They observed that the process of successive copies was stealthily altering their literary content. In many passages, what the author was trying to say couldn’t be understood, and in other places, lines varied according to the copy. When they realized the extent of the problem, they understood that over the centuries, just as rocks are eroded by the constant rush of waves, texts would be eroded by the silent force of human fallibility, and the stories would become more and more incomprehensible, until they no longer made any sense at all.
