Sumerians were better at preserving information than us

Homer’s Iliad was written down sometime around the 6th century BCE, but the oldest preserved complete text of the Iliad is Venetus A, copied in the 10th century AD. So the oldest copy that we have today was written 1,500 years after the original. The current year, 2026, is closer in time to the copying of Venetus A than Venetus A is to the writing down of the Iliad. And in fact, Venetus A differs from older fragments that we have, so we don’t really know what the “original” Iliad was.

There are other ancient and medieval writers whose texts we completely lost. Sappho was regarded in Ancient Greece as one of the greatest lyric poets, but only one of her complete poems has been preserved to the current times. Even Aristotle’s preserved works are essentially only his private notes meant for internal use, not the polished dialogues meant for publication. So the Aristotle that the ancient world admired as a writer is not accessible to us.

Apparently only 1-2% of all Ancient Greek literature was preserved.

Why was so much lost?

Because Greeks used papyrus - a more convenient writing technology than clay tablets, but less durable. Prone to rotting, to tearing. Left in humid conditions, papyrus will rot away forever. That’s why a lot of the papyrus that we have preserved is from Egypt, where the climate is dry. But that’s partially luck. The medium of storing information was not durable.

Is paper more durable than papyrus? Is magnetic storage more durable than paper? Is flash memory more durable than magnetic storage?

The digital era is not immune

We can argue that in the digital era, when we upload something to the Internet, it will be saved forever. But even on the Internet a lot of information was lost. Offline backups can be corrupted with bit rot. Essentially all modern digital storage under ideal conditions might last a century or maybe two. And even humanity’s huge data centers - the “cloud” - are prone to losing all data when a geomagnetic storm hits Earth or some global war or catastrophe happens.

Buried Sumerian clay tablets would survive even these conditions. But they are not informationally dense enough and not convenient.

Digital data is cache memory

The digital data that we have access to today is essentially cache memory of humanity. So what is the database of humanity? What if we wanted to store data for the next 10,000 or 100,000 years?

I think that to achieve that, we would need a medium with these traits:

• Passive - doesn’t require energy or maintenance to persist
• Physically durable - resistant to moisture, heat, biological decay, electromagnetic events
• Readable without complex technology - like a microscope
• Distributed - stored across multiple locations, ideally globally or even off-planet
• Dense - maximizes information density per unit
• Cheap - to help distribution

Nanofiche: the technology exists

From the little research that I’ve done, something like that already exists, but it’s not produced on a commercial scale. Nanofiche - nickel discs etched at 300,000 dpi by laser, readable with a simple optical microscope. A single letter-size sheet holds over a million pages of text. Nickel doesn’t oxidize, has no half-life, and withstands extreme temperatures. Expected lifespan on Earth’s surface: at least 10,000 years, potentially millions if buried. One of these discs is already on the Moon with the English Wikipedia, tens of thousands of books, and a linguistic key to 5,000 languages.

The missing piece: distribution

The problem with this solution so far is that it’s not distributed. Currently it’s mostly used for expensive one-off institutional projects - space missions, government archives. The same company does sell it commercially as jewelry pendants with the entire Bible or the US Constitution engraved on them, so the manufacturing pipeline exists at consumer scale. But nobody has reframed it from sentimental gift item to civilizational preservation tool. If we could produce objects like that and make them cool to own - maybe collectibles - that would solve the problem of preserving our current knowledge for a long time.

There are existing projects that try to preserve data long-term, like GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault in Svalbard or the Internet Archive. But they all share the same fundamental flaw - they’re centralized. One location, one organization, one infrastructure. They’re essentially modern Libraries of Alexandria. And we know how that ended.

Full circle

The Sumerians’ clay tablets survived not because someone carefully preserved them, but because they were everywhere - in thousands of buildings across hundreds of cities - and clay doesn’t need maintenance. Nobody needed to care for the data to persist.

We’ve come full circle. The cutting-edge solution to long-term data preservation is engraving information onto metal. We’re reinventing clay tablets with better information density. The technology is there. What’s missing is the distribution model.

If someone made these and sold them for 30 euros, I’d buy one. I think a lot of people would.

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For a much more comprehensive deep dive into this problem, see Harvard’s Century-Scale Storage.