[crazygringo]

Unfortunately that's not true. Most beautiful stuff has been destroyed at one point or another.

The laws of economics and war and necessity really don't care the slightest about beauty.

The pyramids of Giza were covered with fine, smooth, white limestone that gleamed in the sunlight -- as beautiful as you could imagine. That didn't prevent people from stealing most of it later for their own purposes.

[iambateman]

I’ll take the other side on this. OP said “surest” which you seem to interpret as “certain.”

Of course not _all_ beautiful artifacts persist - no one takes that position. But it is reasonable to say that most artifacts which receive attention today are just the artifacts which were formed with special care and whose beauty was preserved, probably by accident, for us.