Historians spend a lot of time pouring over minutia from non-notable people. There is plenty about the world that doesn't seem worth writing down, but can be intuited from tangential texts.
The costs seems low enough to just keep it.
The costs seems low enough to just keep it.
Of course, to your point, they do keep it around. They don't just throw it in the trash.
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It would be pretty neat if someone could figure out how to OCR all the cuneiform tablets and turn them into something searchable.