21–30 of 40 posts
They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
I think the whole "public" library theory is a bit off. Just because it was a public building does not mean it was anything resembling what we would call a public library. More likely, it was a government library, like a registrar, or for tax documents, census data, or something similar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If a truly large archive were found then who’s to say that it could survive long enough to be properly studied? There are multiple sources of untouched ancient texts today which aren’t much studied. Off the top of my head, I’ve heard there are chests full of (roughly 1000-year-old) Arabic manuscripts littering the Archbishop’s palace in Toledo, largely untouched due to a lack of interest/number of scholars (and perha…
At least for cuneiform tablets, somewhere I read most of them are utterly boring, mostly inventory and transactions. Maybe you could pass years sifting through it to finally find something valuable.
https://cdli.ucla.edu/?q=news/machine-assisted-translation-c...
They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
An Egyptologist told me there are enough unstudied papyri in archives to keep all researchers occupied for the next 100 years. Basically there is no need to dig anymore - the limiting factor is not finding the scrolls, it is studying them to figure out if they contain anything interesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least for cuneiform tablets, somewhere I read most of them are utterly boring, mostly inventory and transactions. Maybe you could pass years sifting through it to finally find something valuable.
Here's the cuneiform scans if you're interested: https://cdli.ucla.edu/?q=news/machine-assisted-translation-c...
They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
Well ancient and pristinely preserved do not really usually go together... but Villa Papyri, near Pompeii, almost gets you there. The villa's name derives from the discovery of its library, the only surviving library from the Graeco-Roman world that exists in its entirety. It contains over 1,800 papyrus scrolls. The scrolls are coarbonized and rolled up, but each scroll gets very slowly unrolled, read, studied and pr…
They didn't mention it, but I'm assuming that no scrolls or actual library knowledge is recoverable from the site? Whenever I listen to history people talk about all the sources that have been lost, I dream that someday someone will uncover an ancient time capsule under their house and find a pristine collection of lost works that some wise person squirreled away for future generations.
If a truly large archive were found then who’s to say that it could survive long enough to be properly studied? There are multiple sources of untouched ancient texts today which aren’t much studied. Off the top of my head, I’ve heard there are chests full of (roughly 1000-year-old) Arabic manuscripts littering the Archbishop’s palace in Toledo, largely untouched due to a lack of interest/number of scholars (and perha…
-Which reminds me of Joshua Hammer's brilliant book 'The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu', detailing the efforts to save those collections from the latest threat to them - islamic militants.
The title alone was enough to make me want to read the book, I'll admit.