Quote:
Originally Posted by orcinus
Yeees, just look at the library of Alexandria   |
In those days until the advent of the printing press, manuscripts were done one at a time taking up to 3 months a copy. They'd make a run of 5 to 50 if the text was worth it. Alexandria was the proverbial egg basket.
I could give you the opposing example of Pompei where the only organic material to survive was what looked like a clump of charred fire wood. Upon closer examination, there was more than 1300 tightly rolled up papiri. There is a team working on those and they are making good progress on deciphering some known and unknown texts.
With printed text it's even easyer, you only need one example to survive a catastrophe and most books surface at some point. Just take the Twin Towers as an example although they were pulverised you could see sheets of paper floating about! Authorities had to set up special task forces to protect the privacy of information those papers carried. I don't recall their pulling out working hard drives there but I may be mistaken. Paper can survive violent phenomenons like the reed survives the proverbial mighty oak!
Hey! data is solid too! just take those flight black boxes. Labs almost always seem to recover what they need from them.
My point is clear enough... we need ALL the supports we can in their best utterances with the less fuss for deciphering.
Choosing one over the other is a mistake.