Preserving Today’s Text For The Distant Future
Ennigaldi was a Neo-Babylonian princess in the 6th century BC. Her temple complex at the Great Ziggurat of Ur contains the oldest known museum in history. The Neo-Babylonians conducted extensive archaeological study of the ancient monuments and temples, already a thousand years old in Ennigaldi’s time. Thanks to their work, some of the artifacts they preserved were eventually rediscovered by 20th century archaeologists and survive to this day.
A Message From Our Founder
I started the Ennigaldi Foundation to preserve our culture for the distant future. As early as I can remember, I’ve always been reading history. As I got older I noticed how much our understanding of the past depends on the accident of what has been preserved.
Ancient Athens was a small society which flourished relatively briefly, but it looms large in our memory because we still have so much of their writing. Through their philosophy, their histories, their tragedies and comedies, we can understand who they were and how they lived. Their writing has shaped our lives for thousands of years. Yet across the Aegean Sea, the Ionian Greeks were equally important in their own time, but today we have almost none of their works, and except what we can see through the eyes of Athens we know little about them.
There are so many dark spots in history, where we have almost nothing to tell us how our forebears lived. Whatever Carthage may have written is gone forever. For some kingdoms in the early medieval period—or the Dark Ages, if you prefer that name—we have only a few songs about kings and battles, collected by foreign priests well after the fact. Only four Mayan books survived destruction at the hands of the conquistadors. On the other hand, when I’ve researched Chinese history, I’ve been intensely jealous of how thoroughly they preserved extensive official records well over a millennium old.
What will happen to today’s culture? What will happen to our books, our essays, our ideas, our values, our way of life? How much will be left in the year 2500? In 4000?
Our texts will not vanish as thoroughly as Carthage. But I worry that much of our greatest and most distinctive work may be lost, like that of so many societies before us, and our descendants will never even realize what they’re missing. More and more of our cultural and intellectual crown jewels are published digitally, where they might persist for a few decades if we’re lucky, rather than in books which can easily endure for centuries. I am not sure how much of our material the historians of the future will have to work with.
The Ennigaldi Foundation’s mission is to record as much of our culture as possible in a format that will endure through the ages. Our vaults will store glass tablets to carry our words to future civilizations, thousands of years from now. My dream is to preserve the entire English-language Wikipedia, but this is a long way away and we are starting much smaller.
Long ago, the Library of Ashurbanipal preserved clay tablets for over two thousand years before it was found by modern archaeologists, most famously including the rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Today, we are an industrial civilization, and we ought to preserve our most important texts at least as well as the ancient Assyrians did.