Quote:
Originally Posted by wwmiv
Ergo, I doubt literacy really played into this loss of knowledge. Rather, nobody had access to the knowledge at all because it was burned and lost. And even if literacy declined, some people were still literate. If the records still existed, somebody literate would have been around to perpetuate the knowledge.
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It's much more likely that this information was lost because the skilled trades that supported it evaporated. A ton of human culture (i.e. knowledge) is passed down by imitation. It's not like the Romans had a ton of literate slaves who were reading an IKEA instruction manual on how to build a concrete aquaduct. There may have been some degree of written knowledge of the process, but the Romans didn't document things in quite the same way as we do in the post-enlightenment era of scientific theory which is probably why their fairly advanced civilization never progressed into an industrial revolution.
Most of what the Romans did write was chronicling of things. It was "This is what I, Julius Ceasar did on this glorious campaign against Gaul" or "on the fourteenth day of July Antonius the merchant delivered 5,000 amphorae of olive oil to my warehouses in exchange for 2000 Denari". Not so much "I performed an experiment of 10 mixtures of cement and here are my findings".
Much of what they knew about construction was learned from imitating the Greeks and improving on it. Europe also forgot how to build arches for a few hundred years and that's despite the Romans leaving standing examples of them all over the place. The real loss of knowledge wasn't the burning of texts, it was the disruption of the skilled trade base that made the construction and supervision of such things possible. If you stop building with cement for even 50 years, you now have a huge knowledge gap. The best example of this is our own era. We built with ancient masonry techniques right up until (and to limited extent after) WWII. Now a days that knowledge is almost extinct save for a few extreme specialists. The systems we build with today are designed to imitate the aesthetics of the old ways, but functionally modern reenforced masonry is nothing like hand hewn brick and stone masonry.
To further that, given the less restrictive nature of today's methods, there's a whole range of knowledge and skill that are already gone. The old designs of historic masonry aren't entirely aesthetic, they were functional too. If you look closely at an old 2 flat or masonry building, you will see the repeating rows of stone sills or projections aren't just there to be pretty, they are placed in a very careful manner to repel water from the facade. Every little notch or finial or dowel or bracket or sill collects and kicks water in a specific way. There's probably a handful of humans on earth that still understand how to actually design and construct (let alone do it with their own hands) such things, let alone enough of them to truly revive that knowledge should modern society degrade to the point where factories are no longer turning out rebar and extruded brick to build modern style buildings.
The same thing happened with Rome, everyone was happily doing their job as a cog in the machine. Then someone threw a monkey wrench in the gears and enough cogs broke or were thrown from the wreckage of the machine that trying to put even a small portion of it (like say the exact cement mix) back together again was nearly impossible.