By Justin Evans
If you were standing at the Port of Alexandria in Egypt on a fateful November night in 48 BCE, you’d be terrified. Smoke would choke you. The great glow of a hundred wooden ships burning would threaten to fry your corneas. You’d see embers and sparks flying into the night sky.
Some idiot in Julius Caesar’s army had set the fire. What was Julius Caesar doing in Alexandria? It was all a little complicated. How Caesar fled there during the Roman civil war. How he got on the bad side of his host, the Emperor Ptolemy. How he got mixed up with Ptolemy’s sister Cleopatra. And why the Romans thought burning the whole Egyptian fleet was a good way to protect themselves, when they them-selves were encamped on land.
The main thing to pay attention to is the embers. One rises, lazily rides the breeze a short distance, lands on a large nearby building, which happens to be the Library of Alexandria, and sets it aflame. Thirty thousand scrolls and half of Greek civilization goes up in smoke.
A tragedy of ancient civilization.
A tragedy of data.
And more precisely, for our purposes, a tragedy of data storage.
Pick a Greek tragedy that survived the fire. Antigone, by Sophocles. If you add up all the type and text that goes into Antigone—setting aside the genius and all that—it’s about a half megabyte. Today, you can download it as a pdf to your phone in about twenty seconds.
In 48 BCE, the storage of Antigone required the wealth of an empire.
The Library of Alexandria was not a library like we think of libraries today. A place you go to snack and text while pretending to do homework. The Library of Alexandria was basically Stanford University. A lavish campus, with landscaping, sculpture. Scholars with bad hygiene puttering around the grounds, thinking great thoughts, living off a stipend. The collection itself was a multigenerational achievement, requiring the obsession and the treasure of the entire Ptolemaic Dynasty, from Ptolemy Eurgertes, who started it, to Ptolemy Philodactus, who had his ships burned by Caesar. At its peak, it contained seven hundred thousand scrolls.
And it is not a flight of twenty-first-century fancy to equate the library with a giant database. Its greatest librarian, Zenodotus, invented a system for labeling the scrolls. Each scroll would have a plate next to its storage slot with its title, the name and birthplace of its author, and the first line of the book. So our slot would read:
Antigone
Sophocles
Kolonos
My sister, my Ismene, do you know
With this plate system, which was called pinakes, Zenodotus had invented metadata. Data about data. We’ll come back to that in later chapters.
For now it is enough to understand that the storage of half a megabyte of data in 48 BCE is impossible to put a value on. It would be like putting a value on storing the Mona Lisa. You’d have to value the entire Louvre Museum, all 650,000 square feet of central Paris real estate, not to mention its value as a historic landmark or its annual operating budget for staff and climate controls and cafeterias and parking and tourist security. Everything required to keep the Mona Lisa up there half-smiling on her hook, day after day, for generations.
Data storage to Ptolemy in 48 BCE was, literally, priceless.
***
Now each person with a smartphone is an enumerator. Listening to music. Posting photos. Posting comments. Writing. Reading. Searching. Shopping. Calling. Texting. Meeting. Even just moving around. We are data creators. Our actions, our movements, our mere fingers typing, create data, which, thanks to Herman Hollerith, we can store. Cheaply.
And it is not just people that are data creators. A person does not need to punch the card anymore. Because our devices are “smart,” they, too, are enumerators. More than seven thousand satellites circle the earth, taking pictures of every tree, road, hill, and canyon on the planet, every minute, generating 950 terabits a day. Road sensors passively capture traffic data in “continuous count” programs. Stock markets track the flow of trades each day, creating a hundred terabytes of data. Ocean sensors bob in the deep tracking every patch of ocean the size of Texas. Oil and gas exploration uses sixty types of seismic sensors to plumb the earth.
We’re taking the pulse of our planet.
Add it all up, and, as a civilization, we produce data at the rate of seventy-nine zettabytes per year. What the heck is a zettabyte? In volume, that’s thirty-five billion times the works of Shakespeare… every minute. The planet doth protest too much.
We produce it. And then we keep it.
Why?
One reason is because we can. Thanks to the tabulating machine, storing the data is affordable.
But the deeper reason lies back in the Library of Alexandria.
Around 240 BCE, the Ptolemaic emperor who started the library, Ptolemy Eurgertes, sent an envoy to Athens. The request was to borrow the original scroll of Antigone. Also the original scrolls of Sophocles’s other works: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Ajax, Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, and Electra. Also the works of Aeschylus. And the works of Euripides. Pretty much the canon of Greek tragedies. The Athenians said yes. The only reason they did so is that Ptolemy Eurgertes plunked down an enormous deposit, the equivalent of millions and millions of dollars.
When the scrolls came back to Alexandria, Ptolemy Eurgertes had copies made.
Then sent those copies back to Athens.
He kept the originals. What a bully.
Because he wanted the originals in his library.
And the Ptolemies kept adding to the library. Book buyers spread out across the globe, buying scrolls, whole collections. If you were a visitor to Alexandria you’d find that your ship would be searched. Goons, employed by the Ptolemies, would empty out your trunk and confiscate your books. (In their fashion, they would keep the originals and give you back copies.) When the city of Athens was starving, an Egyptian envoy pulled up to the harbor at Piraeus with a ship full of food aid and said, “We’ll happily unload the food to feed your starving people—if you give us books in return.” Literary extortion.
Why?
Greed, clearly. The Ptolemies lusted for books. They were thieves, even. Literary gangsters. But why did the Ptolemies need all the books? Why did they need to amass a dragon’s hoard, with Zenodotus prowling the stacks, labeling it all, counting it?
To me, the answer is simple. Because they might need it. There might arise some unexpected problem to solve. Some question to answer. Like the tragic hero in another Sophocles work, Oedipus Rex, Ptolemy Eurgertes, leader of his people, successor to both Alexander the Great and the Pharaohs, might come upon a sphinx—c’mon, he was Egyptian; of course it would be a sphinx—posing him a riddle, standing between him and something he desperately needed. Some terrible problem that threatened his people. Life, and history, has a way of doling out such problems all the time. And Ptolemy Eurgertes wanted to be able to go to the library, sniff all of Zenodotus’s plates, and be able to find an answer.
The vast storage of data, and the incomprehensible speed of data creation, are new. The desire for data—for information just in case—dates back at least to Ptolemy Eurgertes.
Two thousand years later, in 2012, a big data expert named Edd Dumbill spoke what no doubt Ptolemy Eurgertes felt in his data-greedy heart:
“When you can,” he said, “keep everything.”
Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins
The Little Book of Data: Understanding the Powerful Analytics that Fuel AI, Make or Break Careers, and Could Just End Up Saving the World
Justin Evans
HarperCollins
Pp 304, Rs 599
