On the transmission of texts: Written cultures as complex systems

Knowledge of past cultures relies heavily on surviving written material. Over the centuries, texts were copied, altered, and often lost, leaving scholars to reconstruct partial genealogies-stemmata-from shared innovations between surviving copies. Yet, a general understanding of the processes shaping textual transmission remains elusive. Within the broader topic of cultural evolution, text transmission provides a favorable context for integrating formal modeling with empirical evidence: explicitly identified items (texts), transmitted through deliberate manual replication, have left tangible artifacts (manuscripts)-traces of a dynamical, cultural, and historical process. Rethinking textual transmission through a complexity science approach, this study combines stochastic models and simulations, informed by historical scholarship, with empirical data from a corpus of circa 2,000 medieval manuscripts spanning four centuries. Our framework quantifies how variation in copying and destruction rates influences survival or extinction, and reproduces key stylized facts observed empirically in reconstructed stemmata, such as imbalance, a feature debated for over a century. Further, this approach provides broad trends estimates suggesting that up to 60%; of texts and more than 95%; of manuscripts may have been lost. Our findings highlight the role of drift in cultural transmission, while providing a formal basis to integrate drivers such as cultural selection and historical contingencies (eg the Black Death). It bridges philology and cultural evolution approaches, while providing a theoretical and empirical framework applicable to numerous other traditions-eg Classical literature, legal and scientific texts, religious canons-where replication and loss also shape what endures.