Highly amusing guys...

But the reason why old manuscipts are found in mummies:

Mummies were stuffed with whatever second hand appropriate materials were availabale (called recycling). Papryus from unwanted books was financially worth recycling - cf modern 3rd world countries where people make a living from the rubbish tips.

Books were written by hand - no printing press - China's use of hand carved wooden blocks for pages predates Western Europe's Gutenberg by centuries - but such magic was unknown in the time of mummy-stuffing..

(and that was not meant to be any sort of humourous statement... get your mind out of the gutter and let mine float past!)

A client would approach a scibe and request a copy of some work. Not every body was rich enough to keep all the books HE owned (very few women read - and certainly not all males did so) so he would often trade the book back to the scribe for another one, if he did not trade it on to someone else. If a "book" was popular, the scribe now had a "stock" which could be used again for another similar request - if not, vellum books were often scraped to allow reuse of the valuable writing material - if a papryus book was "obsolete", the mummy stuffers gave a good price. I have also heard that the material was used as mummy wrappings. Another use of old writing material was as "dunny paper" - a well known Victorian novelist who was a daughter of a vicar has a section where she notes that the family spent the day cutting up old reading materials to hang on wire behind the dunny door.

Robin
(Well Read Source of Useless Information - you should see behind MY toilet door...)