This is 99% invisible.
I'm Roman Mars.
Future historians who want to learn about the 21st century will probably not lack for primary sources.
As of today, approximately 30,000 hours of content are being uploaded to YouTube every hour, while Wikipedia is currently home to roughly 55 million articles and counting.
For historians who want to study the previous century, the sources thin out just a bit.
Archives provide access to about 2,000 daily US newspapers and another 2,000 magazines.
Go back to late Middle ages, before the invention of the printing press, and things get a lot rougher.
Only a few thousand hand copied manuscripts from that time have survived.
And as for the very ancient past, the situation is downright bleak.
Of the over 100 plays written by Sophocles, we have seven.
But the hardest stuff to find, the further back you go, are the documents that tell us something about everyday life, about what it was like to be a bureaucrat in Egypt's Middle Kingdom, or a soldier in the Persian army, or a farmer in ancient Sumeria.
It's not that these ancient societies didn't produce lots of everyday communications.
Frequently they did.
But it's often the most common, ordinary documents that don't survive, either because no one thought to preserve them, or their society was conquered, or they were written down on a medium that wasn't meant to last.
Ask any historian and they'll tell you it's called ephemera for a reason.
But today I'm here to tell you the story of some documents of everyday life that did survive.
That's 99 PI producer Joe Rosenberg.
So, Joe, you have a story of preservation for us.
Yeah.
And it's about a trove, you might say, found in what is now northern Iraq of some very, very, very old texts.