How many letters are usually in a line in Ancient Greek texts?

Christian Bloom's answer is right. There is interesting work being done on books and readers in the ancient world, and the starting point is to recognize that books and reading practices differed widely not only in time and place but also among socio-economic groups. read more

The result was that the line beginnings themselves provided natural points for the ocular fixation, and the “decoding” of the letters could proceed regularly on a line–by–line basis. Although it's true that ancient texts typically didn't use word divisions, the Greeks had the idea very early. read more

The number of untranslated ancient manuscripts, including the Greek and Latin, is unknowable. I’ll try to explain a little. First, there is no automatic ownership of ancient manuscripts. Many are looted and find their way into a market, bazaar, souk, for collectors and auctioneers to find. Many are exported, often illegally. read more

Formerly most Coptic letters shared codepoints with similar-looking Greek letters; but in many scholarly works, both scripts occur, with quite different letter shapes, so as of Unicode 4.1, Coptic and Greek were disunified. Those Coptic letters with no Greek equivalents still remain in this block (U+03E2 to U+03EF). read more