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 U.S. 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

Sumaria. 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 99PI producer Joe Rosenberg.

So, Joe, you have a story of preservation for us.

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