4 ms·

Actually the fact we have 10% is amazing. I would assume it would be much lower. The headline should say "10% of all Medieval manuscripts have been found!".

• Banana699 4y ago
  It could have been better. We have tons of surviving tablets from ancient mesopotamia, there is no way of estimating a percentage but I won't be surprised if its within 40%-60% range. This is inherent in the mediums used: mesopotamian tablets are just hardened clay, no decomposition and no book worms. Even when a tablet breaks, it breaks into a small number of sturdy pieces (unless smashed deliberately and repeatedly). Paper is begging to be lost in comparison. And this is important because we're repeating this mistake even more gravely now with digital media. Terrible proprietary formats and protocols that are lost like tears in rain the moment the private entity maintaining them closes down, terrible dependency graphs that are never frozen or even properly described (e.g. "runs on Linux" is an implicit dependency that is never explained or explicitly mentioned), terrible culture of "movE fAsT ANd bReAk tHiNGs", and a false sense of security and durability ("The Internet is forever") that makes us increasingly generate information in native-digital ways and convert whatever is not digital to digital then discarding the original. All of this is begging for a mass civilizational amnesia on a scale never seen or imaginable.