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Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

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

#51

Post by pessimizer »

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…

> 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.

It's the opposite of Whig history.

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

#52

Post by wizard-beta »

quotemstr wrote: post #33
Telemakhos wrote: post #28

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 a…

To be fair, wasn't a lot of that Latin just the endless navel-gazing of Medieval Scholasticism?

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.

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

#53

Post by wizard-beta »

prox wrote: post #49
jeffreyrogers wrote: post #39

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 literat…

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.

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

#54

Post by CamperBob2 »

pacman2 wrote: post #18

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu and 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,…

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.

/s

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

#55

Post by prox »

wizard-beta wrote: post #53
prox wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#56

Post by coliveira »

pessimizer wrote: post #51
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…

> 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 re…

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.

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

#57

Post by Thorentis »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #54
pacman2 wrote: post #18

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu and 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,…

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. /s

You're right, the current monopolies on information (tech giants) are really great at preserving and not deleting things which they find offensive.

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

#58

Post by School-Cotton »

quotemstr wrote: post #33
Telemakhos wrote: post #28

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 a…

To be fair, wasn't a lot of that Latin just the endless navel-gazing of Medieval Scholasticism?

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.

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

#59

Post by tragomaskhalos »

periphrasis wrote: post #42
quotemstr wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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."

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

#60

Post by 867-5309 »

sramsay wrote: post #48
quickthrowman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you’re into classical literature, what was lost can be extremely tantalizing. I would very much like to read Suetonius’ Lives of Famous Whores and would bet I’m not the only one.

Or Diogenes’ On Farting.

and Steinbacchus' Of Nice Women
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