How 99% of Ancient Literature Was Lost

Ancient Greece and Rome had plen­ty of lit­er­a­ture, but prac­ti­cal­ly none of it sur­vives today. What exact­ly became of almost every­thing writ­ten down in West­ern antiq­ui­ty is the sub­ject of the video above by ancient-his­to­ry Youtube chan­nel Told in Stone, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for its inves­ti­ga­tions into every­thing from the Colos­se­um and the Pan­theon to Roman nightlife and the explo­sion of Mount Vesu­vius. But none of its past videos has quite as much rel­e­vance to this par­tic­u­lar sto­ry as the one on the burn­ing of the Library of Alexan­dria.

Described by nar­ra­tor Gar­ret Ryan as “the great­est of all ancient libraries,” the Library of Alexan­dria could have con­tained between 532,800 and 700,000 vol­umes in scroll form, all of them lost by the time Julius Cae­sar burned it down in 48 B.C..

Even so, “the loss of all but a tiny frac­tion of ancient lit­er­a­ture was not brought about by the dis­ap­pear­ance of a sin­gle library. It was, instead, the con­se­quence of the basic fragili­ty of texts before the advent of print­ing.” Papyrus, the pre-paper writ­ing mate­r­i­al first devel­oped in ancient Egypt, cer­tain­ly could­n’t stand the test of time: in rel­a­tive­ly humid west­ern Europe, “most papyri had to be recopied every cen­tu­ry or so.”

Plus ça change: even, and per­haps espe­cial­ly, in our dig­i­tal era, long-term data archival has turned out to neces­si­tate reg­u­lar move­ment from one stor­age medi­um to the next. But per­haps our civ­i­liza­tion will prove luck­i­er with the process than the Roman Empire, whose col­lapse meant that “the elites who had tra­di­tion­al­ly com­mis­sioned new copies all but van­ished. Far few­er man­u­scripts were pro­duced, and those that were tend­ed to serve the par­tic­u­lar pur­pos­es of reli­gion, edu­ca­tion, and the tech­ni­cal dis­ci­plines.” For these and oth­er rea­sons, very few clas­sics made it to the Mid­dle Ages, and thus to the Renais­sance. But even if you don’t have much to study, so the lat­ter era glo­ri­ous­ly demon­strat­ed, you can more than com­pen­sate by study­ing it hard.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Was Actu­al­ly Lost When the Library of Alexan­dria Burned?

How Egypt­ian Papyrus Is Made: Watch Arti­sans Keep a 5,000-Year-Old Art Alive

The Rise and Fall of the Great Library of Alexan­dria: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

The Turin Erot­ic Papyrus: The Old­est Known Depic­tion of Human Sex­u­al­i­ty (Cir­ca 1150 B.C.E.)

How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Par­ti­cle Accel­er­a­tors, 3D Mod­el­ing & Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.