Time Shipwrecks
Time is a destroyer. Unrecorded memories vanish in the overwriting loop of the continuum of life.
Bacon - the human - captured the lost in The Advancement of Learning (1605).
Antiquities are history defaced, or remnants that have escaped the shipwreck of time.
These are the wreckages that refuse to sink in oblivion. The māðm - the mathom of Beowulf and Tolkien. Things that resisted the rot becoming the opposite of brosnung, but... Did they really escape the shipwreck of time?
Back to Francis Bacon:
...the originals cannot last, and the copies cannot but leese of the life and truth.
The records keep only pieces of the puzzle. We can only imagine what was lost in time.