How did historical works survive to this day?

by romanius24

I always wondered how things like Julius Caesar's Commentarii and other Greek or Roman texts have survived.
Where were they found?Who preserved them for so long?

Did historians just recreate them form multiple sources?

EDIT: forgot to mentioned that i am mainly interested in texts from the Antiquity.

ballor

Thy survived because they were copied by scribes and monks again and again and again...the downside of it was that those works which weren't relevant enough didn't survive, so what we have no is just a tiny fraction of the original number of ancient books. Some books survived only because they were translated to Arabic and then back-translated to Latin, because they didn't survive the Dark Ages in Europe.