Books that were burned, names that were erased, and knowledge that simply stopped being copied. What was lost, and how quietly it went.
Claudius had native informants, a practising priesthood, imperial money and a library at Alexandria endowed to read his Etruscan history aloud once a year, forever. Not one sentence of it survives.
Read→5 min
We can pronounce every word of Etruscan and have been able to for centuries. That was never the problem. The problem is that thirteen thousand surviving inscriptions are almost all gravestones.
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The longest surviving Etruscan text spent two thousand years wrapped around an Egyptian woman in Thebes. Nobody noticed it was a book until 1891, and we still can't read most of it.
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In 12 BCE the new pontifex maximus collected every unauthorised prophecy in Rome and destroyed it. Then he edited the official collection too, and moved what survived into a temple next door to his own house.
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The great fire is the most durable myth in ancient history. What actually happened is slower, less dramatic, and considerably more unsettling.
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Chisel the name out of the stone, melt the coins, recarve the face. Rome had an administrative procedure for deleting someone from history — and it produced the most conspicuous holes in the record.
Read→5 min