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Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

talesoftimesforgotten.com

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Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#21

Post by dr_dshiv »

decasteve wrote: post #7
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

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 may…

I 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.

It is INSANE that we havent lost a single book of Plato's. In contrast, we lost 3/4 of Aristotle's books.

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#22

Post by Koshkin »

pacman2 wrote: post #12
jl6 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that’s the Greek mythological version of the Garden of Eden story. I find the reality even more interesting. What were humans thinking about 40,000 years ago, with their modern bodies and brains?

Were they thinking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...

> In ... the book, "The Mind of the Iliad", Jaynes states that people of the era had no consciousness.

R-riight...

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#23

Post by [deleted] »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

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 may…

[deleted]

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#24

Post by cblconfederate »

lai-yin wrote: post #2

The part about the extinction of the Punic language made me wonder - what would it take to utterly erase an entire branch of knowledge today?

an authoritarian ruler and hatred. cultures are being erased today

https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/china-doubles-down-on-xinjia...

https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/a-violent-effort-to-rewrite-hi...

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/taliban-pose-threat-afghan-c...

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#25

Post by Koshkin »

jl6 wrote: post #11
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

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 may…

Sure, but that’s the Greek mythological version of the Garden of Eden story. I find the reality even more interesting. What were humans thinking about 40,000 years ago, with their modern bodies and brains?

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.

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#26

Post by new_guy »

Koshkin wrote: post #22
pacman2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were they thinking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...

> In ... the book, "The Mind of the Iliad", Jaynes states that people of the era had no consciousness. R-riight...

> R-riight...

Says the guy/gal who dismissed the guys life work because they skimmed a shitty Wikipedia summary for all of 5 seconds.

Try actually reading it before commenting.

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#27

Post by cjsplat »

bombcar wrote: post #16
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

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 may…

It’s also possible that much of what was lost was frankly not worth preserving, perhaps time has acted as a great filter.

Or also vice-versa, and what we have is a sample of the quantity peak, rather than quality.

Perhaps Gilgamesh is the equivalent of I Dream of Jeannie.

:-)

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#28

Post by Telemakhos »

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.

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#29

Post by golemotron »

bombcar wrote: post #16
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

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 may…

It’s also possible that much of what was lost was frankly not worth preserving, perhaps time has acted as a great filter.

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.

Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

#30

Post by theli0nheart »

vulcan01 wrote: post #19
dbtc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm long on paper.

Paper, 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 So I don't think paper is necessarily a "better" alternative.

> 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
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