Such a shame that IT people have only recently adopted multiple backup systems.
That hasnt saved the last 20 years of the net
I mean… We do have the Wayback Machine
You can see what the Internet was like in 1996:
It’s easy to preserve the stuff that looks the same for everyone. The problem is that the web 2.0 revolution that happened in the late 2000’s would show something different depending on who was logged in, and then the social and mobile revolution of the 2010’s started hiding a lot of content behind logins entirely. So public webcrawlers stopped being able to access the main part of what people considered to be the internet, and tools like the Wayback Machine no longer capture what it was like for the typical users.
Honestly, the fact that works from thousands of years ago survive and have spread around the world is incomprehensible in terms of what would have to happen over time, particularly prior to the printing press.
The human race really is amazing.
‘From the first written account until the fall of Roman empire’- from Susan Bauer really drove this point home for me. Probably mainly because it made me think about it (like you just did) for the first time. It also make those first few written accounts (kinglist, Gilgamesh) much more special for me.
Even though it’s ‘only’ 4k years old, which less then the blink of an eye on the galactic scale, the amount of effort and capital and determination it requires to still have access to those… Almost mythical. Really amazing.
This knowledge also made thinking about losing the library of Alexandria about 15 times more painful. Oh well, you win some, you lose some :)
You didn’t get the memo?
Now that people are interested in “The Odyssey” again, they are going to demand a sequel.
A singular poem containing the epic end to that epic tale (Telegony) will be re-created on a 1/1 ratio.
This will then be hidden away and turned into a movie (film? I haven’t seen the new one yet. I hear good things. I like the Armand one. Although not enough ship mast at the end …)
The Odyssey 2 - Odysseer
Telegony was the original name, but your’s is much catchier.
Let’s also change the name of Odysseus to “Johnny Odd”!
…oh, and the ship is actually a really fast car. No oceans in the sequel. Just Johnny Odd, a couple bros & the open road.
And that, is how The Fast and the Furious franchise started.
Props to Homer, he knew what he was doing when he wrote that dope-ass poem. It was Epic, bruv.
The Odyssey 3 - Hades On Earth
Still holding out hope we’ll rediscover some of them on some random charred scroll.
This is really fucking cool. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
People forgot about Anabasis.
Maybe they were absolute trash?
Apparently they were. From my understanding these two got preserved because they were good and so others put effort in collecting them, copying them and distributing them.
Homer’s works were the most famous and highly esteemed as the foundation of Greek epics. But I wouldn’t say it means that the other stuff was trash.
It’s sort of like if only Shakespeare got preserved from the modern era. Sure, he’s one of the most famous and widely printed authors of all time, but there’s plenty of other good stuff.
Also have you read Merry Wives of Windsor, Pericles, Timon of Athens, All’s Well That Ends Well, Love’s Labors Lost… they’re not all bangers.
Titus Andronicus probably only squeaks by because of the ridiculous violence.
I’m just saying what I think I read somewhere.
I think someone wrote that these two were the best works and the others weren’t as good or something. So historians guess that’s why there aren’t copies they can find.
It’s actually very sad from a historical and archeological perspective. We only have a tiny sliver of the past. How much more is just lost to entropy?
