There is a great quote:
"The Egyptians built using stone but wrote day to day on papyrus.
The Sumerians built with mud and wrote on clay tablets.
This is why we have lots of Egyptians buildings but not much of their writing and the opposite with the Sumerians."
Future archaeologists will be so confused when they find only glass and (maybe, if the wildlife doesn't finish eating it by then) plastic.
And lots of small rectangular silicon dioxide thingies.
They won’t find anything because it’ll have rusted and disintegrated within a few hundred years
These were a symbol of status and served a ritual purpose.
For your amusement: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/rite-on
In some circles they are. You think all the fancy RGB stuff and fancy lights to call attention to the gamers' PCs are about functionality? Or maybe are they about status?
Tools or and goods often serve as both status symbols and functionality.
Do you think fancy cars are just about transport? Or maybe they also serve as status symbols?
Do you think the special sword for the king which he uses to knight people is just a tool of war? Seems to me that its all three tbh.
All sorts of things in our lives are both functional and status symbols and/or serve a ritual purpose.
Heck there are all sorts of things that are not really functional any more but were very functional at one point and still serve as status symbols and ritual purpose, for example - the traditional gift of a fancy fountain pen to a recent law school graduate.
It would be way easier for us to beat overconsumption and promote sustainability of it wasn't for status, in fact. New iphones and fresh clothes are not necessary for life, but socially, people crave them.
> This is why we have lots of Egyptians buildings but not much of their writing and the opposite with the Sumerians.
Well, we have a lot of Mesopotamian writing. Nothing like the amount they wrote, but more than we want to deal with. Most of their writing sank into the water table and dissolved, like the buildings.
Papyrus isn't a reason for any lack of Egyptian writing; just like everything else, papyrus won't rot in Egypt because of the lack of water.
There is enough humidity around the Nile, that is, the places where people actually lived, to rot papyrus. We have some remaining papyrus archives, but those are exceptions, not the rule. There is absolutely nothing like the library of Ashurbanibal.
Papyrus was amazing material for the time, but it was also a curse on future archeologists. The Achaemenid Persians went from being illiterate, to writing on clay, to capturing Egypt and writing on Papyrus, in one human lifetime. We have more surviving Persian writing from the short time they wrote on clay than we have of the two hundred years of their history after that.
UV and oxygen are plenty strong enough to deteriorate paper over time even without water. Never mind the occasional fire as what happened with the Library of Alexandria.
> UV and oxygen are plenty strong enough to deteriorate paper over time even without water.
This just isn't an issue at all. You're not taking historical documents off the shelves of a modern building - and if you were, sunlight still wouldn't matter - you're digging them out of the ground. Water is what matters; that's why we have so many things from Egypt that could never have survived anywhere else.
Fire, yes, it's worse for paper than it is for clay. But like I just said, we're missing the majority of Mesopotamian documents because they were never fired. We still have a minority that were. What does the same logic applied to Egypt tell you?