One thing that lives rent-free in my head is this post from a few years ago on @AskHistorians , regarding the question of how much was lost in the burning of the library of Alexandria
tl;dr there's virtually no texts whose loss we can attribute to the fire. More eye-opening: catastrophes generally aren't how we lost ANY historic texts. Sources are not lost by being destroyed, but because at some point scribes just stop making copies
Add comment