14 ms·
Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
- lai-yin 5y agoThe part about the extinction of the Punic language made me wonder - what would it take to utterly erase an entire branch of knowledge today?
- inglor_cz 5y agoBurn 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 5y agoWe still can't read Linear A, the language of Minoan Greece.
- inglor_cz 5y agoForgotten 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.
- lai-yin 5y agoWould 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.
- spdegabrielle 5y agoThe OAIS reference model was created to address the issue in space data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archival_Information_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archival_Information_Syst...
- wirrbel 5y agoI think the most present danger for books and preservation efforts today is of course deletion of digital records, but for books we have more printed copies everywhere than ever. But, the danger is really high that they will be all thrown out alongside of the yellowed Harry Potter books.
- nickbauman 5y agoI 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 5y agoI'm long on paper.
- vulcan01 5y agoPaper, 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria So I don't think paper is necessarily a "better" alternative.
- theli0nheart 5y ago> 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
- remoquete 5y agoThere’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-b521-2a1d1fabf60c https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/720ad4a5-5a51-4b97-b521-2a1d1fa...
- pacman2 5y agoNot 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.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cblconfederate 5y agoan authoritarian ruler and hatred. cultures are being erased today https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/china-doubles-down-on-xinjiang-policy-amid-reports-of-cultural-erasure/ https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/china-doubles-down-on-xinjia... https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/a-violent-effort-to-rewrite-history/ https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/a-violent-effort-to-rewrite-hi... https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/taliban-pose-threat-afghan-cultural-heritage-sweep-back/story?id=79508223 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/taliban-pose-threat-afghan-c...
- dang 5y agoPlease don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cblconfederate 5y agohum, considering that a lot of that culture is not digitized or even recorded, how is that related to flamewar?
- dang 5y agoYou're introducing hot, divisive political topics which are completely extraneous in this thread. When people do that, what happens is that the hot divisive contemporary political topic catches flame and we get a big, repetitive flamewar, drowning out the quieter, more obscure, and more intellectually interesting topic. That's the opposite of what we want on this site, which is supposed to be for curiosity, not perpetuating pre-existing battles. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html The big divisive topics are like black holes that suck in surrounding spacecraft. It's not a good idea to open a black hole in a thread like this. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20black%20hole%20-pigment&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- DonaldFisk 5y agoWhile very little of the writings of Carthaginians has survived, the language itself (Phoenician/Punic) is well understood because a very close relative, which was mutually intelligible with it, has, however, survived: Hebrew. So if anything did turn up, we'd be able to read it. Contrast this with another ancient language: Etruscan. Although we have a number of longish texts in the language, we can't translate much of them. Etruscan has left no descendants, and Emperor Claudius's books on the language haven't survived. There is one bilingual text of more than a few words (the Pyrgi tablets). The other language is Phoenician. We can read that.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 5y agoWhen 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 5y agoI 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 5y agoIt is INSANE that we havent lost a single book of Plato's. In contrast, we lost 3/4 of Aristotle's books.
- dan-robertson 5y agoOne 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.
- pseingatl 5y agoMore 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 5y agoAll 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.
- pacman2 5y agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices "Bishop De Landa, a Franciscan monk and conquistador during the Spanish conquest of Yucatán, 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 5y agoBut 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 5y agoYou're right, the current monopolies on information (tech giants) are really great at preserving and not deleting things which they find offensive.
- iammisc 5y agoThere is no universality amongst religious figures. For every zealous priest that burned a bunch of books, there's a curious, yet equally zealous priest, who carefully documented a cultures behaviors and language in careful latin and published it.
- CamperBob2 5y ago[Citation Nee... You know what, never mind.
- Telemakhos 5y agoA 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.
- quotemstr 5y agoTo be fair, wasn't a lot of that Latin just the endless navel-gazing of Medieval Scholasticism?
- wizard-beta 5y agoNot 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 5y agoFor 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.
- ARandomerDude 5y agoTrue, though I suspect this probably has more to do with the rise of German nationalism in the 1840s, including a few revolutionary unification attempts. The German language itself was a major political issue of the day. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nationalism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nationalism
- antognini 5y agoI'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/ https://songofurania.com/about/
- dr_dshiv 5y agoCool 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 https://www.jstor.org/stable/228080 [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/531064 https://www.jstor.org/stable/531064
- jeffreyrogers 5y agoMaybe 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.
- nextaccountic 5y agoTry posting this question on https://reddit.com/r/askhistorians 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28663948 has some pointers
- prox 5y agoSanskrit 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)
- dr_dshiv 5y agoThere 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.
- prox 5y agoDo you know any libraries that need financial support for archiving this body of work?
- dr_dshiv 5y agoI know of research institutes, yes. Sanskrit is widely taught in younger years. Funding needs to go to bright PhD students to make the field again. It's extremely conservative and territorial after so many years of hardship.
- throwawaygal7 5y agoOf course it's Greek! The byzantine empire lasted another thousand years and the Greek speaking world was vast when Rome was still a republic.
- mycall 5y agoI'm sure there are tons of old writings buried in Rome. They just kept building on up of the old city.
- wirrbel 5y agoA while ago there were reports that they try to restore papyri-turned-charcoal from Pompeyi. The problem with books buried in Rome is, that Rome isn't exactly a desert with natural conditions to preserve books.
- 8bitsrule 5y agoGreat details about a period I am sketchy about. I used this 15-min video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV4xYG4KMIU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV4xYG4KMIU] to get caught up on Mycenae. I remember grinning while reading in Lucio Russo's (2004 The Forgotten Revolution on 'Antikythera') caustic description of how, after Rome wiped out Greece, Greek writings became a very popular commodity with Roman book collectors. As Horace put it, "Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium."