Comment by thaumasiotes
8 hours ago
> This is why we have lots of Egyptians buildings but not much of their writing and the opposite with the Sumerians.
Well, we have a lot of Mesopotamian writing. Nothing like the amount they wrote, but more than we want to deal with. Most of their writing sank into the water table and dissolved, like the buildings.
Papyrus isn't a reason for any lack of Egyptian writing; just like everything else, papyrus won't rot in Egypt because of the lack of water.
There is enough humidity around the Nile, that is, the places where people actually lived, to rot papyrus. We have some remaining papyrus archives, but those are exceptions, not the rule. There is absolutely nothing like the library of Ashurbanibal.
Papyrus was amazing material for the time, but it was also a curse on future archeologists. The Achaemenid Persians went from being illiterate, to writing on clay, to capturing Egypt and writing on Papyrus, in one human lifetime. We have more surviving Persian writing from the short time they wrote on clay than we have of the two hundred years of their history after that.
> We have more surviving Persian writing from the short time they wrote on clay than we have of the two hundred years of their history after that.
The Medes turning up to fire the clay tablets probably contributed a lot to their longevity.
UV and oxygen are plenty strong enough to deteriorate paper over time even without water. Never mind the occasional fire as what happened with the Library of Alexandria.
> UV and oxygen are plenty strong enough to deteriorate paper over time even without water.
This just isn't an issue at all. You're not taking historical documents off the shelves of a modern building - and if you were, sunlight still wouldn't matter - you're digging them out of the ground. Water is what matters; that's why we have so many things from Egypt that could never have survived anywhere else.
Fire, yes, it's worse for paper than it is for clay. But like I just said, we're missing the majority of Mesopotamian documents because they were never fired. We still have a minority that were. What does the same logic applied to Egypt tell you?
Well we have a minority of surviving documents from ancient Egypt as well. A tiny tiny subfraction of a percent of that was able to survive and many of them were entombed with mummies and come from higher quality papyrus in general as every precaution of preservation was inherently taken as part of the process.
And even what survives today much of it is fragments and are torn and incomplete and has to be carefully handled to avoid further deterioration.
Water is not the only thing that matters. UV is extremely damaging over time. Oxygen is damaging over time. Insects, too can chew apart papyrus.
You are only digging the ones out of the ground that happen to have been kept in careful containers or tombs. You're not going to uproot an old papyrus document that has been buried under 6 feet of earth for 3000 years like a fresh potato. Even the mechanical stress of being shifted and being under pressure around can easily tear it apart and disintegrate it over time.