In both cases many of the tablets didn’t survive either, as collapsing buildings turned them into dust, or pieces to small to put back together.

You can’t put everything we’ve written in a medium that will last forever, under any kind of circumstance. Get used to it.

(Type: “a lacunA,” not “a lacunAE.” Speaking of those dead languages…)

Really? Then why does my gag reflex kick in if I hear more than 5 seconds of an add for Celtic Sojourn?

i.e. no one just picks up shakespeare, reads it, and fully understands it. It must be learned.

Because, really, “I bite my thumb at thee!” makes no sense until someone with extra knowledge elucidates you. Which is why we have the annotated shakespeare.

Asking how much of the ancient literature that we do have is fully understood is perhaps a better way to attack this problem. Digital knowledge is fine (we’re coming up on memristive storage, which keeps sans power) – so maybe a way to package tons of knowledge in a format such as that (which will, of course, be tiny) and a package that contains successive layers of instructions on how to build access the deeper layers. A.k.a. a Rosetta stone that ‘translates’ by bestowing the knowledge of how to bootstrap yourself into a technological society

(apologies if I’m not making much sense. the immune system attack that’s currently being perpetuated upon my bodily invaders in slowing my brain down)

The library at Alexandria and Byblos were both sacked, in the case of Alexandria, at least, multiple times.

There were also at least a couple of organized and systemic purges of pagan and heretical documents in the late Roman Empire/early Byzantine Empire, and minor echoes of these efforts in the Middle Ages. They were organized a lot like the 1980s war on drugs, with draconian punishments for people found possessing pagan works and relics and worship places, property where it was found subject to civil forfeiture, and so on. Many pagan and heretical documents are know today only by references to them by orthodox Christian apologies that refer to them in the course of trying to refute them.

#13 – Violet, I once had the dubious pleasure of excavating an old garbage dump for bridge foundations. The garbage had been dumped into a peat swamp that was mildly acidic. Amongst other things that we found were a 1920s car body, bright shiny metal without any sign of rust, and hundreds of reels of old movie film that appeared to be in excellent condition.

I think we’re probably looking at 1000s of years, so maybe plastic is best. But what to preserve?

So just like the Pyramids and their secrets, we need to be like the Mormons, and place these plastic writing tablets in vaults deep in mountains – possible a few well chosen locations per continent – so that future generation can decipher what came before – or the alien inheritors of the earth can discover them for their own amusement!