The only reason we have anything from 1000yrs ago is because people deliberately conserved it - copying, translating and actively passing things down the genera

The only reason we have anything from 1000yrs ago is because people deliberately conserved it - copying, translating and actively passing things down the generations - for example: Media: Oral history/stories -> early written versions on tablets/papyrus -> vellum/scrolls/hand copied books -> printed books -> digital. Language: Aramaic/Ancient Greek -> Latin/Greek -> Modern English If the original source media is very long-lived, you can skip some steps, but you still need to actively conserve and translate things - not just between old human languages, but from old media to new. This process is obviously very lossy - we have only a tiny fraction of the literature from 1000 yrs ago - we have only the intersection of the stuff that people cared enough about to transcribe many times over and the transcribed pieces that physically survived the ravages of time and history. Expecting things to just survive over the long term without anyone doing this - without anyone caring enough to do this - is probably both idealistic and unrealistic.