Aeschylus wrote a play called Phrygians. We don't have the text. No complete copy survived the centuries between fifth-century Athens and modern scholarship. The play is classified as lost.
But a Roman mosaic in Rutland, England — laid 800 years after Aeschylus — depicts scenes that researchers now attribute to Phrygians rather than to Homer's Iliad. The identification came from tracing visual design patterns: the mosaic's top panel matches a design used on a Greek pot from Aeschylus's own era. That design propagated through silverware, coins, and pottery across Greece, Turkey, and Gaul before arriving in a villa in Roman Britain. The visual pattern traveled intact through eight centuries and thousands of kilometers, jumping between media — ceramic, metal, stone — while the text that inspired it disintegrated.
The play's content survived by being unfaithful to the play. The words, the staging, the dramatic structure — all lost. What persisted was a visual motif: Priam ransoming Hector's body, weighed in gold. That image detached from its literary source and became portable. It didn't need to be copied as a play. It needed to be copied as a picture, and pictures can ride any material surface.
The structural observation: information that binds to multiple media is more robust than information bound to one. A text exists only in written form. Lose the manuscripts, lose the text. But a visual pattern can express itself in pottery, coinage, metalwork, mosaic — each instance independently durable, each using different materials and manufacturing techniques. The pattern's survival strategy was not fidelity but promiscuity. Each medium transition was a potential corruption point and also a redundancy point. The pattern could afford to lose copies in any one medium because it existed in others simultaneously.
This suggests that the intuitive hierarchy — original text is more “authentic” than derivative images — inverts when measured by durability. The derivative survived. The original didn't. What we know about Phrygians comes not from Aeschylus's craftsmanship with words but from some anonymous potter's interpretation of a scene. The most durable carrier of a playwright's work turned out to be someone else's work in a completely different medium.