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A huge portion of Assyrian cuneiform was preserved due to the fact that fires ravaged their cities, baking their clay tablets, if I understand correctly. Most of it hasn't even been translated yet. The Assyrian Empire was in the early iron age though, and Egyptian records go much further back than that I think.

> Taken into a climate wetter than Egypt (in other words, pretty much any other climate where people actually live) it begins to disintegrate very quickly and needs constant maintenance.

For example papyrus was massively used in the roman empire and all those records have disappeared, only what had been copied and re-copied since then reached us.

Was Egypt able to keep their culture for so long, and build many structures and temples - simply because they could transmit ideas through time? Other cultures would be stuck relearning the same building techniques and religious ceremonies every generation and relying on faulty oral histories.

Papyrus as a communication method through time.

Probably not, at least not significantly. AFAIK most people couldn't read, it was mainly the clergy and nobility as in most ancient civilizations.

Egyptian culture persisted because Egypt persisted. The Nile provided immense prosperity and sustained the country for millenia. Once we get to modern antiquity, they had a massive trade operation with Rome which sustained them for a thousand years.

Culture can persist and be transmitted without written record. Most cultures operated this way, at least initially.

Remember that universal literacy did not exist until just a few hundred years ago. Most people throughout history were not taught to read. Their stories were recorded by the clergy in writing for posterity, but on a day to day basis, they were passed down by word of mouth.

I might be wrong about this one but AFAIK the heiroglyph script we associate with Egypt was a lost language for a long time. It was a ceremonial language known only by the priests and it was forgotten after the last dynasty. Until the Rosetta stone was discovered, all of that writing was effectively lost, unreadable until modern times.

From what I understand ancient civilizations rarely kept records of things that could be easily transmitted by speech. It seems to me that most practical skills are better taught this way anyway.

They didn’t have manuals and grimoires of building techniques, flora and fauna. Most of the texts were either religious or for bookkeeping. This was true of Egypt as well. Almost everything on display today is about death rites.

Of course it might be that these records were just fewer and eventually lost.

I'm skeptical of the idea that they could be thought to have kept their culture. Even through records we see massive changes over time.

Anyway, oral transmission can be extremely durable over time.

You've never played the "telephone game" in school? Passing information verbally from one person to another (whether standing next to you or to the next generation) is famously inaccurate, even when everyone is trying to ensure correctness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game

> even when everyone is trying to ensure correctness.

...I am, uh, skeptical of that with regard to the telephone game.

There's always one secret troublemaker.

The main difference is the sheer scale at which it is happening.

Paper records are relatively easy to store, and created as part of day-to-day operations. If something is written down on paper, they just have to put it in a box rather than throw it away. Is it already archived because the law says you need to keep it 10 year or something? Then it has a pretty decent chance of surviving as long as nobody takes the effort to clean out old records. Sure, paper can get damaged by fire, water, mold, insects, and a lot of other stuff, but in general if you leave it alone it'll be perfectly readable 100-200 years down the line without anyone actively trying to. Some yellowing and a smudge on the paper? No big deal, still perfectly readable.

Digital records are different. The physical mediums commonly used rapidly degrade, so survival past a few decades is doubtful. Even if it does survive, are you still going to have the equipment to read it? And if you have the equipment, are you even able to connect it to a modern machine? And don't expect to just reconstruct it: the specifications are even harder to find! In other words, for a digital record to survive in an easily-accessible format someone has to copy it to a new physical medium every few years.

Assuming you can read the disk, how are you going to interpret it? Most records aren't stored in ascii. You're going to need software which is able to parse whatever complicated format is being used - which is now horribly outdated. And that format and software wasn't designed for fault tolerance either: a single bit flip can prevent a file from being opened, or completely corrupt its content. It's going to require expert-level knowledge to retrieve it.

Some Zip-drive from 2000 containing a WordPerfect file? Probably doable 25 years later if you really want to, but it's going to be a challenge. Another 25, 50, or 75 years? Forget it.

And that's the best-case scenario. These days everything is stored in The Cloud, which means it'll just randomly disappear one day because they don't feel like keeping it. Mass deletion is trivial and happens without anyone noticing. If you're very lucky your records will last until a few years after your death, but even that is far from guaranteed. 200-year-old records retrieved from the cloud by archivists? Not going to happen.