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Comment by pram | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe it wasn't documented anywhere at least once. We can piece together Roman GDP from records, but no one ever said what these gizmos were??

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History is full of stuff so commonplace that no one ever wrote it down. One example (mentioned in passing here [1]) is that from the Medieval period up until the mid-19th century, European condiment sets were made with three shakers: salt, pepper, and well, no one is really sure.

Another is the rune 'Peorð'.[2] All the Anglo-Saxon runes have names in the Rune Poem, all the rest of which are known words in the corpus.But 'Peorð' isn't recorded anywhere else. No one knows what it means.

1.https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/26482/mind-boggling-fact...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peor%C3%B0

And our descendants are going to hate us for doing this on an even more massive scale.

Most of our info is encoded digitally now. We put everything on some cloud server and that company gets shut down. Whoops. We change formats somewhere along the way and nobody converts old things over. Whoops. Documentation for implementing a decoder for that data was all stored online and maintained by one nerd who maintained the open source project all on their own. That will be arcane knowledge 5 years after they die. More so 50 years and 1000 years later.

And that's not even taking into account that data simply rots away over time, and things we don't actively copy over will be lost. Plus disasters like massive solar flares that could wipe everything. We've had a few solar flares that knocked out electricity before. We think that's about as bad as it gets, but the fact is, we don't know just how bad solar flares can be. We haven't had any way to measure them before fairly modern times and people didn't have any devices that would be affected by them.

If (when) Google dies, there's zero chance everything on Youtube gets backed up. There'll be a 2 week notice and then it's all gone. Only things with active fanbases will have data copied. And once people forget about that content, it'll also fade away with time.

A lot of people here will think, "Nah, no way. Someone will definitely save that stuff and it'll be fine." That's what our ancestors thought, too. "Someone will do it. Why worry? Who cares?"

> European condiment sets were made with three shakers: salt, pepper, and well, no one is really sure.

Mustard seems to be the agreed answer for the third condiment, though some people hold out for sugar instead. (Sugar seems to be unlikely because it wasn't cheap enough to be commonplace until after the third shaker fell out of use).

I also like the Land of Punt, an entire country that nobody wrote down the location of

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Punt

Literacy was much lower, and writing much more expensive. People didn't communicate through writing unless it was really necessary, and were generally much more selective about what to write down.

So of this was a tradition among craftsman, taught and shown off in person, nobody would have seen a need to write about it.

Whereas tax records were how the state ensured it got its money and citizens proved they had already paid - everyone wanted that written down.

Tax records don't get copied over and over again by generations of scribes.

True, but the sheer amount that was produced means that some, through fortunate circumstances, have been preserved to the present day:

https://www.richardcarrier.info/papyrus/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44968442

I saw a video by an expert on Medieval weapons, demonstrating various arrowheads and their uses. For one of them, he said that we know the Europeans had it because it was pictured in Medieval manuscripts, but there is no record of what it was used for.

Only 3 library shelves worth of classical Roman writing survives.

Are you referring to manuscripts? Or to some specific period? Because we've got rather a lot of text from Rome in general.

Talking about classical Latin literary texts up to a couple hundred AD.

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