I mean, there’s the Roman empire that didn’t fall (Eastern) and the Islamic world that preserved a lot of that shit. The Renaissance in Italy was kicked off by Greek scholars fleeing the fall of Constantinople bringing copies of Plato with them.
The Eastern Roman Empire didn’t have the resources and experienced a slow decline.
You are right though they were able to preserve some of the texts and knowledge, but they lacked the resources to preserve it all.
Likewise the rise of the Islamic world was simply too late to preserve these texts from antiquity. They certainly had the resources to do so at their height.
The issue is it only takes a century maybe two if conditions are good for books to rot away. Pest infestations combined with a lack of climate control does not preserve books. Especially the types of papers and bindings then were quite susceptible
I wonder if we’re living in a future dark age because so much data is going to rot away. People are trying to copy things off rotting floppies and CDs and such. A lot of digital knowledge will be lost if we keep it on media that requires electricity, power, a specific OS or computer program, etc to access. On the other hand, we still print a lot of material on paper.
Small example: in my job, there is a well known first application of some stuff. That was a groundbreaking program written in the 70s. Most copies got lost/broken, one is known to remain, but anyways no one had a compatible OS, so it is effectively unusable. (Don’t ask more details, I don’t know them)
I mean, there’s the Roman empire that didn’t fall (Eastern) and the Islamic world that preserved a lot of that shit. The Renaissance in Italy was kicked off by Greek scholars fleeing the fall of Constantinople bringing copies of Plato with them.
The Eastern Roman Empire didn’t have the resources and experienced a slow decline.
You are right though they were able to preserve some of the texts and knowledge, but they lacked the resources to preserve it all.
Likewise the rise of the Islamic world was simply too late to preserve these texts from antiquity. They certainly had the resources to do so at their height.
The issue is it only takes a century maybe two if conditions are good for books to rot away. Pest infestations combined with a lack of climate control does not preserve books. Especially the types of papers and bindings then were quite susceptible
I wonder if we’re living in a future dark age because so much data is going to rot away. People are trying to copy things off rotting floppies and CDs and such. A lot of digital knowledge will be lost if we keep it on media that requires electricity, power, a specific OS or computer program, etc to access. On the other hand, we still print a lot of material on paper.
Small example: in my job, there is a well known first application of some stuff. That was a groundbreaking program written in the 70s. Most copies got lost/broken, one is known to remain, but anyways no one had a compatible OS, so it is effectively unusable. (Don’t ask more details, I don’t know them)
That is largely a myth. Just as the great fire of the library of Alexandria.