Books You Can (Never) Read
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 พ.ค. 2024
- You never know, you might only have a narrow window to enjoy something before its gone.
After 7 months, I have returned. In this long installment of Trey the Explainer, I discuss the history of books, literacy, and lost media. Are you ready to learn what you can never know?
Thumbnail art by Ida ( ncdraw?s=20&t=1Qq...)
00:00 Introduction
03:22 The History of Books and Literacy
10:11 How Books were Lost
15:01 The Lost Books
16:43 Scientific Books
21:47 Historical Books
27:43 Books for Entertainment
33:00 Entire Libraries
36:04 Lost...and Found
39:34 The Importance of Books
Edit:
I have since realized that some of the information in this video should be more properly cited to their original authors, to avoid taking credit for their hard work.
38:48 (James S. Romm, Ghost on the Throne, 2012, pg. 188 & pg. 122)
Citations:
Starr, R. J. (1987). The circulation of literary texts in the roman world. The Classical Quarterly, 37(1), 213-223. doi.org/10.1017/s000983880003...
Chuchiak, J. F. (2010). Writing as resistance: Maya graphic pluralism and Indigenous Elite Strategies for survival in Colonial Yucatan, 1550-1750. Ethnohistory, 57(1), 87-116. doi.org/10.1215/00141801-2009...
Oleson, J. P., Clarysse, W., & Vandorpe, K. (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the classical world. Oxford University Press.
Romm, J. S. (2012). Ghost on the throne: The death of alexander the great and the war for Crown and Empire. Alfred A. Knopf.
Townsend, C. (2019). Annals of native america: How the nahuas of colonial mexico kept their history alive. Oxford University Press.
Netz, R. (2020). Scale, space and canon in ancient literary culture. Cambridge University Press.
Diodorus. (?). The library. Philip Ii, Alexander the Great, and the successors. (R. Waterfield, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Restall, M. (2019). When Montezuma Met Cortés: The true story of the meeting that changed history. Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Madrigal, A. C. (2010, August 5). Google: There are exactly 129,864,880 books in the world. The Atlantic. Retrieved August 11, 2022, from www.theatlantic.com/technolog...
Music licensed from Epidemic Sound
All copyrighted images belong to their respective owners. Most images were taken from the Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons licenses.
Special thanks to
Dr. Jordan Pickett
Dr. Barbara E. Mundy
Dr. Matthew Restall
Yuric INC (@Yuric_INC.)
MajoraZ
Rafael Mena
(among others) - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Hope you guys enjoy this one ;) Sorry if its a little on the lengthier side. I originally had the idea for it all the way back in 2017, but put it on the backburner to work on other projects for a while. I'm just happy it's finally out!
I promise I'll post my next video in a shorter amount of time. It's going to document my adventures meeting an alligatorman...
Let's go
An alligatorman? Sounds fascinating
Don't apologize for longer videos, I'm sure most of us WANT all the extra and/or lengthier content from you we can get. I just hate that it takes longer to make, but as long as you are happy making it we are happy watching it!
HE HAS RETURNED!
Trust me not a SINGLE person is upset about longer videos frankly I was hoping it would be as long as humanly possible
I learned the fragility of writing when I wrote two books in elementary school, "Commando Cats" and "Pirate Dogs". I had them bound with staples and was planning on taking them to my school library to try and publish them. But I lost them after leaving them in the laundry room. I looked everywhere, even the trash but despite my efforts they were lost. It was devastating to me.
very tragic. just imagine what society could be like today if those important manuscripts hadn’t been lost.
@@multipleSpiders they would've stopped that gorilla from dying.
@@multipleSpiders We'd have flying cars by now
@@JcoleMc multiple spiders in flying cars sounds terrifying lol
I had a similar experience to that, sadly. When I was around 8 years old, I made action-filled Plants vs. Zombies comics, following the worlds of the game. They are lost to this day and I only remember a few details. I'm still bummed about it
Does this count as Trey going into Lost Media
big fan AHH!
The best crossover I’ve seen
Yes
He's ancient history's Kenny Lauderdale.
Yes xD
As a Sikh, the most tragic case of lost books to me is when the Sikh Reference Library, which contained tens of thousands of single-copy manuscripts, novels, newspaper archives, paintings, letters, and other historical literature, was burnt to a crisp in 1984 when Indian forces attacked the Golden Temple shrine in Amritsar.
Thats so tragic
** edit: sorry for adding the tone indicator '/gen', i'm autistic and have intense anxiety, and people have asked me whether i was being sarcastic at other points of time when I expressed sincerity, so I felt like I had to add a tone indicator just in case it could be misunderstood this time, too.
But I ended up making others uncomfortable in another way instead. I'm sorry.
@@Pupcat what?
@@thijsmallekote1977 gen means 'geniune' in internet indicator speech- I was saying it was beyond sad, what happened
@@Pupcatit was fairly obvious you were being genuine, and the only thing that caused confusion was the tone indicator
@@JAY-zf6jw Ohhhhhh
Imagine being granted with an unlimited memory and the time to read 170,000,000 books, and the lost ones. God, if I could, I would.
imagine how much sappy romantic/erotica books for middle aged women you'd have to read. seems like that's about half of all literature output by humanity in the past century. oh god and you'd have to read the twilight series
@@treyshaffer F... delete wish, delete!
That's a monkey's paw wish if I've ever seen one. Sturgeon's Law.
@@higgsbonbon Hahaha that's true
Life goals - effective immortality and a social system that enables me to do whatever I want for a few thousand years ;)
The loss of all those Mesoamerican books infuriates me-think of all their discoveries and stories that were lost. They would have given us great insight into not just their cultures, but on humanity as a whole, seeing as they would have developed everything in almost complete isolation from the Eastern Hemisphere.
European cities expanded regardless of resources available to them, sort of like a tumor, new world cities offered cities that expanded in a much more complex way in accordance to their resource and they managed it pretty well.
What I’m trying to say is that we could learn alot about pre contact cities who have alot of our answers to food problems and even climate change, chinampas for example is one of the most sustainable way to farm in the world, sadly we lost a lot of Information on how their cities were built and the knowledge we do have about them is archeological or accounts of those there.
We could learn a lot from them considering climate change and all that.
@@canofsouls282 none of those books would have any use in todays industrialized world.
@@goosegod5165 except they would, were beyond industrialization and countries have already used chinampa systems
@@goosegod5165 since we lost them, we have people claiming out of their asses that nothing an entire continent of people wrote was useful.
The Aztecs destroyed all the works of their predecessors to try and protect themselves while oddly just weakening themselves enough to be made vulnerable to invasion by a small force.
I can’t even imagine how it must’ve felt to just be the only person carrying the knowledge of the solar system or evolution around with you in ancient Greece
Would probably be a lot like being an academic in any field (virtually).
@@Urlocallordandsavior Exactly, just as many people scoff at modern academic, back then like 99% of people would've just been like "who cares about the earth, stars, blah blah blah, I'm gonna eat a goat and get hammered on some Ionian wine tonight!"
@@treyshaffer you have a really arrogant view of the past you know that that's literally what half of philosophy was about since science doesn't seperate from philosophy till the modren period and treys evolutionary view on Anaxagoras is wrong and is like a common misrepresentation by non philosophers his evolution was more like a cosmic one than biological which is because his view was a response to Empedocles view
There were philosophers that had similar ideas to evolution back then. No way to really prove it though.
honestly, i feel like there mightve been a lot of doubt about it. Without the works of others to validate your reasoning within, who would have been able to tell if it was complete, or missing something
I remember when I was around the age of 7, my mom bought me a mini composition book and I thought it was so cool that I wrote my own graphic novel, “The Good Pirates”. I remember it follows a band of 4 pirates crashing into an island and gaining wacky powers, but thats it. One of the only reasons I remember it is because on another book I wrote in 2nd grade, “The cheeseburger fish”, which I have recovered and I still own an intact copy, offers a small written reference to The Good Pirates on the back in the form of a reading suggestion.
A young writer, you were.
Im curious, did you continued writing after growing up? Or did your passion change?
How graphic a novel can a 7 yr old write, lol!
That’s awesome!
@@isabellind1292 ?
24:24 As a mathematics student, this book seems incredibly important to me. The mathematical study of probability was born out of people trying to win at gambling in the 16th century. Depending on the sophistication of Cladius' knowledge, the survival of this book could've meant much more rapid and early progress in discrete mathematics
It's also a great example of non-experts not recognizing the significace of a work, which has surely happened to many an important lost book.
-probably* born out of 16th century gamblers. I’ve also seen sources suggest that the original p value was developed to predict grain output in ancient Sumer.
@@Gavolak it mightve been, but just like Cladius' works, if the people living in ancient Sumer had written down all of their findings somewhere its also been practically all lost. Which kinda just goes along with OP's point, imagine if either one of those discoveries were able to stick around instead of needing to be "re-discovered" thousands of years later, and just how much technology couldve advanced by someone hearing about them or reading the book/tablet that contained it so much earlier. Its no small secret that the fact technology advances so fast nowadays is because all the knowledge we gather nowadays is so readily accessible for anyone who wants to read it. We can access more knowledge with the phone in our pocket in a week than the most powerful emperors of the ancient world could gather in a lifetime with all their resources and connections. Things that seem common sense to us were only unknown to so many back then because even though they were just as intelligent there was just so much less access to gathered knowledge, so many things needed to be re-invented before they finally stuck in the gathered consciousness
“When the prehistorical and historical world needed him most, he returned.”
Yo 🔥th-cam.com/video/rdJ9bsN7JAw/w-d-xo.html.. .
true, with all the bullshit in the present, i like like to escape to the past! Glad my favorite dinosaur is back
@@magnumtrooper17 this comment just gets more and more poignant with every passing year :(
The Ancient Greeks writing homoerotic fanfiction about epic heroes is simultaneously shockingly modern and completely in-character for the Ancient Greeks.
The original yaoi doujinshi
the ancient greeks had _heated_ scholarly debates about whether Achilles or Patroclus bottomed in the relationship. i wonder which side that work came down on?
No, it would not be "completely in-character with Ancient Greece" homosexuality and homoeroticism between men was widely hated and thought as degenerate in Ancient Greece. Modern notion of some kind of wide homosexual acceptation or even tolerance in Ancient Greece is completely not true and ahistorical. Even worse, most of the examples where relations like that were tolerated were examples of exploitation of children by adults.
@@worldcomicsreview354
However, the modern update of that is Masami Kurumada’s Knight of the Zodiac-Saint Seiya which was also responsible for the creation of CLAMP Production which was originally formed by yaoi/shonen-ai fangirls who wanted a space to share their Saint Seiya and Captain Tsubasa fanfics and “Rule 34” art.
@@TheGuindo Just because you read something on the internet, doesn't make it true. Homosexuality was mostly frowned upon in ancient Greece .
The idea of a world with no printing press, no digitization, and no copyright is absolutely mind blowing to me. Books would literally be worth their weight in precious materials.
They actually are now, most just don't know it yet.
@@skyjuiceificationBooks as a concept are valuable. Individual books are not. They're disposable.
imagine if through some cataclysm the contents of the internet are lost and man is unable to re-industrialize
@@gs27777be pretty hard given how many backups there are. hell, I have all of wikipedia on a flashdrive.
Copyright is evil and harmful and should be destroyed as a concept
As a direct descendant of nahuatl speakers (same language as Aztecs), it makes me so sad to think of all the irreplaceable knowledge that was lost in Mesoamérica when the Spanish came to colonize.
I carry the genes and have lost most of the culture of my ancestors. It’s an anthropological nightmare.
Have you considered writing things down
Seems you're focused on written history. That's kind of a European thing. Don't pretend that Christians wiped all your stuff out but couldn't wipe their own stuff out. There is plenty of surviving heretical texts from Europe where's yours. Maybe writing wasn't you thing. Then take care of the oral history... did you
@@edwhite7078 Mayans had writing.
@@Doomer_Optimistwhere are the books
@@edwhite7078 most were destroyed by clergy, which is explicitly discussed in the video. the few remaining ones are in museums.
I remember being somewhat shocked when my English teacher in school taught us about how Beowulf, one of the most famous works of English literature and a huge inspiration to J.R.R. Tolkien and consequently almost the entire fantasy genre, almost became a lost work.
At one point, there were only two copies in the world. One was destroyed in a fire. Nobody was too concerned about preserving the other one for a long time. It sat in a monastery and was used as a cutting board at one point. Imagine how different media and literature would be if the last remaining copy disappeared!
I find it strange how the fantasy genre got bottlenecked through Tolkein. It's not too strange; he was very good, but when I was a kid, I read a lot of fairy stories which were outside his influence and many of them had this really alien vibe. I suppose they should as they posited faerie as another world. :)
I could have swore that last copy of Beowulf was hidden in a private collection.
@@eekee6034 I agree, as amazing as Tolkien lore is, there are tons of myths and legends outside of his works. It’s unfortunate only so many were recorded as people have been telling each other stories since we could speak, and entire millennia old mythologies have been lost in the span of mere generations or less.
@@eekee6034 You should read "Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell" it has some very good references to the older fairy myths.
If you do, PLEASE go on to read the exceptionally cool "sequel" to it, "The ladies of Grace Adieu"
@@ynraider cringe leftist garbage
Imagine writing your account of a crazy unique voyage you did to the end of a known world, for just a fragment of it surviving as a wrapping of a mummy
I bet at least one guy on that voyage was thinking "I want my mummyyy"
Absolutely metal. This makes a fantastic prompt for a fictional story.
I would love to be wrapped in papyrus, it wouldn't be boring.
I think the Dead Sea Scrolls are another interesting case of lost and found, they were missing for so long that they were regarded as mythical works that never even existed. Crazy to think that after nearly two thousand years they were rediscovered and have become invaluable pieces of Hebrew literature and history.
Pretty crazy that they were discovered in a random cave by random shepherds
40:09 "It would be arrogant of us to believe our systems are completely flawless." Dude, I am constantly afraid that my external harddrive suddenly stops working. It's where I keep everything digital I've ever read and going to read. Fear of technical issues is the reason why I keep some of my ebooks in 3 or 4 different places at all times. Animorphs and Goosebumps will not become Lost Works as long as I'm around.
and we salute you for your service
I too have every animorphs book on pdf stored on multiple thumb drives. There might be tens of us!
Me with my drawing iPad😭💀
You joke about Claudius "the art of playing dice", but when you mentioned the title, I sat bolt upright. Analysing dice is one of the most natural ways to start inventing probability theory, which is absolutely huge from a technological point of view. Basic probability theory is also just a few cognitive stone throws away from accidentally stumbling into algebra, calculus and statistical mechanics. Playing around with dice, you could awfully quickly run into problems that require an understanding of standard distributions, for example.
You are totally right, I haven't think of this. Even if it is "only" a books on strategies and tactics on dice and betting (Like when to fold or pull out of one for example) it could very well be probability and statistics in diapers.
But that made you sit bolt upright? What are you, some sort of meganerd created in a lab by supernerds?
@@MyPalJimbo People with functioning brain cells and curiousity experience that. Something you can never experience
@@singularityraptor4022 then why are you bullying me for being mentally incapable?
So what you are saying is Claudius played D&D.
Pytheas: "I sailed north of Britain and found a place that was freezing cold where strange lights danced across the sky and it was as bright as noon all day!"
His friends: "Dude, come on, stop making up ridiculous nonsense. I'm trying to read this historically accurate explanation about how Milo of Croton was turned into a werewolf as a sacrifice to Zeus Lycaeus."
Accurate. Insightful. And funny. 🫡
😂😂😂😂😂
Have you heard about the Vesuvius Challenge? They're trying to use machine learning to read text from 3D X-rays of burned scrolls from Herculaneum - it should more than double the total collection of Roman literature we have
Imagine if they werer all just copies of the Illiad😆
@@quitpayloadomg 😂
I'm super excited about the results of deciphering those scrolls. They recently awarded a sizable prize to the person who decoded the first word: "purple."
And now they've gotten a method to reliably decode the texts! We have entire sentences now!
The fact that we grieve intensely over lost literature and knowledge is something that makes me feel connected to all of humantity. Even when I am feeling lonely, the fact that through the ages we covet art, literature, and music and feel intense loss whenever it is destroyed; makes me feel a little less lonely. Its tragic, but beautiful.
"On Nature" being lost almost made me drop out of a class. I had a class that basically mapped the history of scientific progress through astronomy; the major project, and grade, was doing the same for another topic. At the beginning of the semester, I picked something fun - study of mushrooms/mycelium. It was going well, with the science as we know it today really forming in the 1800s with gentleman scientists. But going back, every damn reference in ancient times went to "On Nature" and I literally begged another teacher, an ancient Greek reader (biblical scholar) to help me find it, only to find out it was lost about a day before the paper was due. One of the coolest classes I've ever taken, but damn, was that final paper killer.
How convenient that it just disappeared. Myceliums are the past the present and the future of this planet and have the answer on almost if not every disease, but somebody doesn't want us to know too much.
You must be a Highlander if "On Nature" was lost the day before your paper was due.
@@Nono-hk3is I see what thy doest there.
His major was biology, and he was failing English.
@@uncletiggermclaren7592 Sounds like you failed English several times, bucko.
I don't understand how the text was lost a day before your paper was due
It's quite sad thinking about how much literature has been lost over the centuries. Think about how many cultures had their entire written language wiped from existence as time forgot their existence
All will be one day most likely, its just a matter of time.
Language written in code so that Latin could not ruin its message the language never decoded
There was purposes to this
who cares
@@RandyOrlok You care enough to write a mocking reply, which indicates care in an opposite direction. Perhaps you believe certain languages should go extinct.
Oh you want to know something that will really drive you wild? The species homo sapiens, modern humans has been around for about 200,000 years. Only about 5,400 years of that history has any notable measure of written records. That's well over 200,000 years of human history without any written records, probably lost save for maybe a few stray fragments that miraculously survived through oral tradition, entire cultures rising and then fading from memory without any reliable or extant records that they ever lived. Millions if not billions of lives forgotten by their descendants. The very origins of countless nations and cultures that live today known only as pieces of myth. That's the story of inventions, wars, the reigns of chieftains and monarchs, the lives of common people, religious lore, customs, laws, games they played, poems, songs, instrumental compositions, and all manner of things, legions of them, lost to us. We are ignorant of the vast majority of our own history.
That thought fills me with sorrow and wonder at the mysteries those lost millennia may hold and reminds me of how little we truly know about ourselves and the origins of societies that still exist today.
A fictional novel you might enjoy if you found this topic interesting is 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' by Anthony Doerr. It spans centuries and jumps between the perspectives of multiple people, from a girl and a boy living in 15th century Constantinople to a girl on an interstellar spaceship in the near future, all centered around a lost ancient Greek comedy. It's a beautiful book and quite funny too, and the themes of lost ancient texts and the power of stories to link us humans works its way throughout the entire novel. There's also a bit of gay romance and sci-fi horror sprinkled in just for fun. One big reason why a lot of these were lost (particularly the scientific works) especially situations like the Archimedes Palimpsest:
is because during Antiquity and the early Medieval (ESPECIALLY early Medieval) times, there was a general approach to scientific works that went like: "oh, these formulas? Yeah, we know that, so we don't need the book anymore. Like, everyone knows how it works" (it's literally 10 people in the entire country, and 3 of them are about to die of some ludicrous disease that will literally never appear again once it spawns in a village in 2 weeks). This is what led to sudden technical inferiority in the medieval times: a lot of works of advanced concepts were preserved, but the Romans themselves didn't bother writing down the basics. So you had a situation akin to having an entire book on something like trigonometry, but not a word of what is necessary to actually know the basics to even do anything regarding trigonometry. The monks would say "welp, it can't be helped" and just overwrite it.
Super suggestion, thank you.
forgot the Epstien list
Got me of guard
It's pretty sad that there have been absolutely crazy events throughout history that we'll never know about
Sadder even that a few might have been obscured, erased, or forgotten on purpose.
Even things that are hidden in plain sight are often ignored.
Did you know Rousseau shaped modern education drspite having no interaction with children and being a horrible father?
His influence, harmful as it is, was rejected by his contemporaries who did know of his vices.
@@SergioLeonardoCornejo Oh, you should see the push back from paradigm shifts, I get Astrophysicists and Archeologists that are downright lying to obscure the truth, muddy the water... I also get, denial and incredulousness, including ridicule and laughter.
@@bardmadsen6956 What are they lying about? Like conspiratorially?
@@geligniteandlilies Sure seems like it, yet at the same time ignorant of the facts. I've been working on it since the night of Halloween 1968 and figured out something important that others have missed or denial centers the blind spot over the clues. Within comparative universal mythology there is a commonality of where the destructive force that caused The Younger Dryas Impacts Theory came from and 'educated' powers that be do their best to obfuscate the truth about The Taurid Stream that appears to emanate from the Pleiades, which is right above The Golden Gates, The First Fire From Heaven, The Throne of God, and the diametric of The Milky Way among others. This past tragedy was the impetus for the sky and cosmic battles of religion and mythology. In other words there is no supernatural on-goings between good and evil, it is about life with the Sun and death of Impact Winter.
@@LuSquared_ Ah, so a tin foil hat schizo. opinion discarded
I wanted to make a comment laughing about how much of early writings were fanfiction, but the story of Couoh's library has me in tears. Someone who worked so hard to preserve his culture having it all taken away from him, as well as the memories of his people, really hurts to think about.
the longest piece of fiction is a sonic fanfic if i am correct 😭
Like that Twilight Zone episode where the guy preserves his library through the apocalypse but then breaks his glasses
@@therealCamoron I guess he had enough cans of baked beans for the next 50 years? There's always a downside to surviving the apocalypse....
@@therealCamoron That was the late, great Burgess Meredith who played The Penguin on the 60's Batman TV series.
Imagine the loss of MOntezuma's library? Or the Aztec's library those idiotic monks & Conquistadors destroyed. What a shame on Spain and the christian religion.
There was a whole forum full of zombie stories written by the forum members, some of them quite good and as long as full novels, that I posted on back in the late 90's. That forum was just gone one day, along with all the stories. I've never seen them reposted anywhere. One of the best of the stories was startlingly similar to the plot of the Telltale Games' first "The Walking Dead" game, but obviously predated it (and The Walking Dead, for that matter) by well over a decade.
you should bring this up to a lost media TH-camr
does the wayback machine or the internet archive help? (if you remember the URLs or have them saved anywhere of course)
@@aiaioioi This was a quarter century ago, I don't even remember the name of the forum and typically forum posts aren't archived by wayback machine anyway since the spider can't see the posts. You'd have had to be logged in to see anything.
I don't know if I even still have the computer that would have the links, or if I threw it away a decade ago.
I have worked at a library for four years now and have gotten an appreciation of how impressive the systems that we have put in place to acquire books. We are able to share books with over 300 different libraries that get sent to us in a matter of days. Even still, there are constantly books that we are finding are not in our collection and try to hunt down.
I think I have a new favorite instance of "finding the context of the wacky historical bits Trey posted on Twitter for actual research purposes."
Yeeess. When I still had Twitter, one of my favorite things about it was reading Treys posts and wondering how all of this would come together into a new video
@@jonasholzer4422 One might even to as go as to say, taking Trey's context-free meme tweets and trying to figure out how they might assemble into a video is like taking the vague references from ancient authors and trying to figure out how they might assemble into a lost book.
Yo 🔥th-cam.com/video/rdJ9bsN7JAw/w-d-xo.html.. .
When it got up to the ancient Aztec erotica part it felt like the pointing Spider-man meme
Why I am the most saddest at the lost for Emperor's Claudius "Estrucan Research"? Maybe it is probably the fact that he probably put a lot of time and effort on making this book and now everything is gone 😭
I also feel the same way.
Such was life for uncle Claudius
Also because Etruscan culture is very mysterious to us, and so that text would have answered many of our questions
yas stan loona
He probably knew things we don't know to this day, maybe he'd even figured out the entire history of rome up to that point and now it is lost.
Coming back to re watch some of your videos and the new videos you have made. I'm so happy to see the quality of them has not only been mantained, but also Improved. Very interesting and sometimes touching subjects, as always. I love this channel.
As someone who does collaborative story-writing. I find this topic interesting because there's so many stories which are almost like book that I've participated in writing and fleshing out while knowing they'll probably never be shared beyond two or three people total.
Talking about archaeology, at Pompeii, strange lumps of charcoal were found, particularly in a certain villa just outside the city. When first discovered, they were not seen as interesting, and in some cases were used as a source of fuel. However, an astute excavator noticed that the charcoal was arranged in layers and after pealing one back, noticed discolouration on the inner surface. The realisation hit the whole archaeological expedition- these lumps were rolled scrolls! Since then, the lost scrolls were meticulously log and stored until recently when digital imaging technology and laser analysis finally revealed their contents. We can now read these scrolls, once they are carefully unrolled and scanned. Who knows what lost works waiting to be rediscovered lie amongst the hundreds of thousands of these once thought useless lumps of charcoal.
Imagine how irritating it would be if they turned out to just be copies of the Iliad.
@@MrBrendanRizzo well to be fair it was broken up into separate books so it’s more than likely to be true
@@MrBrendanRizzo 😂😂
@@MrBrendanRizzo
That comment made me literally laugh out loud!
Yeah... that would suck though.
neat, some hebrew scrolls were uncovered the same way
Bernard Shaw in his early 20th cent play, Caesar and Cleopatra has a line that haunts me. When Caesar is storming Alexandria, the great Library catches fire and the chief librarian comes to Caesar, begging him to order his soldiers to put the fire out because "the memory of mankind is perishing." Caesar replies, "Let it perish, it was a shameful memory"
"haunting" is the perfect way to describe that line
It's got me thinking about how much of history we've yet to discover; there could be brilliant works by writers we've never heard of lying somewhere in wait for us to find!
sadly as more time passes the more likely it gets we already found everything
@@MK-rw1on everything * that could possibly be found
cause when you realize that the vast majority of our specie's history happened before the advent of writing
it becomes clear that history is forever lost to time
we're not even remotely close to have found everything
and we sadly never will be
I have never seen your channel, but I definitely enjoyed this video. Props to you and your team. You guys did a good job.
One lost book I'd want to read is the Book of Pictures, a holy text of a now-extinct religion called Manichaeism, the faith you may know as the former religion of Saint Augustine of Hippo. It was written by Mar Mani, who founded the religion, himself. The book was an illustrated guide to the cosmology of Manichaeism, made for ordinary, illiterate people to understand. Mani's art was meant to be very good, greatly influencing the development of Persian miniature art. Alas, due to Manichaeism's persecution in all countries it came to, the book doesn't survive.
Woah, I’ve never even heard of Manichaeism. Sounds interesting.
@@ninjaeagleart same here! kills me that this book is practically nonexistent now.
I had a book basically like that, gave it to a used book store, it was the Bible in illustration for the illiterate. It wasn't worth much, IIRC early 20th Century.
@@ninjaeagleart It’s actually an incredibly interesting religion that mixes ideas from Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism. The last practitioners were in Southern China and there’s still a temple today in Fujian where a statue of the Iranian prophet Mani is venerated as the Buddha of Infinite Light.
I have my doubts that Bishop Augustine of Hippo really ever truly converted to Christianity. A lot of the biblical interpretations that he popularized sounded more like Manichaeist theology rather than first-century Christian theology.
Here's one interesting book that is probably lost forever: The "Indiculus superstitionum et paganiarum", a guidebook for christian missionaries written in the 9th century. As the name suggests, it contains explanations about the rituals of the pagan Saxons. The book had thirty chapters dealing with all aspects of the pagan Saxon religion and would probably have solved every question about continental germanic mythology maybe ever.
I hope that a few copies exist somewhere for it could shed light on all the European pagan religions by giving us something to further compare with others.
@@viktorberzinsky4781 they tend to find manuscripts once in a while hidden in monasteries, let's not lose hope
How did it become a "Lost Book"? Destroyed?
@@viktorberzinsky4781 Who knows what the Vatican has got in their basement...
@@sahar3820
It's a 1200-years-old manuscript (the cover still exists), it just needed a brief period of neglect to perish.
I've grown up reading books. The fact that there are some books that can never be read is mind-boggling to me. Maybe they contain graphic content or there could be secrets in there that are never meant to be passed on to the next generation.
i read a fiction book in elemantary school, Lizard Music , ? , i think that is the name, some kid fell asleep in front of his tv and woke up in the middle of the night and saw lizard (men?) playing musical instruments , i forget what happened in the rest of the book, but i remember that part, but i didn't know about the reptillians conspiracy theory until recently, where the theory is that there are lizard people secretly living in our planet and maybe in human society. i think in that book, the author was either trying to alert me and others about that, or they were just saying that the kid somehow picked up transmission from another dimension on his television late at night.
Definitely my favorite video you have ever put out. I've watched it several times over!
Imagine Archeologists 3000 years from now writing stuff like: "During the late two thousands and early two thousand tens a work of fiction, that seems to have been adapted in multiple forms of media, caused much discussion and controversy throughout western societies, especially among the youth. Seemingly hated by some it was loved by others and even inspired further works by other authors. Sadly all that survived to us to this day is the rather cryptical title of "Twilight".
LOL!
The one text aside from the turner diaries and unceasingly dull bibliography of Ayne Rand I hope does become lost...Also 50 Shades of Grey.
Imagine if 50 Shades of Grey survived.
"This weird theory says that there are 50 Shades of Grey, but they state no fact or evidence. Just text on bdsm."
Imagine the same archaeologists coming over mentions of My Immortal but never the fic itself. And none of the periferal mentions are ever truly informative
Honestly, with no context whatsoever the name "Twilight" can sound quiet poetic, LOL.
The future archeologist: Hmm. that name could have multiple meaning. The time between the day and night, could it mean something in the middle? or is it the transitioning period toward another state of existence? Could this book contents be about the mortality of the living?
The first major copyright dispute occurred in Ireland between two monks where one claimed the other copied him. It was ruled: to each cow its calf and to each book its copy.
Well, Ireland also has its own public domain catalogue. Still a good video.
I already love this channel but that Takanaka reference at the end REALLY got my heart
Fabulous, it makes me weep to think of the lost writings of authors. Most especially those that were lost due to purposeful destruction. 😭
One of the most interesting lost books is "On the Ocean" by Pytheas of Massalia he was a Greek explorer from the 4th century BC who explored Britain and possibly went as far north as Iceland and the frozen arctic ocean. Only fragments of his work survived, being quoted in works of other classical writers from which we can partly reconstruct his journey. It was centuries before any other first-hand accounts of the British Isles and Northern Europe were written. Just imagine how much more we would know of the iron age people of these regions had it survived.
Just got to the part where you talk about him, glad Pytheas made it in the video :)
Blasphemous but yes
@@paulrobinson6935 wtf do you mean by “blasphemous”
Yes blasphemous but in accords
Is that about the hyperboreans
I'm gonna expand a bit on books in Mesoamerica (The Aztec, Maya, etc), since I already provided Trey some images of those and there was only so much he could include in the video: Mesoamerican books, or codices, were usually made from either bark paper, known as Amate in Nahuatl (the Aztec language; in this comment I mean Aztec = Nahuas, not just the Mexica of Tenochtitlan), which was indepedently invented in Mesoamerica separate from Asia, or hides, mostly deerskin. These could be single large parchments, or more famously, very long, horizontal sheets which were folded over itself sort of like an accordion. Writing was also inscribed onto stone monuments or tablets, or painted onto ceramics, though these were more or less common depending on the specific culture, as was the exact format and conventions of records in these documents/inscriptions, since obviously the nature of the writing system would vary per culture.
Writing in Mesoamerica was viewed as an extension of painting, so Mesoamerican scripts are best understood as being sort of on spectrum of being more visual or more language based. I am NOT a linguist, not even close, so i'm gonna be brief here, but in essence the Olmec script is entirely undecipherd and probably always will be, so nobody knows. The Epi-Olmec, Zapotec, and Maya scripts are more language based: Zapotec, partially deciphered has logograms (characters which denote whole words they depict, like hieroglyphs) and phonetic elements, but also some pictographic ones and lacks articles/prepositions. The Maya script, fully deciphered, has logograms, but also a full set of characters representing each syllable in the spoken language to write out spoken words in true sentences, and Epi-Olmec was probably something similar.
The less language based, and more pictorial based scripts are Teotihuacano, Mixtec, and Aztec. There's actually debate over how Teotihuacan's writing worked, with some thinking it was pictographic, others logograms, or some combinations; but was probably less language based then the prior 3. The Aztec and Mixtec scripts are primarily pictographic, (So less "writing", and more pictures with a standardized format to be drawn/read) However, the Aztec script also had some phonetic elements, rebuses, and puns tying into the spoken language (A lot of city-state glyphs have teeth in them, because the word for tooth sounds like the word for a place/location!), and technically COULD be used like a full written language representing every spoken sound in Nahuatl, though it was never actually used for that.
Anyways, back to the books: Mesoamerican codices (and inscriptions) generally dealt with 3 rough categories of subject matters: Dynastic/political; tax/resource documentation; and cosmological,/calendarical,astrological records, though often these would overlap and/or the same document could have different sections devoted to each:
1. Dynastic documentation recorded political histories, the movement of people, conquests, political marriages and lineages, etc. Mixtec codices like the Zouche-Nuttall record the conflicts and machinations of different Mixtec and Zapotec royal families and their kingdoms, especially focusing on with 8-Deer-Jaguar-Claw, who acted as a general for other cities, used shrewd alliances with the influential city of Cholula to sidestep the oracles which organized Mixtec affairs, and conquered nearly 100 cities in 18 years, only for it to be undone by 4-wind, the one boy he left alive from his rival dynasty's family. (Fun fact, the city-state he founded, Tututepec, was one of only a few states within the Aztec empire's reach not conquered by them). The Maya placed similar records of their kings and great deeds and conflicts onto many public monuments in stone inscriptions. Aztec codices like the Boturini record the movement of Nahua people and the founding of their city states and similar political conflicts, etc.
2. Astrological and calendrical records are pretty much what they sound like: These were divinatory documents which depicted various dates, calender's, religious festivals and their associated deities, creation myths, and the like. These would have been consulted by seers and priests for rulers, or by families after a birth of a child to ascertain their fortunes. The Aztec Magliabechiano, Borgia, and the Maya Paris and Dresden codices are some of the most famous of these, but frankly most codices contain at least SOME astrological/religious and political records.
3. Tax/resource documentation: Perhaps the most interesting. For example, the middle portion of the Mendoza codex shows a list of Aztec tributary provinces, their towns, and the various economic goods they owed Tenochtitlan: Military equipment like warsuits, shields, and helmets; luxury goods like fine feathers, gold, jade, turquoise, incense, jewelry, ceremonial masks and fine cloaks and ceramics; utilitarian goods like textile, obsidian, stone, wood, ceramics, cacao, maize, beans, chia, amaranth, salt etc. What is REALLY fascinating is the Oztoticpac Lands Map, the Códice de Santa María Asunción, the Codex Vergara etc, which are documents that aren't just lists of taxes and resources, but are maps and diagrams which show land plots, agricultural yields, and other information that are basically geographic land surveys and censuses.
However, as I noted, Mesoamericans viewed writing as an extension of painting, and primarily pictographic scripts couldn't really convey much qualitative detail. Even Maya inscriptions and codices really tend to give information in a fairly dry, "On X date, Y happened" sort of format. We do not have things like narrative annals, philosophical records, compilations of poetry, or fictional works, if you're looking at Prehispanic codices, even though we know 100% know poetry, philsophy, etc existed (which i'll get back to shortly). There is likely less then 20 surviving, totally prehispanic documents, sadly. Trey mentioned that Tenochtitlan had a large royal library, but so did Texcoco, and most medium to large Mesoamerican cities likely would have had *some* collection of codices and documentation. At least hundreds, likely thousands, if not tens to hundreds of thousands of texts were burned.
However, there are also POSThispanic codices! While so much was intentionally destroyed, some things were also written down or re-recorded, either by Native nobles and scribes attempting to preserve their history or to justify their status in the Spanish colonial administration. Catholic friars wrote many too, using native informants or working directly with native scribes and nobles collaboratively, to document existing histories, political and economic systems, and cultural practices, that way Spain could better govern and convert the existing population. Some of these adhere to more Prehispanic conventions, and are basically Pre-contact codices merely made after contact and with Spanish annotations (Like the Mendoza), while others are mostly European style books merely recording information on Mesoamerican society, history, and culture (The Duran, the Florentine), or are something in between.
These documents DID record more qualitative information, since they were fully written out in Spanish or Nahuatl, and do include things like full narrative histories, poems, ethics and philosophy, and so on (Tax/land survey records exclusively show up in Post-contact codices, but we know from Conquistador accounts that they existed to some extent pre-contact too). Sadly, however, almost all of these are on the Aztec, since Spain's colonial infrastructure was basically inheriting the Aztec Empire's. There's some on Mayas, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, the Purepecha (the third largest empire in the Americas after the Inca and Aztec, just to the Aztec's west) and so on, but much, much less. Almost nothing on the Totonacs, Huastecs, Mixe, Chatinos, Tlapanecs, Otomis, and so many others, despite likewise being urban civilizations.
An interesting additional category is botanical and herbal records. The Aztec were INSANELY skilled at sanitation, hygiene, dentistry, surgeries, herbal treatments, agriculture, horticulture, and botany. The sanitation and purely medical stuff Trey will likely cover in a future video, but as it applies here, royal Aztec gardens could cover many square kilometers and have intricate series of aqueducts, pools, and artificial waterfalls, with them having different sections to mimicked different biomes, to experiment with their growing conditions, and to test and stock them for medical properties. There was even a formal taxonomic system for them! There are botanical and herbal records in a few codices, such as parts of the Florentine Codex (a massive, multi-thousand page compendium on so many aspects of Aztec history and society), the entirety of the Badianus manuscript is a corpus of plants and herbal treatments, and there are a few surviving sections of documentation by Francisico Hernandez de Toledo, the personal royal court physician and naturalist to Philip II, who traveled to Mexico and recorded information about (and begrudgingly admitted it was superior to Europe's) Aztec sciences in those subjects, though the full reports of his are lost. It is hard to say for sure if these sorts of records would have been in codices in the prehispanic period, but I think it is quite likely.
On a last note, the % of literacy in Mesoamerica is somewhat debates for some cultures, some believe the Maya had somewhat more widespread literacy then what Trey implies, for example, but I don't know the full details of the debate here.
actually CONTINUED IN A REPLY BELOW!
Reserving a reply to add onto later!
Godamn....that's dedication
Amazing read, thank you.
It seems there's an example of the acordeon looking parchment based writings at 35:15 in this video
Just a small correction to this otherwise splendid comment. Amate is a Spanish word, in Nahuatl it's Amatl and luckily for us the method by which it is made has been preserved to the present (despite the Spanish outlawing the practice). You can watch videos of people making it here on TH-cam which is pretty neat.
I'm not holding my breath but maybe one day we'll find a nice cache of indigenous codices someone hid away from the inquisition in Mexico. Sahagún accounts that during his creation of post conquest codices that many had survived and were able to be referenced.
Great video. Watched it all the way through. It’s great to get understanding of a new perspective outside of the “winners” of history that destroyed all other stories. Thank you. Looking forward to more content
Love how long and informative!! Always enjoy your work!!
The irony about Couoh is that by attempting to save the works, he almost certainly caused even more of them to be lost by storing them in a central location.
Next time do the same thing he did only have it be like a decoy depot with dummy books. And put the real books in some unmarked bunker. That way they don't destroy the real shit.
Maybe he did and we just didn’t find it
@@minyoungc_wouldnt that Be something?
Yeah the way to make a library is to send your scribes to make copies of everyone's books, not just take their books.
As a Dutch person I'm far too familiar with the concept.
One of the most famous medieval Dutch books is the tale of Reynard the Fox.
We know who wrote it; Willem die Madoc maakte (Willem who made Madoc). That's it! We do not know anything else about this Willem. No-thing!
The only thing we know is that he made "Madoc". We think it is another medieval epic/poem that is lost to time.
What Madoc is, is one of the biggest mysteries of Dutch literature history. Neerlandici (experts on Dutch language and culture) and Dutch medievalists have been plagued by the question for years.......
Things we know about william:
1.) His name is william
2.) He made madoc
Just some interesting discussions on who people think it could be en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoc
ik wilde hier net een comment over achterlaten, ik dacht namelijk ook meteen aan madoc!
This became one of my favorite videos. I’ve never felt passionate about books as a medium. I read, a lot, I just never cared about the book, just the contents. I’ve been humbled today. This was a very interesting me topic that was navigated perfectly by Trey.
Glad to see you back Trey. This was a good one.
I’m so glad you’ve posted a new video! I love falling asleep to your videos…your voice is so soothing, the content is so well researched, and you’re clearly passionate about everything that you discuss.
Aww thank so much for saying all that :') Comments like these make my day!
I'm so happy to have fans that appreciate all my hard work and also enjoy/gain value from the content I produce. It makes everything feel worth something in the end
I agree, I also use them to fall asleep to for this exact reason!
I've been catching up on your newer stuff, you had moved down my subscription list after a while, but I was reminded how much I like these videos when you were on with Preston last month!
Troy's content is in my playlist of things to go to sleep to, myself. I love to go to sleep to science and history (and science history!) videos, too!
Imagine your content is so good (NOT BORING) it literally puts ppl to sleep 😅
Man, the loss of the Aztec and Maya [EDIT: and Zapotec, Mixtec, Purépecha and many other cultures] codices bums me out every time I think about it. It's representative of how the conquest of the Americas not only resulted in an apocalypse-worth of death, but also the loss of so much knowledge and culture. So much history just lost.
EDIT: "Oh but the Aztecs--" go outside, think about why you feel the need to do whataboutism on this subject of all things. Examine that impulse to try and make it seem like they deserved it or something.
Mesoamerican Knowledge: *Exists*
Spanish Conquerors: *SHIT'S ON FIRE YOOOO*
And as a descendant of those civilizations it pains me to know (or rather NOT know) how much of my culture, knowledge, legends, stories, epics, comedies, hell even a few of my ancestors GODS and aspects of their religion will never see the light of day. We're left with what few remnants we were able to hide, fight for, or were just able to MIRACULOUSLY dig up after being buried for centuries. As a history lover it hurts, but as a person of indigenous mexican it BREAKS my fucking heart.
EDIT: wanted to clarify that I'm a person of indigenous decent, my family doesn't know what pueblo/tribe we decended from bc history of assimilation n records/stories being lost. Apologies for any confusion was not my intention
I nearly cried at that section. Couoho really did what he could.
it makes me so mad it makes my blood boil
No. Not lost. Actively, *intentionally* destroyed so that some bastards across the waves could have chests full of gold and silver made by men, women, and children who were infected with diseases with no cure, whose land had been taken from them.
Colonialism never ended. As long as settlers live on stolen lands colonialism is alive and very well. If you’re mad about it then you better find a way to help indigenous people regain their sovereignty and to advance their own rights to freedom and happiness.
Support indigenous socialism!
I have not watched your videos before, I enjoyed this very much. Keep up the good work.
We need more videos like this, great research and good job. 👍🏼
I literally just read Lost Libraries edited by James Raven. The essays that talk about the moments in history where books were destroyed is astonishing.
The behavior that lead to these actions is still prevalent today, controversial or political.
he missed Nalanda University in the indian subcontinent, one of the most oldest university/library storing thousands of books which was completely destroyed by the delhi sultanate.
This sounded like a good book so I went to look around to get a copy and I could find nothing below 80$. How did you get your hands on a copy? The irony of a book on lost libraries being kinda 'lost' by the absurd price of it is fitting.
@@ConWolfDoubleO7 That’s an example of insufferable irony living this cruel experience we call humanity lmao. How many upper cuts must we take?
@@ConWolfDoubleO7 this is why sites like zlib are absolutely crucial these days imo
Since you didn't mention it, a lot of books in Abbasid house of wisdom actually were lost with Mongol sack of Baghdad, famous among them is history of Arabia by a historian named Ibn Sinan (he only wrote that one book), another book is about the Qarmatid rebellion from Qarmatid perspective, called (the chronicles of Qarmatids) by a historian named abu Jafar al-qarmati
There were collections of scientific books as well, one that stands out is al-farahidi's "the eye" which supposedly had studied sabaean language which we know little about now
"Damn Mongorians!" City Wok guy from South Park.
The rivers ran black with the ink of books, I heard.
@@nunyabiznes33 True, as it said for 3 days the river nonstop was painted with black and red from all of the blood and ink that was spelled
This sack and the sack of the Library of Alexandria always make me depressed. So much ancient knowledge lost.
Also when mentioning literary rates he sidelined /mena/ when Abbasid ones wouldn't have been far from roman rates considering the translation movement and Chinese paper making techniques being adopted which would've made manuscripts atleast relatively cheaper and easier to produce than in rome
Having seen the title, I was completely expecting a doc about occult books that are magically impossible to read. However, turns out your video is far more restraint and interesting.
Good job! Absolutely enjoyed viewing it.
Accidentally clicked this video and it did not disappoint. I remained intrigued the entire time. You've gained a new follower
As someone who studies ancient history at university I love this video. It really hits the nail on the head when it comes to the difficulties of studying many periodes in history. We often have only 1 or 2 sources for a certain period, and even then they aren't reliable. What I especially liked is how you included a quote from 2 of my professors at around 5.12, Willy Clarysse and Katelijn Vandorpe. They're both great people and I've especially enjoyed prof. Vandorpe's classes about papyrology and Roman epigraphy.
And yet, there was a period when historians argued that we didn't need to do archaeological research on the 'Classical' world (i.e. ancient Greece and Rome) because we had written sources that told us all we needed to know.
My favorite thing is when a 'source' is a journal entry about a dream his cousin had
It feels almost silly to say, but it does fill me with genuine and strong feelings of sadness, imagine how much useful knowledge and advancement we missed out on. How many stories, fictional or real & personal, the culture & history of thousands of cultures and cities, something that generations of scribes poured over for hundreds of hours that might've been lost in less than a day. Losing works like these is truly a loss for all mankind.
Even more infuriating is that a lot of lost knowledge is due to stupid reasons like bigotry, xenophobia/racial supremacism, and theological supremacism.
"Me no understand thing! Thing bad!"
Too be blunt, a lot of it was junk. When the library of Alexandria caught fire during Caesar’s occupation, what was lost was mostly commentaries on the odyssey and the Iliad. Much of modern writing is junk too, penny novels and whatnot. That doesn’t mean that their wasn’t nuggets of gold lost in the sea of shit, but it was mostly shit.
Yeah, like the internet. If the internet vanished... oh god
@@Dap1ssmonk yeah but even with that the Couoh case is sad, he was really desperate to save anything he could
In my life I have experienced three dark nights of the soul. The first was when I saw a documentary that ended with a discussion of how the Earth could completely freeze over, destroying all traces of life. The second was when I learned of the Heat Death on Wikipedia. The third was when I learned of the destruction of pre-Columbian culture and literature, especially the cruel paucity of Mayan manuscripts surviving. If Columbus's ship had sank, I would not exist, and the world may be a less prosperous place. However, these past five hundred years would likely have witnessed the blossoming of Mesoamerican culture, perhaps even the transmission of Mayan hieroglyphs throughout Mexico via the Aztecs, perhaps contact with the distant North and South, perhaps the creation of a Bronze age equivalent that would spark the development of a third pillar of humanity. While I'm grateful to live in this society, we did bleach the world of so many possibilities of language, art, and thought.
Hey, I've been watching your videos for quite a long time and it made me research about history even more ( I've always loved history).
So i decided to tell you that you are my favourite, actually only youtuber i fully respect because of the accuracy, funny elements, JOJO and many more things i see in your videos. You are doing a great work but I never managed to find any links for music you put into your videos, it really sounds like a cool music for studying. Sorry if my english is bad, it is not my primary language.
ANYWAYS cool inspiring videos (I cant wait for new one)
This is such an interesting topic. I work as a library assistant and part of my duties is book repair, so all of this is a whole mood tbh
There's no such thing as a bad Trey the Explainer video, but this is an especially great one. 💕
Lost Astronomical Work by Aristarchus of Samos: 17:20
"On Nature" by Anaximander: 19:16
Ptolemy's History of Alexander by Ptolemy I Soter: 22:28
"The Tyrrhenica," and "The Etruscan Dictionary," "The Art of Playing Dice," all by Emperor Claudius: 23:35
"Indica" by Nearchus: 24:38
"Pytheas' Great Voyage" by Pytheas of Massalia: 25:29
"Babyloniaca" by Berossus: 27:22
"The Myrmidons" by Aeschylus: 28:00
"The Telegony" by Unknown Author: 28:20
"The History of Cardenio" by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher: 29:30
"The Book of Bai Ze" by The Yellow Emperor: 30:16
Elephantis' Sex Manual by Elephantis: 31:05
Thank you!
Very good, and very sad.
If I had to choose one work to miraculously rediscover (among so many lost wonders, most of which we don't know about) would be Claudius' works on the Etruscans.
The great thing about a physical book is there is no barrier to deciphering it. Convenient though it is our digital world could be wholly lost in a moment.
I stumbled upon your channel for the first time today. I love it, keep the good work. 👍
An interesting thought on this. The ancient Greeks were known to memorize entire books from start to finish via once commonly used memory techniques that are now obscure. So it's not beyond the realm of possibility that a book would become "lost" and then someone who had it memorized would write it down again.
Memory was a quite big deal in oral cultures.
A quite famous example would be the Indians and the Vedas, which have been preserved for a significant part of their history almost exclusively through memorization, for which various techniques still used today by Vedic scholars were invented.
Buddhism was originally an oral tradition as well, and information was passed down through techniques common at the time such as group chanting.
And those are just some examples from a specific area.
Human memory is truly something amazing that has been unfortunately left aside for the most part in today's world, thanks to more reliable means to externally store information.
I don't believe that for a minute. I dont know what size "books" You're talkin, but if You're referring to something 100-400 pages being casually fully memorized start to finish permanently, no way no how. That's a superpower lol.
@@johnnyrings1813 Apart from the two examples I made (Hindu and Buddhist traditions) there are also the ones who memorize the Qur'an: The hafiz and the hafizas.
While it may seem to be difficult to envision people memorizing hundreds of pages to the letter for we modern people who rely so much on writing, we are talking about memorization processes that often took years and were very, very rigorous.
When you constantly repeat something enough over time it just gets struck into the long term memory.
And mind you, a lot of those texts that were memorized were considered important and such memorization was associated with professions such as priests, bards and poets.
Of course, human memory can fail, but that was something that was often dealt with: Cultures either developed crosschecking techniques such as group recitation or simply accepted change.
Modifying an oral text (even voluntarily) was not necessarily seen as a bad thing, especially in artistic contexts.
@@Luca-si5fy there is not a single person that can verbatim learn these books. You're feeding into tall tales. And if they did, it took an INSANE amount of time, and they would VERY quickly forget it less they continually read whatever book. Thats my point. You made a comment like some lost method to superhumanly memorize books is out there; it isnt.
@@johnnyrings1813 There is nothing superhuman about what I said.
And yes, they did often take YEARS to memorize.
I'm not talking about some instantaneous and easy processes, but very methodical ones.
I didn't say that human memory was infallible either: Which is why crosschecking methods such as group chanting were developed.
And again, atleast depending on the nature of the text, they weren't so adverse to change either.
Things being forgotten, purposefully modified and added etc was not seen as too much of a big deal in the vast majority of cases.
Repetition and the use of formulas were something common in oral texts as well, which aided memorization.
We are also talking about people that needed to know such texts for their profession, made a living out of them and used them pretty much daily.
Two academic books that pop into my mind at the moment are "Education in Ancient India" by Hartmut Sharfe and "How to kill a dragon" by Calvert Watkins.
The latter is a comparative study of Indo-European poetics, and while not focused on oral trasmission specifically its content is still related to it as it deals with things like formulas.
This reminds me of Ursula, the first abolicionist novel written in brazil, the first novel written by a woman, for decades it was lost and completely unknown until somebody found a copy in a second hand bookstore
A similar thing happened in Malaysia with a small 4-volume comic called Chop Suey, which documented Japanese war crimes. It came out in 1947 but was soon forgotten, until much more recently when it was rediscovered and reprinted.
Actually I think all original copies of volume 4 are still lost, but somebody had a photocopy.
@@worldcomicsreview354
I shouldn’t giggle at Japanese war crimes, but titling your book documenting them “Chop Suey” is one helluva euphemism 🤣
@@warlordofbritannia Can you explain the euphemism?
yet another banger, thank you trey
I used to fantasize about becoming a teacher when I was young, eventually giving up that dream late into highschool when it dawned on me just how much thankless work goes into the job. Your videos always rekindle that old fantasy as I like to imagine showing them to a highschool class. You always do an such a great job presenting topics that normally would be considered dull by students in such a fascinating and engaging way without sacrificing accuracy for entertainment. In particular this video and the Onfim one I feel like would do an amazing job piqueing an interest in history in a room full of teens
Very recent example: Ragtime composer Scott Joplin wrote an opera called “A Guest of Honor” about the time Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House. The box office receipts were stolen and the score had been lost to time.
Honestly it’s so sad people just know him for the standard ragtime stuff, really enjoyed Treemonisha and imagining an alternate timeline where we had more operas from Joplin
even today, countless works fall in to obscurity, especially books that were never a huge success to begin with. think of all the rejects from publishers, books on niche subjects, or books from authors that no one remembers anymore. Any old book in your late grandfathers basement could be a rare or unique one, and the world may never know. I'd argue that many lost books aren't lost because we don't have them, but lost because no one reads them.
Great subject & video! It is sad to think what all has been lost due to conquest & religion. But as you said, knowledge can be fragile. Glad I found your channel, just subscribed! 😌 Also thoroughly enjoying the thought provoking comments!
You’re my new favorite TH-camr I never knew I loved archeology so much
God has gifted us with more content.
Deus vult
Treys good but he's not that good let's not exaggerate. But yes God made Trey.
It's a beautiful day to stay inside 🎶
God is imaginary, this dude made the video.
Praise Allah 🙌
Wow, this is a great video - thanks for producing it!
Love this. Just discovered this channel. Keep up the great work!
I can understand why The Iliad was popular. It's a damn good piece of writing and the Trojan Horse is so deeply ingrained in our shared history it transcends time and cultures.
Man fuck the Iliad I wanna read the Etruscan history book
the Trojan horse isn't in the _Iliad_
the Trojan horse isn’t in the Iliad lmao, it is in the Aeneid however
Shared history?
The Iliad and the Odyssey are what took me from failing classical Greek literature in high school, to teaching myself ancient Greek and schooling my teacher. I will forever be in debt to Homer.
i like being curled up in bed by candle light watching this channel. makes me feel like i’m a medieval scholar who’s just stumbled upon a vast trove of knowledge and i’m spending my free time learning as much as i can to pass down and share with my friends. thank you trey for taking the time to research and summarize topics that i would otherwise have never seeked out
Loved the video, man. It's just crazy how much of human non material heritage is lost, but it's even crazy how it can still be partly figured out as it was refered or as it was part of the sources and backgrounds of other non-lost human knowledge, it just blows up my mind. After seeing this is when someone realizes how much important was the printing press and the agilization and universalization of literacy, it was crucial to give our modern scientists a greater basis/knowledge background than the ancients had back in time and to make them make more realistic and complex innovations and ideas.
That's why I think that wikipedia, specially, but also all kind of aportations on the internet are the best things in the modern world that finally will give the humanity an almost limitless knowledge on the world we're living on, helping us in terms of technical and scientific progress, but also fullfilling our thirst of knowledge and human histories and experiences
I thoroughly enjoyed this episode. Keep up the good work 📙 📖 👀
It's why I'm still furious at Marc Antony for burning Varro's library he not only made Latin grammar and pronunciation books in multiple languages, he made copies of every book he could, covered so many topics, etc. The estimate according to first and secondary sources site over 2,000 books lost including most of his own works. Including on how swamps & few other things cause illness for livestock/people with something we can't see with our own eyes . He's cited by so many authors I'm just upset about the lost knowledge especially the Latin pronunciation guides as we got stuck hoping the Germans translated it correctly rule wise on some elements.
He invented the extremely useful AUC system of dating history from the foundation of Rome, the precursor of our own AD/CE system.
I’m mad at Marc also he was mean to J-Lo and why they got divorce
@@Echo32x 😂💀
I'm very sleepy and reading this at 3 am and I had to do a double take because I thought you meant Marc Anthony, the Salsa singer, burnt down a historical library, and became VERY angry and confused for a split second.
@@LaRana2315 he did burn it down, he did it with a night of furious dancing…..
The return of the king may also be a book, but it specifically describes this video quite well
This was absolutely fascinating, thank you.
Here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna lay low for a while and not post a video for over 7 months. You’ll post a couple memes on your Twitter each day, maybe a thirst trap with your face obscured. Then, one day you’ll post a new video out of the blue without an explanation.
Welcome back Trey.
He has a life to live.
@@wetube6513 they weren’t seriously criticizing him.
@@wetube6513 It was a twitter post Trey made…
University librarian here. I spend as much time as I can on archival projects, from the Internet Archive backing up books to Flashpoint archiving flash games. Preservation & Conservation is one of my favourite themes, really glad to see you making this video!
the internet archive isnt trustable. i used to find some books there i can no longer find. they also have removed sites from their archive(politically incorrect).
@@wtfvids3472 lmao
@@Crowborn whats so funny?
@@wtfvids3472 probably copyright claims for both
@@My_Old_YT_Account No
I just subscribed yet been doing this thing for a month I gotta tv in the kitchen and I'll play one your videos while washing up you'll say some interesting shit and I'll be there with a plate in my wet hands and be like damn this dudes one of a kind
You're a one of a kind dude bro keep it up
He’s back. Missed your content man
This video really struck me, the fragility of thousands of authors' hard work is heartbreaking. I can't imagine how thrilling it is every time something once considered lost is found by archeologists! I hope if there's one thing humans can do to preserve our existence in the universe, it's successfully archiving the sum of our knowledge and ideas and history for whatever might come along to read it and know we were here.
I wonder how much was lost during The Dissolution of the Monasteries here in the UK. The paperwork and books weren't immediately valuable, so they were just tossed aside or burned. There were a few people going around rescuing what they could, like Robert Cotton. Cotton built up quite a personal library from his rescues, but even that was almost lost in a fire instead of becoming the foundation of The British Library.
How much knowledge and history did the Dissolution destroy? Is it why we have the "Dark Ages", because any records there were were carelessly destroyed?
Or how much was lost in the burning of the Library of Alexandria. What a tragedy.
@@wolfen26 It's greatly exaggerated of the things lost in that library
1:40 AY MAN I NEED THAT BOOK *slams wallet on table, causing an audible “money” sound as quarters and dimes fly everywhere*
🤝 I feel the same way
I just love Trey's vids, he can just look into any niche science and history topic and end up making an hour vid about it. Keep em coming
It’s easy to be complacent and think lost books are an old phenomenon but it’s sometimes surprising how easy it is now for a book to become scarce. If whomever has the publishing rights doesn’t see it as valuable, it can go out of print and become difficult to find. And digital books aren’t the perfect archival method we hope it will be. Digital media is often so format dependent, all it takes is for a format change and then if a work doesn’t get switched over, it could get lost. Not to mention should we experience any kind of societal collapse and the internet be inaccessible or unusable, all those digital books can disappear in an instant.
Tbh I feel it’s very much in the possibility that we’ll all experience a huge internet crash in the coming years.. perhaps not now or the near future.. but someday..
Yep video games anything really
@@somethingwithbungalows Honestly same, I was born at the start of the century and grew up with it, but I can't really rely on/get used to internet. The whole thing just looks so fragile and hard to sustain
This reminds me of that scene in Don Quixote when they decide to destroy his library, and I loved the line, "oh it's Italian, burn it!"
Another example of a famous and important library is the Grand People's Study House in Pyongyang. Built in April 1982 to celebrate Kim Il-sung's 70th birthday as a "centre for the project of intellectualizing the whole of society and a sanctuary of learning for the entire people". The building can house up to 30 million books, this includes 10,800 documents, books, and "on the spot guidance" that Kim Il-sung wrote. The same goes for Kim Jong-il. Yes, the building has Western works as well like Harry Potter, which is promoted as a good example for kids in the DPRK's state-run newspaper. There are also computer rooms within the study house so the people can access the intranet.
Gotta say, Dwight Schrute is very lucky for owning the world's only copy of The Ultimate Guide to Throwing a Garden Party by James Trickington. Shame he didn't share all of its wisdom to the rest of us.
Interesting point about the Archimedes Palimpsest- if the monks hadn’t erased and written over it, it would have been permanently lost. The monks are singlehandedly the reason it is found media.
Trey has *finally* awaken from his long youtube hiatus slumber and returneth to us ! (jk jk I know he is more of a twitter dweller)
Trey and CoryxKenshin are rather more infamous with their awesome content but very extended absance lol