A huge portion of Assyrian cuneiform was preserved due to the fact that fires ravaged their cities, baking their clay tablets, if I understand correctly. Most of it hasn't even been translated yet. The Assyrian Empire was in the early iron age though, and Egyptian records go much further back than that I think.

> Taken into a climate wetter than Egypt (in other words, pretty much any other climate where people actually live) it begins to disintegrate very quickly and needs constant maintenance.

For example papyrus was massively used in the roman empire and all those records have disappeared, only what had been copied and re-copied since then reached us.

Was Egypt able to keep their culture for so long, and build many structures and temples - simply because they could transmit ideas through time? Other cultures would be stuck relearning the same building techniques and religious ceremonies every generation and relying on faulty oral histories.

Papyrus as a communication method through time.

The main difference is the sheer scale at which it is happening.

Paper records are relatively easy to store, and created as part of day-to-day operations. If something is written down on paper, they just have to put it in a box rather than throw it away. Is it already archived because the law says you need to keep it 10 year or something? Then it has a pretty decent chance of surviving as long as nobody takes the effort to clean out old records. Sure, paper can get damaged by fire, water, mold, insects, and a lot of other stuff, but in general if you leave it alone it'll be perfectly readable 100-200 years down the line without anyone actively trying to. Some yellowing and a smudge on the paper? No big deal, still perfectly readable.

Digital records are different. The physical mediums commonly used rapidly degrade, so survival past a few decades is doubtful. Even if it does survive, are you still going to have the equipment to read it? And if you have the equipment, are you even able to connect it to a modern machine? And don't expect to just reconstruct it: the specifications are even harder to find! In other words, for a digital record to survive in an easily-accessible format someone has to copy it to a new physical medium every few years.

Assuming you can read the disk, how are you going to interpret it? Most records aren't stored in ascii. You're going to need software which is able to parse whatever complicated format is being used - which is now horribly outdated. And that format and software wasn't designed for fault tolerance either: a single bit flip can prevent a file from being opened, or completely corrupt its content. It's going to require expert-level knowledge to retrieve it.

Some Zip-drive from 2000 containing a WordPerfect file? Probably doable 25 years later if you really want to, but it's going to be a challenge. Another 25, 50, or 75 years? Forget it.

And that's the best-case scenario. These days everything is stored in The Cloud, which means it'll just randomly disappear one day because they don't feel like keeping it. Mass deletion is trivial and happens without anyone noticing. If you're very lucky your records will last until a few years after your death, but even that is far from guaranteed. 200-year-old records retrieved from the cloud by archivists? Not going to happen.

I have access to at least 206.

That's an extremely fascinating angle I've never seen before. Thanks!

[flagged]