[HN Gopher] Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek o...
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Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
Author : ckarmann
Score : 72 points
Date : 2021-09-26 17:38 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (talesoftimesforgotten.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (talesoftimesforgotten.com)
| antognini wrote:
| I've been doing a lot of research on early astronomy lately and
| have been digging into how exactly we know what we know about the
| early Greek astronomers like Thales and Anaximander [1]. It turns
| out that it's pretty remarkable that we know anything whatsoever
| about these early figures.
|
| Thales was active so early on that philosophers weren't really
| writing anything down at that point. One of his successors,
| Anaximander, wrote his ideas down, but did so in verse rather
| than in prose, and even still, those works were lost to history.
| But centuries later, a student of Aristotle named Theophrastus
| wrote a text called _History of Physics_ (or something similar),
| which was by all accounts a thorough exposition of the thought of
| the major Greek natural philosophers up until his day. But this
| work was also lost.
|
| Fortunately, however, a later author, St. Hippolytus, wrote
| another work called the _Refutation of All Heresies_ , which used
| Theophrastus's text as a source and basically went point by point
| through the various philosophers that Theophrastus covered to
| explain why each was wrong. St. Hippolytus was so thorough that
| we can actually reconstruct the original chapters in
| Theophratus's work. So one of our main sources for the ideas of
| Thales and Anaximander comes to us two sources removed from the
| original.
|
| There are other sources for the ideas of Thales and Anaximander,
| but it's a similar story where the surviving works have been
| filtered through sometimes as many as three intermediate works
| that were all lost. So understanding the ideas of these early
| astronomers means piecing together fragments from a lot of later
| works, trying to figure out the chains of transmission and the
| potential biases at each link. It's almost as though we were
| living 2000 years in the future and trying to understand the
| ideas of Charles Darwin, but the only sources we had to go on
| were a newspaper clipping from the Scopes Monkey Trial and a
| Reader's Digest version of a book by Stephen Jay Gould.
| Understandably, the error bars on our knowledge are pretty big
| and there's very little we can say for certain.
|
| [1]: Shameless plug: https://songofurania.com/about/
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Cool podcast!
|
| Check out Shwep.net.
|
| Did you know that Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler credited
| Pythagoras for heliocentrism [1]? And Newton credited
| Pythagoras for _the inverse square law_ [2] of gravity?
| Pythagoras is best...
|
| [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/228080
|
| [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/531064
| pseingatl wrote:
| More texts are on the way. The Villa Papiri texts will soon
| become readable, it is hoped, through the application of modern
| technology. These charred scrolls were part of a library at
| Pompeii.
|
| Odd that he didn't mention these at all.
| ncmncm wrote:
| All the interesting charred scrolls are still to be dug up;
| what we have is from the top-floor "reading room". Italy is
| holding off excavation because they do not get enough money to
| preserve what is already exposed.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| A more interesting knowledge-hole is Neo-Latin, Latin written
| from the Renaissance to today. Surviving from the sixteenth
| century alone are 10,000 times more different books in Latin than
| survive from all of antiquity (at least according to Jurgen
| Leonhardt's "Latin: Story of a World Language"). People think
| about the Romans when they hear Latin, but they forget that it
| was the international publishing language for academia into the
| nineteenth century (people were still writing dissertations in
| STEM in Latin at some European universities in the early
| twentieth century). Since the nineteenth century, fewer and fewer
| people have been learning Latin, and of those few care about
| anything except the Romans, so there is a vast and barely known
| volume of Latin out there waiting to be explored. Google Books is
| full of stuff that nobody has read in centuries.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yes! I was shocked when i learned this.
|
| I'm currently working on a Neo Latin translation from Marsilio
| Ficino. He is famous for catalyzing the Italian Renaissance by
| translating Plato (and many other Greek works) into Latin,
| making it available in the west after about 1000 years. He also
| restarted "the Academy." He was a prolific philosopher himself.
|
| The book I'm helping to translate is "De Voluptate", or "On
| Pleasure." In it, he integrates Epicurean hedonism and Platonic
| virtue. I mean, after translating all those works himself, I
| feel like Ficino deserves having his works available to
| scholars today.
| cheese_van wrote:
| I picked up my first Latin dictionary at 19 after I found
| Kraft-Ebbing's "Psychopathia Sexualis" in a used book store.
| Kraft-Ebbing was one of the first, if not the first to
| academically discuss homosexuality, among other sexual
| practices. All the real naughty bits were in Latin so I needed
| that dictionary. And put it to good use.
|
| It was assumed, at the time of the writing, 1894, that his
| audience was Latin fluent.
| quotemstr wrote:
| To be fair, wasn't a lot of that Latin just the endless navel-
| gazing of Medieval Scholasticism?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Galileo, Decartes, Spinoza, Newton, Leibniz, Locke... All
| wrote in Latin.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Yes, of course. I was mostly joking. That said, hasn't much
| of the post-classical output in Latin already been
| translated repeatedly? How much _worthwhile_ stuff is left
| to be translated?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| So much. It is surprising, I know. For instance, how
| about Descartes' very first book? Or Baumgarten's
| "Aesthetica", where he introduced the idea of
| "Aesthetics"? I talked to a scholar recently who said
| that it will probably never get translated, because there
| isn't the interest.
| wizard-beta wrote:
| Not necessarily - it was literally anything. Any publication
| whatsoever in Europe up to about 1800 was apt to be in Latin.
| Science, history, geography, correspondences, laws, records
| of all kinds, etc.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| For example, the career of the great German mathematician
| C. F. Gauss. His early works, written around 1800, were in
| Latin. By the end of his career in the 1840s, he wrote in
| German.
| umanwizard wrote:
| No, Latin was the main international lingua franca among
| educated people in Europe for about a millennium after it
| stopped being spoken natively. As such, scientific and
| otherwise intellectual works of all kinds were primarily
| written in Latin, for the same reason they're primarily
| written in English today.
|
| In fact, the US, UK, and every other culturally Anglo country
| could sink into the ocean tomorrow and I suspect English
| would still be a dominant international language for the
| foreseeable future.
| pacman2 wrote:
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu
|
| and
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
|
| "Bishop De Landa, a Franciscan monk and conquistador during the
| Spanish conquest of Yucatan, wrote: "We found a large number of
| books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which
| were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we
| burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing
| degree, and which caused them much affliction." Only three extant
| codices are widely considered unquestionably authentic."
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| But remember, the Dark Ages weren't really all that dark, and
| religious figures throughout history have worked diligently to
| _preserve_ knowledge rather than to destroy or conceal it.
|
| /s
| Thorentis wrote:
| You're right, the current monopolies on information (tech
| giants) are really great at preserving and not deleting
| things which they find offensive.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| Maybe someone on HN knows the answer to this question, which I've
| wondered for a while. Are there other civilizations of similar
| cultural sophistication to the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese whose
| writings have just not been passed down and so we aren't as
| familiar with them? Or are the ones whose work survived roughly
| it, even if much of their works are lost. E.g. there doesn't seem
| to be much surviving Persian literature, but I'm not sure if this
| is because it wasn't preserved well or if it's because there
| wasn't much of it to begin with.
| prox wrote:
| Sanskrit in the Indian subcontinent has a long history, and not
| many are familiar with them. Lots of other scripts and
| languages in East Asia are relatively unknown (for example from
| Indonesia)
| wizard-beta wrote:
| Even though people are not so familiar with classical Indian
| civilization, they were very highly literate and the extant
| corpus is enormous. It easily rivals or exceeds classical
| Greek and Latin. I have heard that the Mahabharata is 10
| times longer than the Iliad/Odyssey.
| prox wrote:
| On that line of thought, probably it's Tibetan and buddhism
| that must have an extensive library. Most of these works
| have survived for a very long time.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| There are thousands of lost palm leaf books, in Sanskrit and
| other South Asian languages, rotting away.
|
| There is simply no money to support the scholarship that
| would preserve these works. It's incredibly sad.
| ncmncm wrote:
| The whole of modern linguistic theory, including the regular,
| context-free, and unrestricted grammars, were fully worked
| out in still-preserved Sanskrit.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Try posting this question on https://reddit.com/r/askhistorians
| maybe? They often have in-depth, comprehensive answers, that go
| into the evidence we have available
|
| edit: anyway this comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28663948 has some pointers
| lai-yin wrote:
| The part about the extinction of the Punic language made me
| wonder - what would it take to utterly erase an entire branch of
| knowledge today?
| pacman2 wrote:
| Not long. Lets assume we lose the ability to manufacture modern
| IT equipment. How long do we have? Estimated live expectancy of
| HDD, SDD and tapes?
|
| Most digital data would be lost within 10-20 years. Maybe
| sooner. We could at least try to pint out wikipedia.
| remoquete wrote:
| There's this scene in Rollerball (1975) where James Caan visits
| the most powerful supercomputer on Earth. The lead scientist
| candidly admits that they lost all the computers with XIII
| century data. I never forgot that scene.
|
| https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/720ad4a5-5a51-4b97-b521-2a1d1fa...
| [deleted]
| cblconfederate wrote:
| an authoritarian ruler and hatred. cultures are being erased
| today
|
| https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/china-doubles-down-on-xinjia...
|
| https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/a-violent-effort-to-rewrite-hi...
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/taliban-pose-threat-afghan-c...
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cblconfederate wrote:
| hum, considering that a lot of that culture is not
| digitized or even recorded, how is that related to
| flamewar?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Burn it all on CDs and leave them for ten years in wet
| environment.
|
| Joking aside, our methods of recording information are
| hellishly vulnerable. This comes with the density of record. A
| clay tablet from Mesopotamia does not carry more than 2 kB of
| info, but 4000 years have gone by and it is still readable.
| nickbauman wrote:
| We still can't read Linear A, the language of Minoan Greece.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Forgotten protocols are a thing until today. AFAIK we have
| problems deciphering the recorded transmissions of
| Lunokhod, the Soviet probe that landed on the Moon.
| Everyone who knew the code is dead.
| spdegabrielle wrote:
| The OAIS reference model was created to address the issue
| in space data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archival
| _Information_Syst...
| lai-yin wrote:
| Would be interesting to have a catalogue of endangered
| protocols/knowledge bases - similar to the endangered
| species list.
|
| Bit of a tangent: just occurred to me that part of the
| story arc for the show 'Mr. Robot' is hackers trying to
| erase an entire knowledge base - the debt history of
| billions of people. The protagonists try to achieve this
| goal by peaceful means, but...okay I'm going to stop
| spoiling it's an awesome show check it out.
| p1esk wrote:
| In Mr Robot the goal was to destroy a data base, not a
| knowledge base. Data != knowledge.
| nickbauman wrote:
| I think it's possible with the rise of more and more
| "successful" dictatorships the Internet will become the domain
| of the state and we'll probably lose a lot very very quickly.
|
| So... that happening.
| dbtc wrote:
| I'm long on paper.
| vulcan01 wrote:
| Paper, meet fire.
|
| Seriously, though, there have been a _lot_ of instances
| throughout history where scrolls and books have been burned
| at the order of the state. Perhaps the most famous example
| of this is the burning of the Library of Alexandria:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria
|
| So I don't think paper is necessarily a "better"
| alternative.
| theli0nheart wrote:
| > _Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library
| of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically
| destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over
| the course of several centuries_
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| When you think about the scope of human history, and how little
| we know, it's sad to think of all the lost work. We only know
| things going back a few thousand years, but men who have our same
| cognition have been around for far longer. Plato spoke of a
| golden age, now long lost, where the flaura and fuana were so
| plentiful that men didn't need to work. Atlantis is mentioned,
| stories of a distant time, with men who maybe lived better than
| we do.
| decasteve wrote:
| I think of that too.
|
| I also think about how some of the really great works have
| stood the test of time -- like Plato's. Then there are really
| great works that were once common and popular but have fallen
| out of contemporary thought.
|
| Given the rich and documented history we do have at our
| disposal, it feels to me that the present era is much less
| diverse and more ignorant than it ought to be.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| It is INSANE that we havent lost a single book of Plato's. In
| contrast, we lost 3/4 of Aristotle's books.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| One general thing is that it is the most 'classic' works
| that are copied the most and most frequently. Early works
| in philosophy from Plato or even Aristotle are much more
| likely to survive than, say, philosophers from later
| antiquity (can you even think of many?) Of course that
| isn't to say that all the most ancient philosophers' works
| survived--we have little of Parmenides for example. Perhaps
| another reason for Plato and Aristotle to survive
| particularly is their relevance to Christian theology, but
| I don't really buy that as we have more Plato than
| Aristotle but Christian theology is more Aristotelian.
|
| A simple argument about mathematics or engineering can be
| made by going to Constantinople and looking at the Hagia
| Sophia. Much technical and practical mathematical ability
| would have been needed at the time to construct it but we
| have little interesting mathematics from that time (6th
| century). I find it improbable that we would have such
| mathematicians as Archimedes and Apollonius around 250BCE,
| then roughly nothing for 750 years, and then the Hagia
| Sophia. I find it more believable that the tradition of
| mathematics continued but that only those most ancient,
| foundational and well-regarded works were sufficiently
| reproduced to make it to the present. To be clear, I am not
| trying to claim that one needs the kind of mathematicians
| produced by Apollonius to build a large dome but rather
| that a society capable of continuing that kind of technical
| ability for so long ought to have also been supporting the
| continuation of technical mathematics.
|
| One then has to wonder: if this work was being done in the
| Greek-speaking world, what did this continuation look like?
| Among the known works, some of Apollonius' work was not
| really improved upon until Riemann over 2000 years after
| his death.
| [deleted]
| jl6 wrote:
| Sure, but that's the Greek mythological version of the Garden
| of Eden story.
|
| I find the reality even more interesting. What were humans
| thinking about 40,000 years ago, with their modern bodies and
| brains?
| pacman2 wrote:
| Were they thinking?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in.
| ..
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _In ... the book, "The Mind of the Iliad", Jaynes states
| that people of the era had no consciousness._
|
| R-riight...
| new_guy wrote:
| > R-riight...
|
| Says the guy/gal who dismissed the guys life work because
| they skimmed a shitty Wikipedia summary for all of 5
| seconds.
|
| Try actually reading it before commenting.
| dhosek wrote:
| Ah Julian Jaynes, the Erich von Daniken of psychology.
| [deleted]
| Koshkin wrote:
| Even with the abundance of plant and animal food, they were
| preoccupied with survival. There were too many things to be
| taken care of: avoiding falling prey to carnivores (including
| fellow humans), injuries, sickness; need to hunt and/or
| collect food, tend to children. There was just no time to
| think about much else. But the prehistoric form of communism
| made survival easier. In the later, more individualist,
| times, if you wanted to be able to spend time and your
| thoughts on something other than mere subsistence, you had to
| have servants.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's also possible that much of what was lost was frankly not
| worth preserving, perhaps time has acted as a great filter.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Aeschylus did great work, winning prize after prize in
| playwriting competitions. Only seven of his 90 or so plays
| survive. It'd be great to read the rest of this work and
| there's no particular reason to believe it's of low quality.
| User23 wrote:
| I don't disagree. Back then copying manuscripts was
| exceedingly expensive, so it's not unreasonable to suppose
| that the other 83 were good, but insufficiently so for
| enough copies to be made to assure survival.
|
| At least we have Bignose's[1] pickup and breakup manuals.
|
| [1] Publius Ovidius Naso
| periphrasis wrote:
| Yeah, I was about to make the exact same comment albeit
| mentioning Sophocles and his roughly 120 plays.
|
| If you're into classical literature, what was lost can be
| extremely tantalizing. I read Cicero's De Re Publica
| recently, of which only about 35-ish% survived. What's
| there is so interesting, both for what it says about the
| structure of the Roman republic as it existed, and what an
| educated traditional Roman of the senatorial class thought
| about how best to structure society and government. The
| concluding Dream of Scipio is enough to make you cry, not
| just for its extreme beauty and elegiac tone, but also for
| the fact that the dialogue it concludes only came down to
| us in a mutilated state.
|
| While much of what was lost was surely dross, we also lost
| some of the great achievements of human culture too.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > If you're into classical literature, what was lost can
| be extremely tantalizing.
|
| I would very much like to read Suetonius' _Lives of
| Famous Whores_ and would bet I'm not the only one.
| sramsay wrote:
| Or Diogenes' _On Farting._
| 867-5309 wrote:
| and Steinbacchus' Of Nice Women
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| This quote from the great Carl Sagan, concerning the
| library of Alexandria but generally applicable: "We do
| know that of the 123 plays of Sophocles in the Library,
| only 7 survived. One of those seven is Oedipus Rex.
| Similar numbers apply to the works of Aeschylus and
| Euripides. It is a little as if the only surviving works
| of a man named William Shakespeare were Coriolanus and A
| Winter's Tale, but we had heard that he had written
| certain other plays, unknown to us but apparently prized
| in his time - works entitled Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius
| Caesar, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet."
| cjsplat wrote:
| Or also vice-versa, and what we have is a sample of the
| quantity peak, rather than quality.
|
| Perhaps Gilgamesh is the equivalent of I Dream of Jeannie.
|
| :-)
| User23 wrote:
| Gilgamesh definitely reads like a comic book. I would be
| surprised if it weren't popular entertainment.
| golemotron wrote:
| Strangely like the filter we are creating now. Digital
| storage may be more ephemeral than stone. I would not lose
| sleep if much of the content created so far this century were
| lost.
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a form of democracy of duplication - on average the
| more popular (which isn't necessarily a substitute for
| quality to be sure) things will be more duplicated, and
| more chances to survive.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| This is how I perceive it as well. I'm not necessarily
| advocating for christianity or islam here, but there's a
| reason they've been much more successful than other various
| pagan religions.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yet, they are not as successful as the secret Platonic
| influence underlying Christianity, Islam and the secular
| Academy. There are many mysteries about the past still to
| be discovered in the future.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Plato spoke of a golden age, now long lost, where the flaura
| and fuana were so plentiful that men didn't need to work.
|
| That's an example of the belief that all things were known in a
| golden age, and that the process of discovery is actually
| _rediscovery_ of the knowledge of the elders. Common in a lot
| of pre-modern societies that had ancestor-worship. In old
| B.C.E. pre-imperial Chinese philosophy, before deductive
| reasoning had been formalized /discovered, one of the basic
| tests of whether a thing was true was "conformity to the
| teaching and practice of the ancient sage kings." Which meant
| that you had to cite a mention in works about the ancients of
| the practice or belief that you were recommending, or grounds
| for a reasonable belief that they practiced it.
|
| It's the opposite of Whig history.
| coliveira wrote:
| You don't need to go to old China to give an example of this
| phenomenon. Fundamentalist christians nowadays still have the
| same mindset, nothing can be true if it's not supported by
| their ancient texts.
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