I find it amazing that the books and manuscripts are still around hundreds if not a thousand years later meanwhile the dye medium of my data CDs from the mid 90s is probably rotten.
Lots of books and manuscripts from that period aren't around any more. A monestry in the middle of the desert is going to be hot and dry, which is great for preserving books.
"Never been sacked" is important as well. Often books can get burned and destroyed during political upheaval, either intentionally (burn the books) or accidentially (the building with the books goes on fire).
When the Spanish conquered what is now Mexico, they destroyed all the Mayan books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices#Background
> "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."
> Mari holds the key to much of our knowledge of this era. The site of Babylon has physically sunk over the years so that now the palace and archives of Hammurabi are below the water table and, presumably, reduced to mud
> As in the case of Ebla, the vast archive of thousands of documents from eighteenth-century [BC] Mari is preserved because the palace burned down. [...] Because of this, it is possible to read, in some of the letters baked and buried in the conflagration, about Hammurabi's relations with Mari in happier times.
Our documents from that period come from conquering kings who, in their zeal to raze enemy cities, forever preserved those cities' records. Literature wasn't as much of a presence then as it is now (tablets run to accounting and correspondence), but it (and history) existed; cf the epic of Gilgamesh.
It is so utterly disappointing that the voodoo of Catholicism felt the need to destroy the Mayan books as voodoo. My voodoo is better than yours, but just in case.
Prompted a thought: bits are always either there or not, ultimately, correct? (meaning you can either recover it, or never can) Whereas with printed or written text, you can recover partial data - a partial single letter for example - and conclude what it was. With the potential of written text also being generally far more restricted in possibilities (given you know, eg the language and time frame), than what's on a data disc.
But bits are abstractions encoded in the physical world which is not at all 'either there or not' anywhere near the scale of writable CDs. For starters for every 24 bits of data 56 bits are written on the physical media (8 to 14 encoding and a redundancy byte for every 3 data byes) and then the pits and lands are written into dye ... much like a written page if you language consisted of a very long straight series of lines of varying length.
Yeah, but CDs were never made to last very long. The key with digital information is that it's easy to duplicate and copy, so the preservation strategy in the digital age is data redundancy.
Yes. Agree, but what I meant is that the materials used to record information mattered more before. If you write something in stone (like the Rosetta stone, for example), it's extremely durable even if you do not make any copy of it. For oil paintings and sculptures, copies were usually not the preservation strategy, rather the protection of the originals in trusted places.
