[discostu]

But of course paper doesn't last. Some guy on the History Channel once made a comment about Babylon being a society of paper and Egypt being a society of stone. If places got flooded away whatever records there were are probably gone, you see that even now; small towns die and nobody cares anymore and the place is functionally erased from history.

[RightWhale]

If the records consisted mainly of scratches on sheets of treebark, a general flood probably wouldn't do much to preserve the record.