> Ever heard of the library of Alexandria? Yes: the end of the library of Alexandria had virtually no impact on the preservation of knowledge. The library of

> Ever heard of the library of Alexandria? Yes: the end of the library of Alexandria had virtually no impact on the preservation of knowledge. The library of Alexandria slowly declined for various centuries, and was progressively replaced by dozens of libraries in the rest of the world. We don’t know how much of its materials was lost in time, but the key thing is that knowledge of that time was not preserved by libraries but by copies of documents. What we know from Antiquity is mostly due to scribes and monks who spend their life copying content, while libraries have been mostly useless for that purpose.