The clay tablets we have from the bronze age themselves seem only preserved by chance. They are found in store rooms in layers of cities that suffered widespread destruction, accidentally firing the clay records. So what we have is kind of sporadic, some letters from one king to another here, a bunch of apparently unremarkable palace economy bookkeeping there, then we tie it together with what we learn from archeology (and most exciting in recent times, from genetics). We also have a lot of stone stelas. But they certainly didn't leave us a well preserved big picture. I imagine future people would see the same story for us: A big stone inscription here, some documents accidentally printed on very high quality stock stored in an accidentally optimal place there, etc.

Another fun glimpse: It has been speculated, based on evidence in the Uluburun shipwreck, that some bronze age societies used a wooden book-like object with wax or clay faces as an easily erasable notepad. Whoever owned that may have thought about it the same way we think about electronic records blinking out. Or maybe they didn't think about the future at all.

Most clay tablets pulled out of the ground are unfired. The act of removing unfired tablets that have been in the ground for so long kicks off some decay, so it used to be common to fire excavated tablets to preserve them. There's modern conservation techniques that remove the need to fire tablets, but those techniques post-date the lawful flow of material culture to western museums, so pretty much everything you'll see is fired. While fires in antiquity might have inadvertantly helped preserve some tablets that might not have otherwise survived, this is hardly the most common case. The talk of fires preserving tablets is mostly used to illustrate the stark difference in durability between records recorded on clay and records recorded on vellum or papyrus.

This fascination with "being remembered" is strange. We shouldn't optimize for being remembered (or being easy to reconstruct archaeologically). We should try to not vanish. If we do vanish, why do we care about being remembered?

We will all die, and this time will pass - this is completely inevitable. There is no way to not vanish, the closest you can come is being remembered.

Our civilization may well continue and prosper for a thousand years more, but unless we care about being remembered, they will have no idea what Pink Floyd, or Harry Potter, or A Hundred Years of Solitude, or an iPhone, or Linux, or anything else you consider important of our time were/was. Just like we have almost no idea about the pop culture or songs of people living in, say, the area of Berlin in the year 1022 was.

> Just like we have almost no idea about the pop culture or songs of people living in, say, the area of Berlin in the year 1022 was.

We can listen to the music of Hildegard of Bingen, who lived a little after that time in another part of Germany. It's not folk music, sure, but that's still pretty cool.

> 1022

This seems to be like end of Ottonian Renaissance. So maybe someone like Hermann of Reichenau?

And so what?

It's OK to say "being remembered doesn't matter", I was only pointing out that the alternatives are "being remembered" or "being forgotten" - and both are fine. There is no third option, though, "not vanishing".

> This fascination with "being remembered" is strange. We shouldn't optimize for being remembered

What if it’s about remembering rather than being remembered? There are some good lessons in past events.

Think about the number of civilizations over the last hundred thousand years or so. Most of them are gone and we know very little about them. There are probably a lot that we don't even know existed in the first place. Ignoring the state of the world today, just on the numbers it's likely that this civilization will die and fade like every other.

Given the choice, would you rather your civilization be understood to people in the future, or would you leave as little as possible behind and leave future historians with only guesses?

> we should try to not vanish

If this civilization survives for the next few thousand years, the work of the preservationists will end up in a museum to early Earth civilization. If not, then the preserved work will end up in a museum to early Earth civilization, but run by aliens or something.

The need to be remembered is more of a philosophical argument, but I think it's just part of the human condition. It's why we pass our names to our children, why we tell stories. Thousands of years after the fact, almost everyone on the planet knows the names of at least some of the great conquerors of antiquity. Just about anyone you meet could probably tell you at least one story about Alexander the Great, or Genghis Khan, or Julius Caesar.

As a wildly successful civilization, the need to be remembered for that success is strong. Maybe just for vanity, but maybe future generations can learn from our stories as well. If our civilization does fall and we are not remembered, what happens next? Would we have another Dark Age? If the remnants of our civilization can still use the knowledge we've accumulated, would that help them rebuild?

It's really an unknowable question. The only thing we can be sure about is that it costs us relatively very, very little to preserve our records. If that effort is wasted, then so be it, but not putting in the effort would probably be bad in almost all situations, depending on your perspective.