.

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Juan Luis Manfredi, Prince of Asturias Distinguished Professor @Georgetown, Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

David Thomas, University of Oxford

The Dune films remind us of just how beautiful, mysterious, expansive and changeable sand dunes can be. For centuries these wonderful landforms have filled humans with awe – and in some cases fear and foreboding – because of the apparent remoteness and risks associated with the deserts they are synonymous with.

That’s what first attracted me to research deserts and dunes more than 40 years ago, and I have been investigating them ever since. Here are five things I have learned that may surprise you:

Not all dunes are made of sand

Ash, snow and even gypsum can all build dunes. Dunes develop when small particles are mobilised on bare dry surfaces by a moderate wind, accumulating where movement is slowed down by an obstacle or a surface undulation. Where the wind deposits the particles they can create a small mound against which other particles in turn accumulate, leading eventually to a dune.

“Sand” is not really a material – it is a size of particle, somewhere between 0.06mm and 2mm diameter. Dunes in deserts and at the coast are primarily formed of quartz and feldspar grains, the most common minerals on earth.

But in volcanic regions, such as the interior of Iceland, dunes can be formed of ash, while in the centre of Antarctica, the driest and windiest continental earth, dunes can form from ice crystals and snow. In New Mexico, US, the very soft and bright mineral gypsum forms dunes – appropriately the place is called White Sands.

Dunes can record a history of climate changes

Sand dunes might seem soft and changeable, but below their active surface there often lies older sand that tells a story of long-term development.

Dune shape is affected by how changeable wind direction is through the year: some dunes, such as crescent-shaped barchan dunes, roll forward under fairly consistent winds, with the sand turning over on a regular basis. Others, such as linear and star dunes, develop where wind directions are more variable, piling sand up to thicknesses of tens and even hundreds of metres.

Using a technique called luminescence dating, we can measure how long dune sand has been hidden from sunlight, identifying periods when dunes even stopped forming and soils, now themselves buried under more sand, developed on dune surfaces under wetter climates.

In Arabia’s Rub’ al Khali desert, for example, giant linear sand dunes have formed in several dry periods during the past 130,000 years. The dunes may even be much older, as it hasn’t yet been possible to drill all the way through to the base and establish the whole accumulation history.

Only a fifth of deserts are covered by sand dunes

Only about a fifth of all desert areas have the right conditions to form dunes: a supply of fine loose sediment, enough wind energy and the absence of protective vegetation. Other common desert landscape features include mountains, rock slopes, gravel surfaces and dry lake beds.

Yet we can go beyond today’s deserts and find evidence of more widespread dune landscapes, for example underneath the grass and woodlands of some of Africa‘s savanna regions such as the Kalahari and even under tropical rainforests in parts of South America. These dunes testify to different patterns of deserts and climate in the past.

Scotland’s ancient dunes changed history

In the 1780s, the Scottish geologist James Hutton realised that the well-bedded and distinctive red sandstones at Siccar Point on Scotland’s eastern coast were in fact the preserved remains of ancient desert sand dunes. At this location the Devonian old red sandstone, as it is now known, abruptly overlies fine grey mudstones.

Hutton realised that a considerable period of time – we now know it to be over 65 million years – must have elapsed between the grey rocks being laid down, smoothed flat by erosion, and the red sands being deposited on top.

His careful theorising established the foundations of modern geology and our understanding that the earth was much older than the history that had been calculated from biblical texts. Further developments in the 20th century enabled us to explain why rocks formed under desert conditions are found in the unlikely context of Scotland – we now know it’s due to movements of the earth’s crust, or plate tectonics.

Coastal dunes defend against storms

Sand dunes fringe large tracts of the world’s coastlines, built from wind-blown sand derived from the drying intertidal beach zone and trapped by onshore vegetation. While only 7% of the British coastline has dunes, 40% of Australia’s and 60% of Portugal’s are fronted by dunes.

These dunes play a vital role in protecting low-lying land from tidal surges and storms. Yet in some areas human recreation and sand extraction for building has degraded the dunes by damaging stabilising vegetation and creating blow-outs, with sea level rise adding a further risk.

David Thomas, Professor of Geography, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Duncan Mitchell, University of the Witwatersrand

The Namib desert of south-western Africa can be extremely hot – the surface temperature can be over 50°C. But a surprising number of around 200 beetle species live on its bare, inhospitable-looking sand dunes.

Scientists studying them were perplexed by the astonishing behaviour of one of the beetle species – a darkling beetle, Onymacris plana.

Like most desert darkling beetles, it is black – a colour that absorbs heat. And it has a flattened body, a big surface area exposed to heat. Scientists didn’t expect to find it active on the sand surface in the dangerous heat of the day. But it sprints in the sun, sometimes pausing in the shade of a desert shrub.

In fact, it’s the fastest of all the invertebrates of the Namib desert sands. This tiny beetle can run as fast as a human can walk.

When humans and other animals run, the fuel burning in our muscles produces heat. The faster we run, the more oxygen we use and the hotter we get.

But not so these beetles.

In an astonishing discovery, we established that the beetle in fact gets cooler when it exercises. This is the first land animal to have been found with this capability (and the first research of its type on a pedestrian animal).

Their cooling system enables them to move around to find their wind-blown food before it’s covered by sand. And they can be active when other animals (predators and competitors) are not. Finally, males can spend more time looking for mates. So we believe they are adapted to move in the sun because it’s good for survival.

The hunt

In the early 1980s, entomologist Sue Nicolson and her co-workers from various universities and research institutes went out on the dunes in the hot sun to measure the temperature of the beetles. They used a thermometer in a fine hypodermic needle to measure each beetle’s temperature without harming it. The needle went into the beetle’s thorax, from underneath. They looked for beetles that had just finished a sprint and others that had rested for the same time in the shade of a shrub. The beetles that had finished a sprint were no hotter than those that stayed in the shade.

In the 1980s, comparative physiologist George Bartholomew and his co-workers from various universities measured how much oxygen the beetles used while running on a treadmill. Running fast took hardly any more oxygen than running slowly. So, running faster would not make the beetles much hotter.

So, we knew how hot the beetles were after a sprint (not very hot), and how much oxygen they used while running (not much). But what no-one had done was to measure the temperature of the beetles while they were running.

We’re a team of scientists who work on how animals’ bodies cope with heat. Much of our desert research is done in the Namib Desert. We wanted to know how the beetles achieved something that looked impossible physiologically: run in the Namib sun.

We attached a fine thermocouple thermometer fed through the end of a fishing pole.

One of our team followed the beetle while it was running in the sun, keeping the weight and drag of the thermometer off it. But the beetles did not get hotter when they ran – they got cooler.

Run like the wind

We calculated what should have happened to the temperature of the beetle. Because it was black, we could estimate how much of the sun’s radiation it would have absorbed. The Namib’s sun is so intense that the radiation falling on a tabletop would boil a kettle.

We measured how far the beetles had run and in what time, so we knew their speed. We could calculate how much heat they were generating in their muscles. Adding the sun’s heating to the heat coming from the muscles, we calculated that, in the hottest Namib sun, the beetles’ temperature should have risen by 5°C per minute. That should have killed them.

The Namib desert’s sand can be burningly hot but its air, blowing in off the Atlantic Ocean, is cool. Running generates a wind over the body. We concluded that the heat from the sun and from the muscles must be carried away by that cool wind.

The males have an especially flattened body shaped like the wing of an aircraft so that they almost float, clear of the hot sand.

We needed to confirm that what we had observed on the sand dune did not conflict with what engineers know about heat transfer (moving thermal heat from one object to another). So, we took beetles into the laboratory. We put them under a lamp which heated them as much as the sun would have done.

Then we blew cool air over them from the front at the speed at which they would have run. So, we mimicked the cool wind they would have felt when they were running on the dune. Switching on the fan dropped the temperature of the beetles by as much as 13°C.

Our laboratory experiments confirmed that the wind generated by running could carry away all the heat that the beetles absorbed from the desert sun. But to survive on the dunes, they had to run. Standing still in the sun in windless conditions would have meant death by overheating.

So evolution has delivered an animal that is cooled by running. This is unique for a pedestrian animal so far, though we think that some desert ants may also be able to do it. Many aquatic animals do cool by swimming and some insects cool by flying.

Carole S. Roberts, Mary Seely, Liz McClain and Victoria Goodall of the Gobabeb Namib Research Institute, Walvis Bay, Namibia, contributed to this research and article.

Duncan Mitchell, Honorary Professorial Research Fellow, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Konstantine Panegyres, The University of Western Australia

If you were to visit a bookshop in the ancient world, what would it be like?

You don’t just have to imagine it. The ancient Roman writer Aulus Gellius, who lived in the 2nd century CE, gives us a number of descriptions of his adventures at bookstores. In one passage, he describes an encounter at one in Rome, which he was visiting with a poet friend:

I chanced to be sitting in a bookshop in the Sigillaria with the poet Julius Paulus […] There was on sale there the Annals of Quintus Fabius Pictor in a copy of good and undoubted age, which the dealer maintained was without errors.

Gellius then tells us that, while they are sitting there, another customer enters the shop. The new customer has a disagreement with the dealer. He complains that he “found in the book one error”. The dealer says that’s impossible. Then the customer brings out evidence to prove the dealer wrong.

In different passage, Aulus tells us about some bookstalls he came across when he arrived by ship at the port of Brundisium on the Adriatic coast. The books, he records, were “in Greek, filled with marvellous tales, things unheard of, incredible […] The writers were ancient and of no mean authority”.

The volumes themselves, however, were filthy from neglect, in bad condition and unsightly. Nevertheless, I drew near and asked their price; then, attracted by their extraordinary and unexpected cheapness, I bought a large number of them for a small sum.

Aulus goes on to describe in excited language all the weird facts he derived from these books – like how people in Africa can “work spells by voice and tongue” and through this witchcraft cause people, animals, trees and crops to die.

The origins of writing

These sorts of stories bring us close to how ordinary people in ancient Greek and Roman times obtained books and engaged with books. But if we read stories like this it might lead us to want to know more. How did books and writing come into existence? And how were books written and produced?

Many people in the ancient world thought that writing had been invented by gods or heroes. For example, the ancient Egyptians believed the god Thoth was the first to create signs to represent spoken sounds.

The origins of writing are certainly mysterious. It’s unclear when writing began and who invented it.

The earliest written text is a wooden tablet radiocarbon dated to before 5000 BCE. This is known as the Dispilio tablet, because it was discovered at a neolithic lakeside settlement at Dispilio in Greece. It is carved with strange linear markings. These have not been deciphered, but most scholars think they are a form of writing.

Evidence for writing appears early in different parts of the world. In Mesopotamia and Egypt, the oldest texts, such as the Kish limestone tablet at Uruk or the Narmer Palette at Hierakonpolis, date to before 3000 BCE. In the Indus Valley, the Harappan script, which remains undeciphered, appeared around the same time. In China, the earliest characters, the Dawenkou graphs, also date to around 3000 BCE.

One of the most interesting aspects of early writing is that there is such a variety of different scripts. For example, the earliest known texts in the Greek language are written in the Linear B script, which was used from around 1500-1200 BCE, and wasn’t deciphered until 1952. Linear B is not an alphabet, but a syllabary of more than 80 different signs. A syllabary is a kind of writing system where each sign represents a syllable.

By around the 8th century BCE, most Greeks had starting using an alphabet instead of a syllabary. Unlike a syllabary, in an alphabet each letter represents a vowel or consonant. The Greeks adapted their alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet, probably via interactions with Phoenician traders. The Phoenician alphabet had only 22 letters, making it much easier to learn than the 80-plus syllabary signs of Linear B.

Our English alphabet comes from the Romans, who in the 8th and 7th century BCE also got their alphabet from the Phoenicians, via the Greeks.

The origins of books

People in ancient times used many different things as writing materials.

The Roman writer Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) tells us that the earliest people in the world

used to write on palm-leaves and then on the bark of certain trees, and afterwards folding sheets of lead began to be employed for official muniments, and then also sheets of linen or tablets of wax for private documents.

However, the most popular writing material in the ancient Mediterranean was papyrus, from which we get our word “paper”.

To make papyrus, you get the pith of the papyrus plant (Cyperus papyrus), cut it into slender strips, then press it together. Once dried, it forms a thin sheet that you can write on.

Papyrus sheets were usually glued together into rolls. These rolls could be very long. Some of the most lavish Egyptian papyrus rolls were more than 10 metres long, such as the recently discovered Waziri Papyrus containing parts of the Book of the Dead.

When papyri were rolled up they were stored in shelves or boxes. Labels were attached to the handles of the papyri so you could identify their contents. In his play Linus, Greek playwright Alexis (c. 375-275 BC) has one character tell another how to look through a bunch of rolls to find what he wants:

go over and pick any papyrus roll you like out of there and then read it… examining them quietly, and at your leisure, on the basis of the labels. Orpheus is in there, Hesiod, tragedies, Choerilus, Homer, Epicharmus, prose treatises of every type…

Papyrus seems flimsy to the eye, but it is a durable writing material, stronger than modern paper. Many papyri have survived for thousands of years stored in jars or sarcophagi or buried under the sand.

The oldest surviving papyrus text is the so-called Diary of Merer (which you can listen to here), the logbook of a man named Merer, who was an inspector during the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza under Pharaoh Khufu. This papyrus, which dates to around 2600 BCE, gives a day-by-day account of how Merer and his team of about 200 men spent time hauling and transporting stone and doing other work.

Papyrus was susceptible to being eaten by insects or mice. But there were ways to prevent this. Pliny the Elder, for example, advises that sheets of papyrus soaked in citrus-oil won’t be eaten by moths.

How to write a book in antiquity

If you were living in ancient Greece or Rome and wanted to write a book, how would you do it?

First, you would buy sheets or rolls of papyrus to write on. If you couldn’t afford it, you’d have to write on the back or in the margins of papyri you already owned.

If you didn’t own any papyri already, then you would have to write on other materials. According to the Greek historian Diogenes Laertius (3rd century CE), the philosopher Cleanthes (c. 331-231 BCE) “wrote down lectures on oyster-shells and the blade-bones of oxen through lack of money to buy papyrus”.

Second, you would get your ink. In the ancient world, there were many varieties of ink. Normal black ink was made from the soot of burnt resin or pitch mixed with vegetable gum. When buying ink, it would come in powder form, and you would need to mix it with water before using it.

Third, you would get your pen. It would be made from reed, hence it was called the “calamus” by Greeks and Romans (“calamus” is the Greek word for reed). To sharpen your pen you would need a knife. If you made a mistake, you would erase it with a wet sponge.

Now you have all the materials you need. However, you don’t need to use the pen and papyrus yourself. If you want, you can get a scribe to write down your words for you.

The Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (c.40-110 CE) even advised writers not to use the pen themselves:

Writing I do not advise you to engage in with your own hand, or only very rarely, but rather to dictate to a secretary.

If you needed to consult other books while writing, you could get friends to send them to you or ask book dealers to make you a copy. In a papyrus from the 2nd century CE found at Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, and written in Greek, the writer asks his friend to find the books that he needs and make copies of them. Otherwise, you would go to a library, though the best libraries at Alexandria, Rome and Athens might be far away.

When you finished drafting your book you would need to revise and correct it. You could then publish it by having many copies made by scribes and delivering these copies to friends and booksellers.

When all this was done, your book would be out in public. Perhaps someone like Aulus Gellius would stumble across it in a busy Roman bookshop. Maybe he’d even buy it.

Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.