Commenting on the low rate of survival of written documents in antiquity, Stephen C. Jett wrote:
The Years Take Their Toll: Deterioration of Records
Written documents of yesteryear had a low rate of survival, a consequence of the many destructive forces that may act upon archaeological and historical materials. One instance was the 1875 explosion of the ship Magneta, which was carrying to France 2,080 Punic stelae, many inscribed, from the ruins of Carthage. Although the bulk were eventually recovered by divers, almost four hundred still rest on the bottom of the bay at Toulon.
Before the advent of printing, the majority of documents existed as unique or in only a limited number of exemplars, and to their contents were vulnerable to total loss. Written records on relatively imperishable materials such as clay tablets, potsherds (ostraca), stone, metal, and, to a lesser extent, shell, bone, and ivory, are, with the occasional important exception (such as in the library of Ashur-bani-pal), typically brief and usually involve texts that are lists of or dedications to deities, ritual formulas, formulaic proclamations of power, commemorative honorifics, king lists, records of military events, diplomatic letters, observations of nature, omen lists, or simple inventories. Historical epics have survived in fragments only.
Most longer works (as well as many letters and the like) were normally written on (expensive) papyrus or on animal-skin leather, parchment, or vellum (Mediterranean area); on paper/bark cloth (China, Mesoamerica), textiles (silk in China), or palm leaves (southern Asia) or bamboo splints, wood, or bark (various regions); or on wax tablets (Mediterranean area). Except in hyperarid desert environments and in dry caves (as in Egypt and in parts of Palestine and Inner Asia), there perishable materials seldom survived the centuries. The Jewish historian Josephus (first century AD) wrote that the Phoenicians had kept voluminous written records, including ones on geography, but beyond a few tens of thousands of mostly formulaic voice and funerary inscriptions on stone, not one original Phoenician document survives today. Even the majority of Middle Eastern records on clay tablets were destroyed or became illegible with time. Of those that have been recovered, half, an estimated 1000,000, remain untranslated.
Although large numbers of documents (for example, 113 of Sophocles’s plays, all of Didymus Chalcenterus’s circia 3,400 books) are known about only by reference in other works, quite a few Classical Greek and Roman texts (or at least fragments of same) are known and are relied upon by historians. However, these are not the original documents, written in their authors’ hands. In almost every case they are copies of copies, at many removes from the writers’ originals, in most instances not dating to before the High Middle Ages. The books that were reproduced and whose contents were thus preserved were great works of literature, science, geography, history, and philosophy, not (with a few notable exceptions) records of individual, nonofficial voyages of exploration, trade, or colonization.
Even many of the key great works did not survive—for example, the thirty books of the Greek Ephoros’s geography and Eratosthenes’s Measurement of the Earth and Geographica and his innovative and highly influential map of the known word—and are revealed to moderns only through quoted passages, synopses, constructions, or mere references by other ancient authors. Six-sevenths of the known works of Pliny the Elder are extinct, and but a small fraction of the two thousand or so works he consulted to write his Natural History have survived. (Manuscript survival rates greatly increased beginning in Late Antiquity, when vellum replaced more perishable papyrus.)
The contents of most ancient libraries were destroyed, the one partial exception being that o the Assyrian king Ashur-bani-pal, whose “books” were written on clay tablets that were preserved by baking in, rather than being destroyed in, the fire that consumed the library building. Most of the perishable documents of antiquity disappeared through some combination of accidental fire, water damage, mold, earthquake, use of corrosive iron-gall inks, wear and tear, putrefaction, insect damage, or deliberate destruction or other disposal, including the making of new paper. Many a manuscript wet up in flames as fuel, was used as packing material and then discarded, was made into papier-mâché objects (cartonnage), or suffered some similar fate, especially during eras of incursions by illiterate barbarians or under the sway of zealotry on the part of adherents of scriptural religions (for example, the Roman Catholic Church’s destruction of documents deemed heretical, epitomized by Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities”), or when the bitter rivals overran literate or pagan and competing civilizations, and destroyed their libraries and archives—for example, in Athens, Alexandria, Carthage, Jerusalem, Rome, Islamic Iberia, Christian Britain (the Viking destructions of monasteries like Lindisfarne, Iona, and Lambay, and, later, Henry VIII’s burning of English monastery libraries), and Buddhist Southeast Asia. In the fifth century AD, the imperial library of Constantinople and its 100,000 or so books were destroyed by rebels and by fire. Rebuilt, it was looted and burned in 1203-4 during the vicious Fourth Crusade. Following a second restoration in 1453 the Turks demolished it once more, and over 120,000 volumes were lost. In modern times, France’s Archives Nationales burned during the reign of Napoleon III. (Stephen C. Jett, Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts With the Pre-Columbian Americas [Tuscaloosa, Ala.: The University of Alabama Press, 2017], 121-23, cf. “Eyes Only: Deliberate Secrecy and Destruction of Records,” pp. 124-28)
