Sturgeon's law would imply that the overwhelming likelihood that any random unknown text we find from the ancient world _in situ_ is likely to be not be very go

Sturgeon's law would imply that the overwhelming likelihood that any random unknown text we find from the ancient world _in situ_ is likely to be not be very good. Most of what we have left from the ancient world is material that people felt worth copying for _centuries_ after they were written. That's a fairly amazing quality filter and gives people a skewed perspective on the overall quality of material written at the time. A selection of work from a random library has also likely to be filtered for quality to an extent, and for the most part, the "good stuff" is going to be works that we _already_ have copies of or fragments from. Anything we don't already have a copy is is most likely going to be something that there weren't many copies made of, and usually there's a reason for that. Which isn't to say that anything we find isn't going to be interesting for other reasons -- even bad writing is going to be incredibly useful for historical research.