Dwarkesh Patel

It's lost between 400 and 600 AD when the papyri are falling apart.

And here you are with a library of a thousand books and you can only afford to make 100 new books.

So you have to choose which hundred of these thousand do we save?

Because there literally is not enough industry on your continent.

to make enough leather to copy down all this text.

You have to pick.

And so the majority of what we lost from antiquity, we lost then.

We lost when the papyri were falling apart.

And this is also what distorted what survived because most of the copying out was done by monks.

And when you have a thousand books and you can only save a hundred of them and you're a monk, you're like, what do I save?

I know, St.

Augustine.

I love St.

Augustine.

This is why we have more surviving work by St.

Augustine than the entirety of all pagan classical Latin.

Because the subjective tastes of the people in power at the moment the papyri were falling apart ended up being an unintentional moment of censorship that biased what survives from antiquity.

So paper technology hits Europe in 800 A.D.

So we're talking about a 400-year famine of a cheap writing surface.

Paper is nowhere near as cheap as papyrus because you need to gather rags from used clothing.