just a note: many of these talets are not being "baked a second time" by the fire as tom said, but actually baked a first time. clay tablets weren't usually baked intentionally unless they were *very* important. most were sunbaked but left unfired
Another fun fact about clay tablets is, in some regions they weren't ever deliberately fired in the era they were used in (so they could be recycled), but many of the best preserved examples are ones that were in accidental fires. So 'better condition than before' could be literal - even without a steam explosion, they might have been raw clay that would have disintegrated when wet, and even if they wouldn't have deliberately fired them (there's some debate on this), when given the choice between letting them burn or getting them wet it's obvious which one you'd pick even without the explosion risk.
same, starting to wonder if guests discuss the "obvious" answers to fill in time? pessimistic but maybe i am just being meta about the format at this point lol
Well it could be that the local fire service were already aware of the museum's contents and knew not to act, whereas passionate museum visitors and good samaritans may not know and try to grab buckets of water, etc to put it out. I'm not a fire fighter, but I am on a farm with access to a slurry tanker and a stream. If something was on fire that shouldn't be on fire while I'm nearby, I'd try my best to put it out, or at least minimise it spreading, in the time between seeing it on fire and the fire service arriving. I hope I never have to act like that though as I know there's many reasons just dumping water on a fire can be bad and being near one extremely dangerous, especially farm fires where there could be hundreds of litres of diesel, etc, and I might be someone who just freezes in an emergency, so maybe I wouldn't be any use at all if the situation arose.
Man, clay tablets or prints on ceramic tiles were my first thoughts in the beginning but I stuck too much to the impression that the fire had to be an accident somehow (making bystanders want to extinguish the flames).
I was all over a document store that was looking to dehumidify something like velum, so baking it would be ok, because the documents were in some fancy chamber, but water damage would be fatal...
40 sec in, library in india that is made of idk how many stellas carved. the whole thing is supposed to be a single book if I remember correctly, but I suppose it could be split in 30000 documents edit: not quite then
I was going to just watch and compare silently, but I think I'll leave my thoughts before I get any further (2:00). I was thinking about the water damage angle too, but then thought about the 'better condition'. I was thinking they're maybe in steel boxes and they had issues with damp, and the fire dried them out. I also thought about them being in plastic pockets in the steel boxes so the heat of the fire laminated them somehow :)
Pausing right after the question to make a guess: they documents are clay. Fire will just make them into fired clay, while making them experience temperature change too quickly would make them explode (and yes, my mind went immediately to Discworld).
Haven't finished this yet but I'm immediately thinking like these are non-paper documents, like stone or whatever, and maybe water or foam would destroy this particular kind of stone
My guess: the 30,000 documents are old clay tablets, like cuneiform tablets from mesopotamia. Using water to extinguish the fire would destroy them, but leaving them in the fire will be like putting them through a kiln.
my mind went to something like some form of stone or metal document pretty fast (though i didnt think of clay) and yeah... all of those would be pretty head resistant.... but shock cooling them after heating might cause problems (in the case of clay, as tom said...they literally explode)
No way they would expect them to get better. I assume many of them would crack and random building fire is far from the consistency of a normal clay firing furnace.
I didn't like the trick in this one. Antique clay isn't made better by exposing it to fire. That's not preservation. Changing the object's material properties with fire might be desirable for some purposes, but altering an antique in that kind of uncontrolled way does not make it better.
@@lateralcast So the part about the "staff looking after the library begging people not to extinguish the flames" is just a fictional invention? We surely have no records of what the staff at the time said.
The question was _very deliberately_ phrased to mislead; As soon as Tom reiterates that it's 30k documents, "not papers", they pretty much got it immediately.
