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.
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.
Modern philosophy courses tend to give equal weight to Aristotle and Plato (with a side order of Socrates), but for most of Western history the only pre-Christian philosopher that anyone cared about was Aristotle, who was often simply referred to as "The Philosopher". Plato was largely ignored and forgotten until there was a burst of scholarly interest in him in the 19th century.
Source: some random thing I read online somewhere; I might be wrong in the details.
This is really not true, sorry. Plato was huge in the Renaissance and his academy ran in Athens (not continuously) from about 400BC-550AD. Platonism had a major influence on the formation and reception of Christianity and Islam, as well.
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.
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.
The lingua franca comes from the dominant culture of the time. The massive colonial empire of Britain move things from latin to English and the rise and control of the US has perpetuated English even more so. If the Anglo countries all sank into the ocean, I doubt it would be very long until Mandarin developed into the dominant language. China would be the major trading power and without the need to work with America, there would be little need to continue with English as years progress.
There have been various movements that have advocated for the use of pinyin as a primary writing system, for the same reason that Beijing replaced Traditional script with Simplified.
> There have been various movements that have advocated for the use of pinyin as a primary writing system, for the same reason that Beijing replaced Traditional script with Simplified.
There are lots of homonyms but they are disambiguated by context. Look at it this way: you don’t need the characters when you’re listening to someone speak, so why wouldn’t you be able to sound out the phrase from pinyin and understand its meaning?
> There are lots of homonyms but they are disambiguated by context.
But wouldn't that lose something? My understanding is a lot of the puns specifically rely on the characters to force a different reading than the context would imply (or to evade censorship by having many ways to write the same sounds).
Well I would still say French would be dominant over Mandarin for several reasons. Technological advantages include current nuclear collaboration on the vast coast of China. China still does not have key infrastructure to self support.
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.
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.
True, 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.
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?
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.
This. Even in Christian circles, many major works remain in Latin because publishers know they can't profitably commission the effort. This creates a situation in which for-profit publishers occasionally fund non-profit translation efforts to preserve the history.
For example, a shockingly small amount of John Calvin's works are translated into English. Regardless of what a person thinks of his theology, his influence on the rise of democracy in post-Reformation Europe and the Americas is staggering.
Most of his sermons and letters are still not in print in English, as well as a treatise on the Trinity, off the top of my head. Granted, as you point out, a large number of his works are in English but given his influence, it's surprising how many remain inaccessible.
There was a Latin collection that contained some of these works called the Corpus Reformatorum published in the 1800s.
"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."
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.
There 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.
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.
I was reading Theophrastus recently - his very entertaining Characters, having read that it inspired a large number of imitators, among them La Bruyere's Characters[0], long one of my very favourite books.
The chapter titles give the idea: I. The Ironical Man II. The Flatterer III. The Garrulous Man IV. The Boor V. The Complaisant Man VI. The Reckless Man VII. The Chatty Man VIII. The Gossip IX. The Shameless Man etc
Children are haughty, disdainful, quick to anger, envious, curious, self-seeking, lazy, fickle, timid, intemperate, untruthful, secretive; they laugh and weep readily; the most trivial subjects give them immoderate delight or bitter distress; they wish not to be hurt, but they like hurting others: they are men already.
p.s. Theophrastus was not just "a student of Aristotle" but took over Aristotle's Lyceum and led it for 35 years:
"Aristotle in his will made him guardian of his children, including Nicomachus, with whom he was close. Aristotle likewise bequeathed to him his library and the originals of his works, and designated him as his successor at the Lyceum. ...Under his guidance the school flourished greatly—there were at one period more than 2000 students, ...and at his death, he bequeathed to it his garden with house and colonnades as a permanent seat of instruction. His popularity was shown in the regard paid to him by Philip, Cassander, and Ptolemy, and by the complete failure of a charge of impiety brought against him. He was honored with a public funeral, and "the whole population of Athens, honouring him greatly, followed him to the grave."
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...
Checkin out that p'cast. Coincidentally just a couple of days ago I learned the history of socially-minded pioneer Ormsby M. Mitchel and his 1842 Cincinnati miracle - a publicly-funded 11" refractor, hand-crafted in Bavaria !!
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.
Of which Richard Dawkins wrote: “It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I’m hedging my bets.”
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.
Please don't make people out to be weird, primitive aliens when it's completely untrue. If you had ever read any of the numerous ethnographies out there, you'd know that they gossip, tell stories, joke, and complain like any other people. Special emphasis on the complaining and joking, because those tend to be important social behaviors. 'resource-related' discussion happens mainly during work hours and then it's still not the majority of discussion in the numbers I've seen.
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.
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.
Also the Temple of Hera was an accomplishment then. Pythagoras must have been strongly influenced by this amazing math/engineering culture. But the evidence was in the artifacts, not books.
How do you figure? He didn't write anything, but his contemporary Heraclitus did. And Heraclitus insulted him for being a syncretic thinker. Why would he if he didn't exist?
> 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.
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.
> nothing can be true if it's not supported by their ancient texts
I'm probably what most people would call a fundamentalist Christian but your claim is wildly inaccurate. For example I know we're discussing this on HN even though the Bible says no such thing.
Everyone has an epistemology that includes multiple sources of knowledge. There is some form of knowledge that every person thinks is ultimately authoritative. In other words if two sources make competing claims, whom do I believe? This varies based on the credibility of the claimant and the reasons for the claim. For example, if a con-artist told you he would deposit $1M in your bank account if you give him your credentials, and an FBI agent told you the guy was a scammer, based on the facts and reputations of those involved you would probably believe the FBI agent. The greater the credibility of the source, the more confidence you have in their claims. At some point you reach a level of what you think is the ultimate foundation for what you know (even if that foundation is you).
The "fundamentalist" position is that God is the most credible being, given his infallibility and omniscience. If a person disagrees with God, no matter how fervently, my epistemology is that the person is mistaken and God is correct.
That is, however, very different from believing that the Bible is the only source of knowledge. In fact, the Bible explicitly states that there are other sources of knowledge (which common sense would also tell you), for example Psalm 19 and Romans 1.
Your reasoning is circular: nobody is "disagreeing with God", because nobody knows what "God" thinks. Fundamentalists just follow ancient texts that present themselves as the "word of God".
I think that's a little different though - the Christian critique isn't that 'once everyone knew everything', but more that everything new presents challenges and opportunities to the human experience that are fundamentally no different than those that humans have always grappled with. Thus, every new challenge can be informed by principles in received wisdom. That's far less golden-agey, maybe more jaded or stoic. Read Ecclesiastes for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%20...
"There is nothing new under the sun" comes from this. I've never read this as saying that in a material sense there is nothing new, but more that the base class library and the primitive types don't change, if I may accost you with a silly analogy.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no secret platonic influence in catholicism. In the latin church, it's openly encouraged. I was just discussing platonic ideals after mass today with fellow parishioners and how important it is to pursue truth. The priest had even mentioned Plato in his homily on the nature of truth
There's nothing secret here. Christianity is openly and unashamedly compatible with many aspects of Plato's philosophy. In fact, the catholic church has also ruled on the validity of other similarly secular philosophies of other civilizations (see the Chinese rites controversy or Merton's books on Taoism -- Christ the eternal Tao). In general, other than the protestants, Christianity does not require you to immediately reject the works of secular philosophers.
In fact, Islam and christianity are why we still study Plato today. There is no secret or conspiracy.
I really appreciate your exposition. Maybe "open secret" is more appropriate. It is certainly esoteric, but not a conspiracy as you say.
But let me put it this way. Most Christians would be surprised to discover that the original conception of god is Platonic — i.e., a god of cosmic unity, a god of ineffable oneness, as opposed to a singular god. After all, it is only in the esoteric Judaic tradition that the god of Moses is a principle and not a person.
Pope Theophilus supposedly massacred 10,000 monks who believed in the non-person version of God. Happy to share links on that history.
I'm not sure you can call the original conception of the abrahamic god as platonic. Platonism comes in when we start getting Jews who are awaiting the Logos, Jesus Christ. Certainly platonism helped pave the way for the success of Christianity.
Also I don't think there was a pope Theophilus. Perhaps you are referring to a non roman pontiff.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
The whole of modern linguistic theory, including the regular, context-free, and unrestricted grammars, were fully worked out in still-preserved Sanskrit.
I suppose I could mention the city-states of Mesopotamia such as Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon. They left behind a rather rich literature which survived to this day (thanks to having been written on clay tablets instead of papyrus), though much of it remained inaccessible until the Cunieform script was deciphered in the 1800s. As with Romans and Greeks you'll find a wide variety of texts from the religious and scientific, to legal treatises, to contracts and shopping lists.
The indian civilizations were extremely complex. Several philosophies written about in ancient Sanskrit. Things like the arthashastra or the vedas even. Very interesting work. Even more interesting in their distinctive 'easternness' while still essentially just being another branch of the ancient indo European philosophies (and thus somewhat closely related to the Greek and Roman)
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
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.
I 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.
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.
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.
While 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.
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.
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.
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:
> 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
You're introducing hot, divisive political topics which are completely extraneous in this thread. When people do that, what happens is that the hot divisive 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.
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."
