Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
talesoftimesforgotten.com
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?
#2The part about the extinction of the Punic language made me wonder - what would it take to utterly erase an entire branch of knowledge today?
Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
#3When 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.
Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
#4The part about the extinction of the Punic language made me wonder - what would it take to utterly erase an entire branch of knowledge today?
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.
Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
#5The part about the extinction of the Punic language made me wonder - what would it take to utterly erase an entire branch of knowledge today?
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.
So... that happening.
Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
#6The part about the extinction of the Punic language made me wonder - what would it take to utterly erase an entire branch of knowledge today?
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.
We still can't read Linear A, the language of Minoan Greece.
Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
#7When 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.
Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
We still can't read Linear A, the language of Minoan Greece.
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.
Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
#9The part about the extinction of the Punic language made me wonder - what would it take to utterly erase an entire branch of knowledge today?
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.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/720ad4a5-5a51-4b97-b521-2a1d1fa...
Re: Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?
#10The part about the extinction of the Punic language made me wonder - what would it take to utterly erase an entire branch of knowledge today?
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. So... that happening.
I'm long on paper.