WI: Record keeping continued to be done in clay tablets

[PecuTheGreat]

Like the Bronze age Collapse was a dark age, people stopped writing and others completely forgot, that's why that era is so mysterious but thanks to writing in mud and baking it, the era before that isn't mysterious, infact we have so much textual evidence that we haven't deciphered them all.

If writing in clay tablets continued to be a thing, just how much lost info would we still have now?.

Now of course, the switch to more perishable materials was a pragmatic one for ease of production but even if writing things down and storing is more difficult and thus less things be written down, I doubt that would be enough of a disadvantage to reduce the total amount of info that survives.

 

[PecuTheGreat]

bump

 

[SlyDessertFox]

Like the Bronze age Collapse was a dark age, people stopped writing and others completely forgot, that's why that era is so mysterious but thanks to writing in mud and baking it, the era before that isn't mysterious, infact we have so much textual evidence that we haven't deciphered them all.

If writing in clay tablets continued to be a thing, just how much lost info would we still have now?.

Now of course, the switch to more perishable materials was a pragmatic one for ease of production but even if writing things down and storing is more difficult and thus less things be written down, I doubt that would be enough of a disadvantage to reduce the total amount of info that survives.

In Mesopotamia they did continue to keep records on clay tablets, at least through the Hellenistic age. We have, for instance, a Babylonian King List for the Hellenistic period that lists the rulers all the way down to Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and we have cuneiform tablets from as late as the 1st century CE. The issue with this is that you had to be a specially trained scribe to use cuneiform-so if everyone was just continuing to use tablet inscription, there would just be much less writing in general.

 

[PecuTheGreat]

In Mesopotamia they did continue to keep records on clay tablets, at least through the Hellenistic age. We have, for instance, a Babylonian King List for the Hellenistic period that lists the rulers all the way down to Antiochus IV Epiphanes, and we have cuneiform tablets from as late as the 1st century CE. The issue with this is that you had to be a specially trained scribe to use cuneiform-so if everyone was just continuing to use tablet inscription, there would just be much less writing in general.

What if simpler to use writing systems like the Alphabets descended from Phoenician just developed a version that works on clay?.

 

[riggerrob]

What if some religious law required all federal records to be kept on clay tablets?
This would eveentually devolve into a highly-formalized language written and read by only a tiny percentage of the population. Even well-educated kings would need to hire cuneform scholars to read their "mail" to them.
Compare this with high church Latin, or some of the more esoteric, high church dialects of Arabic.

Heaven forbid that a flood might damage some of those cuneform tablets stored too close to the storm tide level!!!!!!!

 

[PecuTheGreat]

Heaven forbid that a flood might damage some of those cuneform tablets stored to close to the storm tide level!!!!!!!

Maybe particluarly important stuff, especially up north, will be baked.