Yeah totally agree.
Interestingly in regards to your point - there was an article - in the WSJ recently I think - about scientists who are using all sorts of advanced imaging technologies to try to recover old texts that were illegible or in some cases written on materials that would crumble if you tried to open them. So they do like 3D imaging with 12 different wavelengths and hope to be able to read some texts that were previously unreadable.
I remember when it first struck me for real (along these lines) that the trajectory of human progress is far from a straight line upwards. When you consider how advanced the classical world was and then realize it wasn’t until the renaissance - like 1000 years later - that mankind caught up and surpassed the ancients. That would be like islam taking over now and us not getting back to our present state of technology after the year 3000!
The unspoken assumption that progress is always being made, that we know more today than we did yesterday, is sometimes a correct one but sometimes not.
It also depends on the definition of progress.
We had a president in George Washington who knew how to run his own brewery, could change a wagon wheel if his transportation broke down, could build his own house,
and today we have a president that knows how to play with a blackberry.
More accurately, western Europe went thru this collapse and rebirth.
Chinese and Indian civilizations, among others, were unaffected, although they had their own problems.
The classical world also had some truly amazing blind spots from our perspective. There was very little actual technological advancement (except in architecture) from 300 BC to 300 AD, roughly when the slide started.
In fact, you can make a very good case that art and literature went downhill dramatically over this period.
A major reason for this stagnation is likely the ancient world's dependence on slavery and the resultant isolation of educated men from the world of "stuff." Gentlemen and scholars just didn't muck around with glassware and bits of string, or they lost caste. This made the development of anything like true science impossible.
The authoritarian and increasingly totalitarian Roman state was also highly suspicious of anything that might lead to change. Ironic, sincee the development of true science might have allowed their civilization to survive by providing better weapons.