Violet Moller’s The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found is written for a non-academic audience, and relays the story of how Classical knowledge was passed down to the West, which eventually leads to the Renaissance. This is a well-known story, and iut is written engagingly (at least so far). I do get a sense that the author writes intending to suggest the importance of a liberal open society to the public. But these moral lessons can be ignored if you are aware.
For a work attempting to resurrect the importance of non-European societies, in particular, that of the Islamic civilization, it is to this point strangely Eurocentric, in particular, Western European centric. The importance of Al-Andalus is particularly important, from what I recall, to the intellectuals of Paris and Oxford, who are the forebears in many ways of the Anglo intellectual tradition. In contrast, Italians were just as much influenced by the emigration of Byzantine scholars west to the peninsula during the medieval period. And though the Muslim societies did an excel at transmitting the philosophy of the ancient world, it is to the Byzantines that we owe the humanistic worlds. The great Greek playwrights would be names in encyclopedias without the efforts of men such as Constantine VII.
If you want to read a book that covers the lacunae in The Map of Knowledge, I’d suggest Sailing to Byzantium, which is also written at a popular level. Additionally, the end point of the book is the efflorescence of Western Europe. But it might be interesting to write a book at some point how Galenic medical philosophy became a basis for Tibetan traditional medicine! (a fact mentioned in The Map of Knowledge)
All that being said, one of the points brought home in this book is the importance of institutions in copying and maintaining knowledge. Aside from exceptional conditions (e.g., papyrus in the Egyptian desert!), ancient texts simply will not survive into the present. It turns out that this sort of information is actually less robust than DNA. Papyrus scrolls, parchment, and paper, all have half-lives on the order of a century or so. Our current digital formats are even more tenuous. Though I’m not necessarily an alarmist, is it that unlikely that in the next few thousand years technological civilization won’t go through a major shock and regression?
Then what? What if there are no physical books around, and the electronic cloud disappears? What I propose is a massive Rosetta Stone project to make copies of books in hyper-durable materials, translated into hundreds of languages, and deposited in safe caches all across the world. A literary version of the Millennium Seed Bank Project.
I recall Steve Dutch writing about how to preserve knowledge/writing over geological time scales, but I was unable to find it again the last time I tried. I was able to find someone else’s take on how to communicate with people who come far enough after us that they don’t know our language/symbols:
https://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/
“What if there are no physical books around, and the electronic cloud disappears? What I propose is a massive Rosetta Stone project to make copies of books in hyper-durable materials, translated into hundreds of languages, and deposited in safe caches all across the world.”
Amen.
The idea of a physical book archive made the rounds a while back. My search turned up this 2012 New York Times article. On people who run internet archive wanting to store physical books. Uses the seed bank analogy as well. Unsure if it is still a thing though.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/technology/internet-archives-repository-collects-thousands-of-books.html
Razib: I think they are working on it already:
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
http://longnow.org/about/
The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. …
The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’
On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).
The 13,000 pages in the collection contain documentation on over 1500 languages gathered from archives around the world. …
http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/bbb
In assembling a library, selection of the works presents an interesting problem.
95% of everything that has ever been written is worthless dreck. As Gibbon wrote about the Library of Alexandria: “if the ponderous mass of Arian and Monophysite controversy were indeed consumed in [the fires that heated] the public baths, a philosopher may allow, with a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to the benefit of mankind.”
https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/gibbon-the-history-of-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire-vol-9
A distinction can be made between those works that are valuable in and of themselves, e.g. Shakespeare, Homer, Dante. And those that are about subjects that can be codified in textbooks. Subjects like mathematics, physics, and medicine are pretty much captured by modern advanced textbooks. You don’t have to go behind those books, to learn what is known about the subjects.
i also think something like the bible might be useful because some memory of it will perhaps persist in future religions. in which case, might be easier to decrypt all the other books once it’s translated.
maybe we should store stuff on the moon. don’t things basically last forever there? there is the problem of getting back there if there’s turmoil but at least it’d be *somewhere.*
@Robert_Ford: The moon doesn’t have an atmosphere or a magnetic field, so its surface gets a lot of radiation from the sun. Inks and complex electronics don’t last long. Supposedly the flag we left behind is pretty much white by now. Over longer periods, alpha bombardment creates helium pockets and sputters away the surfaces of any material you could use. A cave on Earth would be better protected and much cheaper, allowing more redundancy.
Almost next to the seedbank:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_World_Archive