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https://www.openculture.com/2023/03/how-99-of-ancient-literature-was-lost.html

How 99% of Ancient Literature Was Lost
in History, Literature | March 13th, 2023 5 Comments

Ancient Greece and Rome had plenty of literature, but practically none
of it survives today. What exactly became of almost everything written
down in Western antiquity is the subject of the video above by
ancient-history Youtube channel Told in Stone, previously featured here
on Open Culture for its investigations into everything from the
Colosseum and the Pantheon to Roman nightlife and the explosion of Mount
Vesuvius. But none of its past videos has quite as much relevance to
this particular story as the one on the burning of the Library of
Alexandria.

Described by narrator Garret Ryan as “the greatest of all ancient
libraries,” the Library of Alexandria could have contained between
532,800 and 700,000 volumes in scroll form, all of them lost by the time
Julius Caesar burned it down in 48 B.C..

Even so, “the loss of all but a tiny fraction of ancient literature was
not brought about by the disappearance of a single library. It was,
instead, the consequence of the basic fragility of texts before the
advent of printing.” Papyrus, the pre-paper writing material first
developed in ancient Egypt, certainly couldn’t stand the test of time:
in relatively humid western Europe, “most papyri had to be recopied
every century or so.”

Plus ça change: even, and perhaps especially, in our digital era,
long-term data archival has turned out to necessitate regular movement
from one storage medium to the next. But perhaps our civilization will
prove luckier with the process than the Roman Empire, whose collapse
meant that “the elites who had traditionally commissioned new copies all
but vanished. Far fewer manuscripts were produced, and those that were
tended to serve the particular purposes of religion, education, and the
technical disciplines.” For these and other reasons, very few classics
made it to the Middle Ages, and thus to the Renaissance. But even if you
don’t have much to study, so the latter era gloriously demonstrated, you
can more than compensate by studying it hard.

Related content:

What Was Actually Lost When the Library of Alexandria Burned?

How Egyptian Papyrus Is Made: Watch Artisans Keep a 5,000-Year-Old Art Alive

The Rise and Fall of the Great Library of Alexandria: An Animated
Introduction

The Turin Erotic Papyrus: The Oldest Known Depiction of Human Sexuality
(Circa 1150 B.C.E.)

How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD,
Are Now Being Read by Particle Accelerators, 3D Modeling & Artificial
Intelligence

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities,
language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter
Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through
21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow
him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (5) |

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Comments (5)
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Frances Almefleh says:
March 13, 2023 at 5:51 pm
https://youtu.be/C8M4i9fvq1M
How Islam Saved Western Civilization
History lecture by Dr. Roy Casagranda

https://youtu.be/2ZN1qVd52z8
History lecture by Dr. Adnan Rashid

I hope you will enjoy these lectures by historians. They may expand your
view of how Western civilization developed.

Reply
T droppelman says:
March 15, 2023 at 4:54 am
This article neglects the fact that monotheism taught that only the
Hebrew scriptures had any moral value and that the spirituality of the
preceeding ages was demonic and needed to be avoided. Many works of
literature were deliberately not copied for that reason.

Reply
Dakota says:
March 15, 2023 at 7:17 am
If I’m not mistaken I believe one of the caliphate burned fown the
library of Alexandria, not Julius Caesar.

Reply
Alexander says:
March 15, 2023 at 9:34 am
There existed more durable writing material than papyrus before
printing, parchment for example and paper started being used in Europe
during the middle ages.

Reply
Lefke' says:
March 16, 2023 at 9:23 am
Many were taken and hidden in the Vatican.
Leonardo da Vinci copied many ancient inventions.

Reply