[HN Gopher] A marble slab in storage turned out to be an ancient...
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       A marble slab in storage turned out to be an ancient Greek yearbook
        
       Author : isaacfrond
       Score  : 62 points
       Date   : 2022-06-08 07:42 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
        
       | jl6 wrote:
       | I'd love to know more about how they determined this was a new
       | document rather than a copy of another. Is there a central
       | catalogue of all Ancient Greek texts that you can search (by
       | keyword?)? Are there few enough that you can just ask an expert
       | scholar and they will know?
        
         | jan_Inkepa wrote:
         | I don't have an overview, but there are various databases for
         | greek and latin inscriptions -
         | https://inscriptions.packhum.org/allregions for example is a
         | big one. For written materials,
         | http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ is pretty good, but I
         | don't think that has rarer stuff.
         | 
         | Compared to Chinese textual sources (where it's pretty easy to
         | find/search gigantic digitized catalogues of old chinese texts
         | - though I don't know much about it so maybe it's lacking in
         | many ways once one starts delving deeper), digital humanities
         | in european languages seems to be lagging behind. Archive.org
         | does a lot of heavy lifting for medieval latin texts, but the
         | disadvantage is that they're not 'digitized' in the sense of
         | being correctly OCR-ed (which is a minefield for Medieval Latin
         | because of all the abbreviations). You have lots of individual
         | endeavours to catalogue various types of material, and some are
         | really good/nice, but that they're not integrated together is a
         | minor pity (though maybe there is some nice site that I don't
         | know about).
         | 
         | I'm not a professional in this field, nor that learned, I've
         | just dabbled and experienced varying degrees of
         | frustration/satisfaction.
         | 
         | Maybe someone who actually has an overview/proper knowledge of
         | the field can comment, but until they do that's my layperson
         | perception of the landscape...
        
         | bigbillheck wrote:
         | > Is there a central catalogue of all Ancient Greek texts
         | 
         | Yes, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae:
         | http://stephanus.tlg.uci.edu
        
           | theoldlove wrote:
           | TLG doesn't have inscriptions.
        
           | rob74 wrote:
           | How appropriate for a Thesaurus of Ancient Greek to have a...
           | Latin name? Wait a minute...
        
             | jhbadger wrote:
             | The name is a reference to an earlier (paper) collection of
             | Greek texts from the 16th century, Henri Estienne's
             | _Thesaurus Graecae Linguae_. Although Estienne was French,
             | the commentary and the like were in Latin as that was the
             | tradition in scholarly work at the time.
        
               | ARandomerDude wrote:
               | > that was the tradition in scholarly work at the time
               | 
               | True, though it's stronger than that. Latin was the
               | closest thing to a universal language in Europe at that
               | time, serving a role similar to that of the English
               | language today.
        
               | jhbadger wrote:
               | Exactly. Like if somebody had a modern collection of
               | Greek texts and called it "A Collection of Greek Texts"
               | in English people wouldn't think it that strange that the
               | title wasn't in Greek.
        
             | DonaldFisk wrote:
             | The word thesaurus is derived from the Ancient Greek word
             | thesauros.
        
           | jan_Inkepa wrote:
           | That just covers literary texts it seems, so you'd probably
           | want an epigraphy source for texts like the one in question?
        
       | isaacfrond wrote:
       | The translation is here:
       | 
       | https://atticinscriptions.com/inscription/AIUK14/1
        
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       (page generated 2022-06-09 23:02 UTC)