Books You Can (Never) Read

Hey guys, back in 2010, the Google Books project tried something amazing. They attempted to collect scans and create a digital copy of every book in the world. His definition of a book had to be somewhat restrictive. First they had to be printed and bound, without magazines. videos, audio recordings, maps, etc. Second, there were no duplicates, regardless of whether a book had millions of copies or just two, it would be counted as a single distinct title. This also applies to identical

books

or updated editions simply published by different publishers after the entire project. It was estimated that in total there were 129 million 864,880

books

worldwide.

Nine years later, the project added another 40 million books, making an updated total of approximately 170 million books. Most likely there will

never

be an exact figure, think about each book. Have you ever

read

or even thought about

read

ing or literally just saw it on a shelf somewhere once it is included within that list within this issue you can find a book about practically anything you want fiction non-fiction fantasy history science religion mystery horror drama romance horny covers the widest range of knowledge and genres of information and there are so many strangely specific combinations a book on yoga for horses you got it a complete, illustrated catalog of antique barbed wire oh yeah darling an illustrated manual that teaches you how to create sculptures made exclusively of bread Bake away buddy, a 17th century gay Aztec romance novel, took ke chol kawat to bed and asked her to promise to sing just for him.

We live in an era of increasingly accessible books and I was very lucky to exist in a period of history like this, if you were persistent enough and had a lot of time and money available, you could possibly read any of the 170 million rare books that exist or at least skim them, you could locate rare copies of certain books or learn a new language, even if a title only has a couple dozen copies worldwide or perhaps just one copy in a secure vault somewhere. First place, you could possibly track it down if you really wanted to, but there are some books that no matter how hard you try you will

never

be able to read.

No matter how hard you look, it's because they simply disappeared, not a single copy exists anymore. All traces of these books, except in some circumstances, some surviving fragments were lost in time and turned into dust, and there is no other way than perhaps to travel back in time. recover them or be able to read them this is the concept of a lost work a document literary work or multimedia piece produced at some point in the past but of which surviving copies are not known to exist are books that you will never be able to actually read We could fill an entire library just with these lost works and I would like to explore this library of forgotten books today, but to better understand how and why this happens we need to talk briefly about the history of books and literacy, the history of literacy and The writing of books or the use of inscribed symbols to preserve knowledge was invented sometime during the 4th millennium, initially for the purpose of administering taxes for hundreds of thousands of years before this generation after generation of humans had no other way to transmit the skills and information that they acquired later to show it physically or tell it to another person and I hope that they memorized it in this way.

Writing extended the memory of humans beyond a person's brain and placed this memory in a book or what scholars call an external storage medium. The first books. clay tablets, stones and bones, were inscribed, most of them did not record more than simple counts of goods, but over time they began to contain many more mathematical formulas, maps, prayers, conversations, diaries, dirty jokes and stories in Egypt, the invention of the papyrus rolls presented a material In the time of ancient Greece, in Rome, these scrolls were the dominant method of recording knowledge and during this time thousands of diverse and unique documents were produced covering a wide range of topics, genres and themes, from the scientific and historical to the poetic and musical.

It is important to note, however, that few at the time could read them, according to modern estimates, only a small minority of adults in ancient times could read and write less than 10 percent in classical Greece and at most 30 percent in ancient Greece. Imperial Rome, which was perhaps the heyday of Unfortunately, until the modern period, women were largely excluded in both cultures, but exceptions existed elsewhere. Literacy was much lower in the Middle East, India, East Asia, northern Europe, and Mesoamerica. The percentages of people who could read and write were probably in the single digits, even if only 10 percent of the male population could write in the Greco-Roman world, this was 10 times more than in the ancient Near East, where literacy was in fact limited to a small class of specialists and yet even within these percentages there were varying degrees of literacy in most cases.

Of this literate subpopulation who were able to read but unable to write, many were simply what we would now call signature literate; In other words, they could barely cross out their own names on tax documents and had no ability to write books or even letters to themselves for the most part. Being able to read much less well was a sign of elite status and prestige, most likely. It's that if you weren't the son of a nobleman, a general or a rich merchant, you wouldn't be reading many books. They were also difficult to obtain before the invention of the printing press in 1440 AD.

Books of any kind were an expensive and relatively rare item, this was because they were all handmade. If you wanted a copy of someone's book for your personal library, you had to do it. wait for a scribe to tediously and painstakingly transcribe a new one by hand, slowly copying each word, some works, especially the longer ones, could take an entire year and several scrolls for a scribe to make just one copy, plus there was no publication for the ancient. books, so they circulated very slowly. A book first emerged when an author or rather a team of scribes wrote by hand an original manuscript based on his ideas and research.

This manuscript would serve as the original master copy for all future manuscripts from here that the author would order. his scribes to produce duplicates or identical copies of his book for distribution now during the Roman empire if you wanted a copy of someone's book you first had to be friends with that person. I know it's a scary concept that a Roman wouldn't ask someone he didn't already know. send a book, even on a topic that interests you both, we don't know of any author who has given a copy to a complete stranger. Authors would give away copies of their books, but they would do so exclusively within a close circle of friends who kept them in their personal libraries, friends often borrowed each other's books and when one friend lent a book to another, the recipient could make a copy at his own expense if he wished, in turn giving copies of these to others and further copies being distributed.

Over time, this network became available from these private copies and gradually increased the number of readers of an author's particular work throughout the Roman Empire. Similar analogies, although on a much smaller scale, existed in other parts of the ancient world, such as China. It is important to note that there was no copyright. Once someone obtained a text, anyone could copy it and sell it with or without the permission or even knowledge of the original author. This meant that there was no oversight or quality control for the old books. If someone wanted, he could change or alter his copy of a book. at any time, subtracting a word, adding a word, or even inserting completely new paragraphs into a work, we know that this also happened quite regularly.

The gospels and epistles of Paul gained popularity in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, for example, showing clear signs of later alterations. Watch my Bible video for more information on this. Needless to say, access to books in general was very limited. You not only had to be elite but also well connected, so to speak. A papyrus letter discovered in Roman Egypt dating to the late 2nd century AD. illustrates this very well. A man asks his friend to make a copy of the Hypsicritis characters in comedy books six and seven and send it to me. His friend then responded by writing harpercreation says that Demetrius the bookseller has them.

I told apollonides that he should send me for my own books. some of which you will learn from Seleucus himself later, if you find any that I don't own, make copies and send them to me. Diodorus and his friends also have some. It wasn't a big deal to skew the number of copies of a book. It had increased directly in proportion to the number of readers who wanted that book. This meant that popular books were given away and copied more often than less popular or unpopular ones. This resulted in a select few titles being incredibly easy to find with many thousands of copies in circulation. throughout the Mediterranean, while others were extremely rare and difficult to obtain, a good demonstration of this can be seen in the fact that somewhere between 14 and 15 of the entire Roman text was the Iliad, particularly the book one and two, the iliad was the most popular book. in ancient times, making it an incredibly easy book to find.

Similarly, Classical Professor Revil Nets theorizes that Roman library collections were dominated by the works of only 11 different authors; in contrast, less popular minor authors had far fewer copies of their works and the distribution, this is Because there was less demand for them, making them rare or extremely rare. You might see where I'm going with this. This restrictive system with a small reader base circulating a small number of copies of books was prone to loss. How books were lost from a relatively small amount. Number of copies of a text were in circulation at a given time Locating a copy could be difficult and time-consuming The limited availability of ancient books was something people often recognized at the time, we hear from several surviving sources that ancient readers They commonly looked for books that they did not have in their own libraries and some were much more difficult to locate than others in a letter that the emperor Julian the apostate says to his friend Priscus find me all the writings of I am blessed, you are the only person who can do it since Your sister's mother-in-law has a well-corrected copy.

Keep in mind that we are talking about a Roman emperor. Even he is having trouble locating this particular author. The problem with old books was that if your copy got damaged, it might get eaten. by worms or was accidentally burned in a fire, something quite common in ancient Rome, well, that's tough, friend, because now there is one less copy of that particular book in the entire world. This might not be a big problem for something like the Iliad or the 11. major authors who had a surplus of widely distributed copies, but for minor authors this was a big problem, you are no one pindar, you will just be a minor author, the total number of copies in circulation could have decreased from 100 to 99 or from 12 to 11 and it could be some time before replacement occurred, if there were ever two main methods by which copies of a book could disappear neglect and Intentional destruction and neglect were probably the most common source of loss of ancient books, papyrus rotting over time and mold fungi. and bookworms constantly attacked Greek and Roman scrolls and codices.

This was a creeping and creeping threat. If an owner realized the threat in time and cared enough about the book, he could commission a scribe to produce a suitable replacement, but this could be expensive and, again, time-consuming. Consuming fire was also a big problem in the ancient world. An accidental house fire caused by a spilled lamp could spell disaster for entire libraries of books. During a particularly terrible fire, hundreds of copies of books could be out of circulation in an instant. Careless students eating and drinking around their favorite texts and damaging them in the process surely happened with some regularity and the intentional destruction of texts was also a major threat to books throughout human history.

Wars and times of political instability were probably the most common culprits when a city was looted. During the revolutions, buildings of all kinds were burned. Administrative buildings that housed many books were often attackedin an attempt to erase any record of human deaths. Censorship has always existed and during the course of the Roman Empire, one author or another fell into the bad graces of the emperor and subsequently his work would be banned. The books written by this enemy of the state would be burned, leaving only the copies that existed in personal libraries. of secret fanatics religious movements could also drive censorship during late antiquity early Christians were partly responsible for the destruction of many ancient texts Church fathers such as Tertullian advocated the systematic eradication of what he considered books and teachings pagan This process was repeated in other parts of the world every time new regimes took power and wanted to eliminate all traces of the old from ancient China. to the Aztec empire with the barbarian invasions in the 5th century AD. and the collapse of the western roman empire literacy receded in europe literacy rates had never been very high in the first place so this event spelled disaster for the preservation of many ancient works dwindling.

Fewer people cared about books and reading in general. Over time, copies began to disappear as incidents of neglect, accidents, and censorship accumulated. The total number of copies in circulation of some books decreased more and more until the number finally fell to zero. This is how the books were lost and we know that this must have been commonplace even during the height of the Roman empire. Works regularly entered and then left circulation. The Roman senator Cicero once wrote when we were children. We used to think that C Fimbria's speech is worth reading, even though we barely can.

Find them now, it is quite sad to see that the Romans during their time talked about how books and speeches were being lost and forgotten simply due to the scarcity of copies and this problem only became more prevalent as Europe entered the Middle Ages. Books that were copied more often survived, while less popular authors were more likely to fade into obscurity until copies of their works were published. Most of the works we lost probably found their final destination in someone's dusty old library while worms silently ate the last copy in the dark. No one heard or saw the lost books now with that background in mind and halfway through. throughout the runtime of the video, let's talk about these lost books, how do we even know they existed?

We know about them primarily through two ways: books that are referenced by surviving authors or directly mentioned in books that are inferred to exist. The first one is probably the easiest to understand. In books that managed to survive the centuries, we often see authors mentioning or referencing books that were in circulation at the time but have since disappeared, often naming the author, the title of the work, what they discussed. and sometimes, if we're lucky, they even date. directly from him while retaining a small fragment of what the original might have said on other occasions, we know very little, imagine trying to figure out the plot and scenes of a movie based entirely on imdb reviews, that's the extent to which We have to deal with some.

From these examples, the books inferred to exist are more mysterious and their identification less certain, as stated before, the lack of copyright in the past meant that anyone could copy a work. Ancient writers regularly borrowed and repeated the writings of older ones, some authors even shared them. sources from their own books, so sometimes simply by comparing two or more surviving texts we can infer the existence of a speculative original from which they both derived, often we do not know the name or author of this hypothetical source, but we can speculate about its content In any case, I have compiled for you a list of the lost books that I found most intriguing.

I separated them into categories and provided a brief description of virtually everything we know about them, their titles, their authors, and what may have been contained in them. books these are books related to scientific discoveries of the past, in my opinion the loss of these texts is probably not as bad as that of others because we can relearn and rediscover these findings and so far we have progressed far beyond them, it is It's a shame that these texts were lost because many of them show that even accurate scientific theories and knowledge can be easily forgotten over time.

One wonders what might have happened to the trajectory of learning if these works had never been lost in the first place. It would also be interesting to hear them. The exact methods and experiments by which some of these discoveries were made, first is an astronomical work by Aristarchus of Samos written sometime during the 3rd century BC. C. its title is unknown, but the Greek mathematician Archimedes made reference to it a century later. It is important for us because they tell us that he proposed a very radical theory about the universe. It appears to be the first known example of a scientist proposing the heliocentric model, which is the idea that the Earth and other planets revolve around the Sun and not the other way around.

Aristarchus theorized that the Earth revolves around the Sun in the circumference of a circle (the Sun is in the middle of the orbit). He also suspected that the stars in the night sky were like the Sun, although much farther from Earth in that sense. The universe is many times larger in size than the universe that had previously been accepted by other ancient scientists. It is not clear how Air Starkus came to this conclusion, but it seems likely that he used planetary orbits, eclipses, and shadows similar to those of another Greek scientist, Eratosthenes. As we all know, this idea is true.

Modern science confirms that, although Aristarchus was not entirely accurate, he was definitely going in the right direction when he proposed this theory and was far ahead of the main ideas of his time; However, we know the theory of it. It didn't gain much traction; Archimedes casually mentions it as a largely forgotten alternative theory to the incomparable geocentric model that dominated scientific thought for literally thousands of years; In fact, Aristarchus's knowledge was not rediscovered until the Renaissance, almost 2,000 years later, the work was probably lost due to the unpopularity of his findings, Copernicus and Galileo received much negative attention when they proposed the same ideas many centuries ago. later, so we can assume that Aristarchus' book might have received similar treatment in ancient times on nature by Anaximander, written during the 6th century CE and known to the Roman writers Censorinus and Plutarch Anaximander of Militis was a philosopher Ionic about 300 years before Aristarchus.

He is notable as an early proponent of scientific thought. Anaximander argued against deferring to magical gods and miracles; instead, he believed that nature was governed by laws and that everything could be explained through observable natural processes. Anaximander was apparently very interested in the origins of humanity and Throughout his life he composed a poetic treatise called On Nature where he postulated a scientific theory on how humanity emerged since Serena states that on nature he discussed how, according to Anaximander, all life first originated in a warm and hostile ocean in the past. primitive of the earth, from this environment life initially formed as fish or fish-like creatures born within these strange animals were the first humans who took shape as small embryos and fed like sharks, eventually they emerged from their fish parents and were Washed ashore to live on land these early humans had protective scales but lost them over time as they adapted and spread to this new environment.

You may notice that Anaximander's theory sounds vaguely similar to modern scientific theories about the origins of life. such as abiogenesis and evolution, although his theory lacks many of the specific details such as molecules and natural selection, in many respects he was correct in postulating that life originated in the ocean and the image of a primitive human ancestor resembling a fish rising from the ocean evokes modernity. fossil discoveries such as tiktaalik and ichthyostega primitive fish and amphibians that pioneered our transition from living solely in water to land, crucially Anaximander's ideas presented a scientific origin for humanity rather than a magical one in nature, in fact, it postulates the first rudimentary theory of evolution in a world. dominated by creationism and very similar to the heliocentric theory of Aristarchus, scientific thinking like this would not resume at least in Europe until the time of Charles Darwin, more than 2000 years later, it is unclear what evidence led him to this conclusion.

Anaximender probably expanded on them within the work, but it is likely that he used early fossil discoveries and experiments with animal embryos to inform his ideas. Unfortunately for us, however, all of nature fell into obscurity at some point during the fall of the Roman Empire, the book's revolutionary ideas were most likely considered too strange. and possibly even blasphemous to incoming Christians who preferred the more simplistic model of divine creation. Historical books no matter how much we know about history. There are many blind spots in patches of missing information for many event areas and even entire time periods that were lost afterwards.

The works could have filled in many of these gaps and provided many more details about the events that we know, for example we know of no less than 11 different lost stories related to the life of Alexander the Great, each of them would be much more useful and probably more reliable than the five that managed to survive to us, all of whom are plagued by strong prejudices and, more importantly, none of them are first-hand accounts that are far removed from the events they described, sometimes even centuries, by example, the lost story of Alexander. By Ptolemy, his best friend and possible half-brother would have provided a wealth of unprecedented personal knowledge in first-hand accounts of many battles and historical events.

We are also missing Alexander's personal diary and letters that were once available at some period in history. but they have since disappeared, several Roman emperors and famous historical leaders produced books that have been lost. Fortunately we have Julius Caesar's account of his conquest of Gaul, but we do not have the works of Trajan Zenobia Septimus Severus and King Puris of the Papyrus, among others. The figures are said to have produced written works, but not a single one of them survives to us today. These books would have given us a very rare and intimate view of history, giving these leaders and famous people a voice of their own rather than the heavily filtered perspective. we often get from second-hand sources the Emperor Claudius was one of the most intriguing of these famous authors, he was a prolific writer and perhaps, by modern definitions, one of the first anthropologists he was particularly interested in and perhaps even a fanatic of the Etruscan people, the little understood. predecessors of the Romans, after a great deal of research, Claudius composed a 12-volume history of the Etruscans called tyrinika according to their Etruscan status on Weibo, Claudius even studied the forgotten Etruscan language to the point that he could probably read it and speak it fluently later.

He made his own Etruscan dictionary to keep alive his academic exploits. Both books did not survive the Roman Empire and Claudius's meticulous research was apparently in vain after it was lost historians had to start from scratch to this day the Etruscan language is only partially understood by modern scholars and civilization itself and Their history is also very fragmentary. Claudius's dictionary and history volume could have been of great help to us, but alas, Claudius apparently also wrote a book called The Art of Simple Dice, but that too was sadly lost to time. The biggest blow to humanity's collective view of knowledge we also hear about a handful of books recording great voyages and adventures in ancient times.

Niarco Secrete was the admiral of Alexander the Great and led his naval expedition from the Indus River Valley through the Persian Gulf to the Tigris River on his successful return. Nyark has composed a memoir of his voyage entitled Indicates that, as is evident, in this point has been lost. Other authors tell us that Nyarko's voyages were crazy, he fought a pod of whales using only trumpets and had arguments with primitives. andMysterious fish eaters living off the Persian coast Nyarkos' voyage was the first time the ancient Greeks encountered a true ocean, the Indian Ocean. Before this they had only known the relatively calm Mediterranean Sea, so Niarkos and his crew They were absolutely amazed by the existence of tides in the Indian Ocean, a phenomenon they were not completely familiar with, even more intriguing than the oceanic adventures of the Arkos were those of Pithaus of Marseille recorded by Pliny the Elder Strebus in Polybius Pytheus was another explorer Greek and his journey was crazy given the time period according to his book, he traveled to lands that no Mediterranean had visited before the historian Strabo claims that Pythaus claims that he personally explored the entire region of northern Europe to the ends of the world ;

His written account of his adventures unfortunately does not. survive from fragments preserved in the works of other authors, we know that in the year 320 B.C. He ventured into the atlantic ocean and surveyed northwest europe to the mythical island of britain, scotland and the orkney islands, and went even further, to a frozen ocean of shifting ice where strange lights danced in the sky at night and the sun shone at midnight to an ancient Greek or Roman this must have been a wonderful story and as such many doubted the reliability of its descriptions; However, looking back at history, we know that what Pythius described was an accurate account of the Arctic Circle and many of the natural phenomena that occur within it, such as the northern lights, the summer solstice, and polar sea ice.

Pythius' exact route is still unclear, but he could have traveled as far as what is now Iceland. There were also some historical books that went back incredibly further in time than virtually anything else that survives us today. The famous historian Herodotus, writing in 400 BC. C., mentioned that the Egyptian priests of Hephaestus had a collection of ancient scrolls that clearly showed that the time between the first king of Egypt and Pharaoh Setus was 11,340 years in total. He goes on to state that the Egyptians claimed they knew these dates to be absolutely precise. The claims of the Barossas Babylonian historian are even crazier.

The history of the nation of him. The history of Babylon, titled Babylonica, was said to date back almost half a million years, 432,000 years ago, when humanity still shared the Earth with Neanderthals and Homo erectus. They have contradicted what we know from archaeology, but it would have been very interesting to see what they had to say. However, books to entertain. These books were not made largely for education, but to entertain and move their readers figuratively and, in at least one case, literally greatly. Of these works are plays, novels and dramas that have been lost to time, The Myrmidons of Skylos, for example, was considered one of the most popular plays in ancient times, however only a fragment survives today in day, being a tragedy, it was a very sad work inspired by Homer's The Iliad.

It portrayed the love between the two Greek warriors Achilles and Patroclus as an intimate and deep romantic love between two men according to those derived from the Iliad. We know that there was a lost epic poem called Taligani. It is not clear by whom or when it was composed, but it seems likely that it existed before 600 BC. C., since the author of the Odyssey seems to have known him and established a connection with him. the story in the form of an unfulfilled prophecy an ancient sequel bait, so to speak, the taligani considered themselves the final part of the epic cycle a continuation of the odyssey told the story of the missing son of the legendary hero odysseus with the sea witch cersei called taliganus it also gave a conclusion to odysseus's life spoiler he died i think a stingray was involved it was indeed the ancient equivalent of the last jedi but to the people overall liked the story ended with Odysseus's body being buried and I guess a lot of Marriages not really incestuous, but still kind of strange.

Modern fiction author Madeleine Miller was inspired by the lost epic and wrote her own book titled Cersei, which she attempted to give a general approximation of her plot in her own modern style. It's also a pretty good book if we look more recently, even William Shakespeare has a lost work or at least a collaboration he did with someone once it was lost. A stationer's register for the year 1653 attributed a work titled The History of Cardinius to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. We are told that this particular play was performed by Shakespeare's theater company, the King's Men, in 1613, not a single word of the content of the performance survives, but it was probably an English interpretation of the then popular novel Spanish Don Quixote.

There is some debate as to whether Shakespeare was actually involved or whether his name attached was just a dishonest marketing ploy. 1613 would have been towards the end of his writing career, making it one of his last works, the reasons it was lost are mysterious. , but maybe it was just boring and staged. only a limited number of times some might have seen it as a cheap money grab and not worth remembering the book of baisua this ancient chinese text was essentially an elaborate supernatural manual that was supposedly set down by the legendary yellow emperor long ago in the 26th century BC C., like the Barossas, this date of authorship is not possible as China did not have a written language until 1200 BC.

C., but we will ignore that for now the book provided the reader with a field guide to the 11,520 types of supernaturals. creatures that existed in the world giving descriptions and telling them how to appease, gain favor and avoid being haunted by these spirits. Most intriguing of all is the fact that the book was supposedly dictated to the Yellow Emperor by a talking cow-like spirit called solo vaisur. Fragments of this being's advice survive in the works of other authors. One of the strangest and most controversial lost works we know of has to be the Elephantus sex manual, you heard me right, an ancient sex manual and on the one hand, it was a text. unique in many ways.

We know that it was set by a woman, probably a Greek courtesan who used the pseudonym Elephantus. It was popular among classic sex workers to use animal names instead of real ones. The manual was notorious in ancient times as a scandalous and obscene text, but it seems. Having been quite popular despite or perhaps even because of his negative reputation, Emperor Tiberius preserved a complete set of his works on his resort island of Capri, famous figures such as Pliny the Elder Marshal and Galen to name a few, apparently everyone read it. , so it must have been a popular and relatively widely circulated work.

We know that the manual described nine ways or positions for making love, presumably 9 different sexual positions that members of the Roman elite could try. The book even had blatant images of the acts, although many sources view this with disgust, it appears that it was not only full of sexual positions, but also provided women with legitimate health advice in a way that no male writer had done before. Even better, ancient Dr. Galen pointed out that Elephantus had included a cure for male pattern baldness in his book, oh come on. get anything out of it, these details suggest that the author was an intelligent health expert of her time and a woman at that, something that was relatively rare, unfortunately, such a controversial text was doomed with the arrival of Christianity, whose ideas more conservative towards sexuality made the book It is highly unlikely to survive the fact that it had hand-drawn illustrations.

Everyone claims that copying this text was difficult and supply was always limited. No doubt many, if not all, of its copies were destroyed in the time of Constantine the Great and disappeared completely. entire libraries from the Middle Ages, but the saddest thing we must realize is the fact that there are an untold number of unrecorded books that were written, published and read for a time and then quickly lost to history without no one mentions them or records their existence and consequently we don't even know the titles of their authors or even what they may have had and I think it is important that the books I have listed are only the ones we were lucky enough to know about, they represent only a small handful in the enormous library of lost and found. books and we know that throughout history there were libraries of thousands of them and filled with collections of books both recorded and unrecorded, the vast majority of these libraries suffered premature fates, although the Hellenistic library of Alexandria is perhaps the largest yet That the modern era gets all the attention, but it was definitely not the only ancient library that was destroyed along with all its valuable knowledge.

The Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz described Montezuma, the second emperor of the Aztecs, as if he had a large house for all his books and was managed by a chief librarian. This library was filled with the curious accordion-shaped books of the Mesoamericans probably representing the largest collection of knowledge in the Western Hemisphere at the time, unfortunately they were burned down during the Spanish Aztec War the Boxer Rebellion saw the destruction of the library. the honlin academy which had been founded in 700 AD. and remained active for more than a thousand years in the fire. Irreplaceable Chinese manuscripts and scrolls were lost, among them was the young lota 10 or the yanglai encyclopedia, an 11,000-volume encyclopedia on practically everything there was to know, essentially Wikipedia. of its time, only around 400 volumes managed to survive the burning, representing 3.5 percent of the original work, the rest were lost.

A story of loss I found particularly sad During the 1560s, Catholic inquisitors systematically burned hundreds of priceless Mayan codices and scrolls as heresy, claiming they were full of superstition and lies of the devil (in truth these documents contained a wealth of knowledge about the mayan culture science history genealogy astronomy medicine and much more a mayan priest named kawuho saw this destruction of his people's culture and tried to undermine the colonizers he began to preach and travel from community to community collecting surviving codices and other documents he could hide from the Spanish Unfortunately in 1568 the colonial government learned of the Kawuho resistance movement and sent a military force to eliminate it in the spring of 1569 a Spanish captain discovered a large temple in the jungle, it turned out to be Koho's base of operations and contained his entire library of codices.

The soldiers burned it to the ground until nothing remained of the books except ashes. Such was the fate of so many lost books, but not everything is pessimism, there is a ray of hope, sometimes, although rarely, what is lost can be found again. There are a handful of texts previously thought lost that have since been recovered through archaeology. The most famous was the gospel of Judas, a blasphemous gospel. About Jesus' rebellious disciple, Judas, was jealously denounced by the early Christian bishop Irenaeus in the 2nd century AD. His denunciation had the ironic consequence of informing us of the existence of the gospel. congratulations, you played yourself, but for almost 2,000 years it was believed that all copies of this heretical book had been destroyed until 2006, when a handwritten copy was discovered among a bundle of books buried near the Egyptian city of Nakamati to this day Today it remains the only known copy of this book in existence Manander was a celebrated Greek playwright and was extremely popular in ancient times, but unfortunately most of his comedies did not survive the Middle Ages, only about 7 of the approximately 80 that we know have survived.

A miraculous example is his comedy The Girl with Short Hair, which was more or less an old novel. -com So far the most intact copy we have is preserved in a few pieces of papyrus found in a Roman midden. Someone must not have been a big fan of it, I mean, because it's garbage that we have 40 to 45 more often than we throw away. Deleting unwanted texts was the practice of people in the past, especially during the Middle Ages, of reusing and recycling them into new writing material. The palimpsest of Archimedes, for example, is a particularly infuriating case study.

Archimedes was considered one of the most skillful inventors and scientists of all time. ancient world with many of his inventions and formulas that revolutionized various sectors of ancient industry, his writings would circulate in the Hellenistic era and well into the Roman Empire after the collapse of the empire; However, the vast majority of his books were lost, we know that at least one The couple was literally erased and written on Archimedes' Palumsest. It's a documentwhich contains several works by Archimedes that were believed lost at some point in the Middle Ages. These ancient manuscripts were taken to the Christian monastery.

The monks of this monastery apparently did not find it. The teachings of Archimedes are quite interesting, as they tried to erase his words and wrote about them with a religious text under the colorful illuminations of Jesus and the apostles. They are mathematical theorems and diagrams from ancient Greece that could have been very useful to medieval engineers and scientists. What happened to two pages of an ancient historian's copy of Aryan events after Alexander, a once detailed account of the successor wars that occurred after the death of Alexander the Great, now lost, the surviving fragments of this work have told us provided information and battle tactics. which are not found anywhere else in history, which really tantalizingly illustrates how much value was lost with this text.

Probably one of the strangest afterlives a lost text ever had was that of a speech recorded on papyrus once given by the Athenian politician Hyperidis, the stirring war speech. It was completely unknown to modern historians until 1858, when a copy was discovered in Egypt, where it had been used to wrap the body of a mummy. The importance of books. If I have learned anything while researching this video, it is that knowledge is fragile. Uncertain future What is known and taken for granted today may be lost in the sands of time tomorrow Our modern ways of recording information, such as the Internet and digital databases, have revolutionized and solved many of the problems that plagued our ancestors, bookworms and fires are less common A concern for us now copying books is easier and faster than ever, but it would be arrogant of us to believe that our modern systems are completely perfect.

The preservation of books and knowledge is a constant battle against the forces of the universe and even against ourselves. I think so. It's a safe bet that not all of the books available in our hands at this very moment will survive the next 1000 years in one form or another, rightly or wrongly, some will be forgotten and, in turn, missing for our descendants, descendants who might wonder What will be the ones to come? The Lost Books might have said we like those rich aristocratic Romans. We are lucky to have so much knowledge at our fingertips. You never know.

You may only have a narrow window to enjoy something before it's gone. Thanks so much for looking. I hope you enjoyed this long video. Sorry for the poor performance lately, I hope to make more videos next year, so yeah, see you since that incident. The rainbow became very careful and decided not to touch the ground again, so now, even if he wants it, no one will ever do it. again being able to reach any of the ends of the rainbow