How 99% of Ancient Literature was Lost
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- Опубликовано: 4 июл 2024
- During the Middle Ages, all but a tiny fraction of Greek and Roman literature disappeared. Here's why.
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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:39 Papyrus scrolls
2:00 The world of books in antiquity
2:40 Ancient libraries
4:04 ProForm
4:31 Do you own a small business?
5:00 The contraction of ancient literature
6:11 Technological changes
7:12 Tenuous survivals, tragic losses
I would trade ten King Tut's tombs for one decent ancient library. I think most ancient historians and archaeologists would do likewise.
I would probably only trade 7 but....good ideas 🖕🤣
Exactly how many King Tut's Tombs do you have burning a hole in your pocket?
I might go as high as 8, but only if they throw in a good card catalogue.
lol .. tuts tomb would probably be considerably cheaper and easier to make :)
@@ysobel14517 Diocletian Decimal System?
Sucks we lost Uncle Claudius' History of the Etruscans along with his book preserving the language.
That or even more interesting would be his history of the Roman Civil Wars.
@@MaxwellAerialPhotography But I don't want to be murdered by Livia
Maybe we'll find it one day
Something tells me the Etruscan language shall be deciphered eventually, probably not in a matter of months, but a lot of progress has been made already. And if not Claudius' works, at least something else about the Etruscans will eventually pop up, I'm quite confident.
@@canko15 I bet a lot of these languages will be solved by AI
While it is unfortunate how much was lost, remember that we are always finding new manuscripts. For example, earlier this year we found a full length copy of the Egyptian book of the dead.
They found a significant and early piece of the new testament inside a paper mache mask made for an egyptian mummy. They're also putting those carbonized scrolls through a medical scanner and reconstructing the contents.
what about the stuff that was to more than just christianity
Really? That’s heartening that some of this stuff is consistently being rediscovered.
Here’s hoping that within my lifetime, we unearth whatever works inspired Lucian of Samosata’s “Vera Historia” (the Vera Historia, despite being a Roman work, somehow managed to resemble a parody of Jules Verne’s works in terms of genre)
@@525Lines that was shown to be a fraud
Some Sappho was found recently, wrapped 'round a mummy.
I'm surprised you didn't mention the Mongol destruction of the libraries of Baghdad. They had many texts from antiquity including from the classical world that were lost forever when the Mongols deliberately destroyed them, turning the Tigris river black with ink according to accounts. That was as bad, or even worse than the loss of the library of Alexandria.
It’s still talked about there today about how much damage the Mongols brought.
@@lenney872 the mongols truly destoryed all middle eastern enlightenment
The destruction of that Library, along with the decay of Mu'tazileh Islam is what lead to the stagnation and decay of Islamic thought to the backwardness it has today: If Mu'tazileh had become the dominant form of Islamic thought, the Islamic World would likely be indistinguishable from the rest of the modern Western world in terms of progression and enlightenment.
The Mongols, nothing good ever came from them, if we could go back and around them from existing the world would likely be a better place
What's holding back progress in the Muslim world has nothing to do with the Mongols and everything to do with modern European colonialism and US imperialism, which have spent the last century consistently overthrowing any progressive Middle Eastern government and often murdering its leaders while supporting the most reactionary political forces because they're the ones who keep their economies privatized so Western capital can dominate and exploit their resources and people. This has been the case in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 80s, Libya, Iraq, Syria (where for the last 12 years the West has been sponsoring al-Qaeda in its war on the progressive, secularist Syrian government), Lebanon, Yemen, Egypt, Somalia, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia and so on. Western imperialism has for decades used Saudi Wahhabism and other regressive political forces as a bludgeon against any progressive and left-wing political force in the Muslim world. Blaming the Mongols for supposedly condemning Muslims to centuries of some inherent backwardness is frankly ignorant and racist toward Muslims, and it ignores the colossal role played by the US, Britain, France and other Western imperialist powers, plus their colonial proxy state in occupied Palestine, in crushing any and all progressive movements in the Muslim world while propping up the most right-wing reactionary forces. And then blaming the Muslim people themselves, who have spent decades being oppressed by right-wing Western puppet regimes, for their own supposed "backwardness". The Mongols didn't destroy Nasserism, the US did. The Mongols didn't lynch Muammar Gaddafi and turn Libya into a Salafist slave state, the US did. The Mongols didn't slaughter millions of Indonesian leftists in the course of a fascist coup in the 1960s, the US did. The Mongols didn't impose a racist colonial apartheid state in the land of Palestine, the US and Europe did. The Mongols didn't bankroll Saudi Wahhabism, the US and Britain did. The Mongols didn't destroy the socialist revolution in Afghanistan, the US did. The Mongols didn't spend the last 12 years arming al-Qaeda in Syria, the US did. The US, the US, the US. The US is what's keeping the Muslim world down, not the Mongols.
The villa at Herculaneum where the carbonised scroll mentioned in the video was found still potentially has hundreds more scrolls to be recovered. Also the villa itself still has huge sections yet to be excavated. It is exciting to think that maybe it has a copy of some long lost text waiting to be rediscovered.
This is my most anticipated archeological dig of the century.
Do you know if any excavations are planned? That would be very interesting!!
I'm hoping for one of Diogenes' lost volumes on Ethics.
@@Ybby999 it has been going on for decades, however progress was very slow since all scrolls were carbonized and hence very fragil and unreadable.
@@Ybby999 something something about how archeologists always leave 1/2 of the dig unexcavated in the hopes that future people will have better techniques
I read that "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."
I made a video a couple years ago that reached the same conclusion
@toldinstone
History is starting to get told
what you mean nothing lasts forever? oh my god what? it can't be? time? no way? i mean, they were slaves for 400 years and never tried to escape until the evil white man set them free? yah history is a joke.
On the other hand, the destruction of the Baghdad Library absolutely was a horrific event that ended centuries of cultural development.
@@toldinstone mind posting a link?
I work for a small municipality in the USA and have become the ersatz archivist for the records there. Since I have been there I have found documents from the beginning of it's existence, and some damaged by flood and several lost to the general public for at least 40 years...on and on. This happened in my lifetime, and my short time as an untrained archive keeper. I can't imagine what 1000 years would do to such a collection.
Do your best to photo-archive anything "perishable" as soon as possible. I know of a place that lost all of the maps of its water system because they were Diazotypes (or maybe one of the others? It's been a few years since I talked to folks there), and had faded.
@@absalomdraconis some stalwart soul scanned many of them already, they were indexed poorly and some of the scans were done poorly too. I finished most of the scans and re-wrote the index in Excel. Now it is easier to find things. Fortunately they are stored in metal flat files in a good place. Thanks for your suggestions, I'll take all I can get!
@@whirving Thank you for doing that. Some historian some time in the future will need the one nugget from that very book which they only found because of your index. And that will be the final piece of the puzzle to some great historical mystery.
I think that although we may have lost a lot of classical literature, it is important to remember how much we really have left. I recently wrote a paper on Roman Parthia, and I came upon tons of random ancient sources I had never heard about before and even one that hadn't been translated into English yet.
There are *SO* few people who remain alive who can translate extremely old texts. Beyond that, there's obviously ZERO incentive, profit, luxury, nor reward for doing so. Sadly, there's a lot more profit in selling digital phones, rocket parts, clothing, fashion items, video games, weaponry, and fast food. 💪😎✌️
Ya gotta know where humanity's priorities are.
🐲✨🐲✨🐲✨
@@Novastar.SaberCombat history has no value. whether you know something or don't know something about history will literally make zero difference for humanity. our knowledge of history is more for our own intellectual curiosity which by extension is just entertainment. Same with phones/technology, fast food and clothing. I enjoy learning about Rome and ancient history but let's be honest, if we never learned another thing about history, our world would not change the least
@@harrywang9375hmmmm
@harrywang9375 I'm not so sure about that. History repeats itself, humans do not change. Learning from people's past mistakes is very valuable.
@jamesrahe5287 is there anyone translating these parthian texts?
The obvious time and effort you put in to the visual gags is only slightly surpassed by the evident scholarly research you put in to these vids (in a good way!) and much appreciated!
The visual gags are indeed quietly brilliant
"50 Shades of Gaius - an incalculable literary loss." Gaius
I think in the ancient world, the same slow decay happened. If a topic became less current new copies were not made. Even with the printing press, all copies of a particular text with a small press run can be lost over time. And even if many people bought 1st run copies and liked the book there's never going to be a 2nd run.
A good -- and important -- video. I think you might have made a few additional points: First, other reasons that the codex replaced the scroll is that they are *far* more compact (scrolls are a very inefficient way to store information), more durable (a scroll takes up a lot more space), and more fireproof. (An ancient library filled with rolled tubes pf paper is a near-optimal firetrap!)
It's also worth noting that Alexandria has a humid climate and was not a good place to preserve papyrus. (Most of our finds are from various middle-eastern deserts.)
Finally, whenever talking about the size of ancient collections of literature we need to remember that an ancient "book" was usually a single scroll and the equivalent of 5-20 pages of a modern book. A library of 100,000 scrolls was more like 5-10,000 modern books.
Yep, this misinterpretation you talk about is very widespread.
When ancient authors mention the supposed "400,000 scrolls" of the library of Alexandria, they are referring to 400,000 _volumina_ (scrolls) and _tabulae_ (tablets); not 400,000 _codices_ (books).
Codices can be huge, the Bible, for example, contains 73 individual works yet presents itself as a single Codex.
An extreme example is the Codex Gigas written in the XIth century, which contains the entire Bible, the _Etymologae_ of Isidore, Josephus' _Historiae_ , the _Ars Medicinae_ , the Bohemian Chronicles and an extensive Calendar.
All of that in a single book.
Even breviaries hold multiple books in a compact form, both in medieval times and today.
The codex was an advance over the scroll, since it allowed "random access" to the information in it: you can go straight to whichever page you want, instead of having to "scroll" or spool the paper from one hand to the other. With computers we have gone backwards. For close reading of a difficult text it's much better now to have a print-out.
@@faithlesshound5621 untrue. It is possible to hyperlink in an index, and most e-readers (as well as all web browsers) contain a search function for words and phrases.
The codex wasn't a good form for papyrus though, because that material was too brittle to be folded back and forth more than a few times without breaking, especially in dry conditions. Although there are papyrus codices, the codex is only really feasible when made of flexible and durable materials like pachment or (rag) paper.
We face a similar problem today with digital data, except at a far quicker pace. Irreplaceable data is sitting on magnetic tapes, hard disks and floppies that are already obsolete, and will be completely unreadable in a few decades
Fortunately, the magnetic tape should generally last a decently long time if kept in climate control, and it's readability will really just depend on getting the right drive- it's still in use as archive media even today.
Maybe next time they’ll back it up on the cloud like a normal person
🙁😣🤪
Wouldn't it be funny if all this was already on the cloud?
So much will disappear without a trace after the internet gets zapped by the next huge geomagnetic solar storm. All that knowledge lost.
@@tomcollins5112 What a freaking fear!!!, imagine years of valuable work vanish instantly; new fear unlocked and copying everything to physic.
@@hadcrio6845 Luckily there are companies working on better optical discs for long term storage. Only problem is that discs are fragile. Even if it lasts for a million years, you gotta keep it in a vault to keep it safe, and nothing is fully safe from natural disasters and the like.
One text I’d love to get back would be Sulla’s memoirs. Seeing the a Roman Civil War from his perspective would be fascinating, especially in contrast to that of Caesar.
Have a look for a novel called The Sword of Pleasure by Peter Green.It's a fictional autobiography of Sulla,apologies if you already know it!
@@fatherhanktree2011 i wasn’t aware of this novel, i will have to check it out. Thank you.
Glad to see a video that doesn't blame the loss of texts on book burning or religious issues. The sad reality is, texts got lost even during the glory days of Rome. It wasn't uncommon for long works to fall out of demand or simply be summarized.
I mean, many texts were lost due to religious reasons, but there are plenty of other book which were burned for other reasons
@@thegameranch5935 The vast majority of texts were lost due to neglect or lack of percieved importance. Destroying books for ideological reasons only really started happening in the 20th century, when widespread literacy actually made books an ideological threat
Interesting that Tacitus' work is known from a single manuscript found in the library of the abbey at Monte Cassino. Who knows what undiscovered treasures were lost when the abbey was recklessly destroyed during WWII.
WW2, Napoleon (probably the biggest offender, as he sacked all libraries he found, but wasn't as efficient in preserving books and art when taking it back to France),
the 30 years war, the 100 years war, coastal raids...
US Army Airforce inflicted much damage.
@Channel That's just how airpower was in those days. If you weren't dive bombing or attacking from really low altitude your bombs weren't going to land very accurately. This limited all air forces at that time, not just the USAAF.
Apparently, Monte Cassino's library was evacuated to The Vatican prior to the bombardment. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Monte_Cassino#Evacuation_and_treasures
Almost no art piece (of course the Building itself was devastated) was destroyed by the bombing, because they were evacuated either by the germans or the church.
I love how you actively seek out small businesses as sponsors. It definitely stands out and adds a somewhat wholesome feel to your videos
Ikr?? I'm not used to that. That's nice.
How many words could a scribe copy in a day? I find it amazing that they wrote such long books knowing that each copy would require tremendous effort to produce.
More than you would think. I read somewhere that a trained scribe could write upwards of 200 lines (of poetry) per hour.
It greatly depends on the quality of the product, the type of scribe, and the handwriting style. At the extreme end, an illiterate scribe copying letters for an ornate de luxe edition of the finest quality could take a team up to a year (including time for illustrating), but simply making a transcript of a book for personal use by a scholar or student would be much faster. In the 13th century it was typical for students to rent books and copy them; copying the (Latin) Bible took such a student 15 months, presumably not working all day at the task. (This last fact from Life in a Medieval City, Joseph and Frances Gies, Harper & Row, New York, 1969.)
The infamous Voynich Manuscript, with its shoddy illustrations and made-up text, probably represents about three months of work, and seems to have involved five different scribes. In this case the writers had the advantage of not actually needing to consult a source text; it was almost certainly assembled on the fly to defraud either Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II or the scholar Athanasius Kircher, who had bragged he could decipher any language. (c.f. ruclips.net/video/67YzIOZTZXk/видео.html)
@@RhetoricaRhamnusia Nice theory, but Rudolf II reigned over 150 years after the Voynich manuscript's likely date from C-14 dating. None of which rules out it being a hoax and possibly assembled as such, but not in the 1570s.
@@RhetoricaRhamnusia By definition a scribe couldn't be illiterate. Unlike some internet writers who use speech to text.
@@brianmccarthy5557 Untrue. I don't know how common it was, but I have definitely heard of scribes who simply copied what was in front of them. Obviously someone writing down what was being spoken would need to be literate, but one need not be able to read and understand what they're writing if they are able to simply reproduce the "markings" on the pages in front of them.
If I recall correctly, there has been speculation that some instances of unusual spellings or odd mistranslations could have been the result of a scribe not actually understanding what they were copying, not being sure what the original author had written (mistaking one letter for another for example), so just guessing and guessing incorrectly.
I mean, technically I could be a "scribe" for ancient Chinese texts as long as I could accurately copy what was presented to me, even if I had zero understanding of what even a single character meant.
What saddens me the most is the thought that maybe the "classics" we got from ancient time were to them the "comic book" tier of stories or like the first drafts. Meanwhile there was an ancient Egyptian that wrote like "Frankenstein" tier culture changing stories that we will never read!
Thankfully the odds of that being true on any kind of scale are non-existent. Although we are definitely missing some VERY important and influential works, generally speaking, the more popular and good something was, the more likely it was copied. In addition, written works could never really be "culture-changing" level works simply because literacy was too low.
It absolutely stings not knowing what we ARE missing though. Like I said, all that is true in general but because of things like destruction of libraries there absolutely have to be examples of greatness that were indeed lost forever.
They were far better than they are portrayed. Obscure facts about the Egyptians and the broader ancient world are deemed too politically incorrect to openly talk about.
@@Channel-sp3fp Can you give an example? Also please don't tell me this is going to be some crazy conspiracy nonsense.
The important classics of the Ancient World did survive: Homer, Vergil, Plato, etc. The problem is that beyond this small circle of critical works, a scattered & random selection of works survived. Think of what the future might think of Modern English Literature if only Shakespeare, Pope, Gibbon, & Hemingway survived: what would they miss by not having examples of Jane Austen, Mark Twain, or Hunter S. Thompson to read? (Just to pick a few names. Most of us could think of one writer or more who never wrote a best seller, yet should survive to be read by generations yet unborn.)
@@Tinil0 That's all it ever is, hence the lack of response but surplus of sole comments.
Same thing happens with modern media. Theirs so much lost media that isn't even a century old and we expect that digital media will be next.
the average video won't be saved, though most text is archived somewhere
The reality isn't as sexy as people think. Most lost texts weren't the causality of Mongol hoards or over-zealous Christians. Most simply went out of publication due to a lack of commercial interest or necessary infrastructure present. Before the printing press it took a tremendous amount of effort to mass produce copies of texts.
I used to work at a computer lab at UMSL's library. I left work one day and found a dumpsters of old books. They literally decided to make space by dumping hundreds of 100+ year old books out into the public dumpster. I only managed to save 1. But now i have a book on the state of the US rail system in the year 1874. I wish i could have saved more. The 2 foot by 3 foot fold out map of the rail system in the front is amazing.
Reading things like this really make my insides crawl
Please tell me they digitized them.
@@empiricalandinquirical2435 no they are completely lost to the sands of time
Wow why wouldn't they simply donate them to the local library or someplace that would want them???
When I think about the Villa of Papyri and the huge area that remains unexcavated , and how we still haven’t fully digitised what has been excavated, it makes me wish the billionaires of the world had an interest in the classics and would pay off the Italian gov to try and speed up the process and reveal these secrets sooner rather than later.
I believe the Getty Museum in California has replicated the architecture and the statuary of the Villa dei Papyri, but is not paying to excavate or conserve the charred papyri themselves. Unfortunately the Villa is in a part of the world where funds for any public project tend to be syphoned off by organised crime. Also, there's a view that ancient remains are best left in the ground.
@@faithlesshound5621 Exactly. God help Campania and it’s problems. Here is to hoping one day soon technology can help crack the code and revitalise interest in the Villa.
woahhh i always thought the scrolls were read down top to bottom! seeing them used in this art as reading horizontally as just pages strung together was really eye opening for me
Here’s hoping something of Dexippus is still out there somewhere, and that I live long enough for someone to find it
The saying "Sic transit gloria mundi" seems particularly apt.
Not only ancient literatures, even literatures from nineteenth century are also lost.
I almost skipped the promotional advertising segment, very pleased I didn't 🙂
Oh dear... "swept away in the dust" ...the drama! Your posts are a joy.
200 years ago in the UK, it was a rich man's hobby to collect ancient manuscripts and print modern copies to distribute among friends. Since then, many of the source materials have been lost.
Collecting them did not preserve them?
Even more destructive are made-up stories that never had any source materials in the first place. Think "anglo-saxon invasion" and "the Vikings".
@@Misses-Hippy : Printing them would have preserved the contents, but would do nothing for the originals.
@@absalomdraconis the content is what truly important, yes I agree the lost of original copy would be sad but at least the content lives om
Thank you for your work!!!!
This is why it’s always important to back up your files.
I think of Callimachus. He wrote, and wrote, and wrote. I bet he thought he'd made important, enduring contributions to scholarship. Only a tiny fraction survives.
Ironically, Callimachus favoured the small form, so the thing about the tiny fraction surviving seems about right.
Just noticed your book is in this month’s Audible sale so I bought it!
I’m really interested in learning about Ancient Greece and Rome and your channel is very educational, so I thank you for your effort.
Coz those are the only 2 civilization to have existed? LOL.
Great, thanks for sharing big G.
Brilliant video as per usual!
You deserve the best sponsors,your content is smart and detailed,i subbed and i hope you get to a million subs,then you will be able to get that ads money
Well Done. For those of us learning, we salute you.
Great job, Garrett 👏
Very interesting, thank you!
Great job on this video.
What a wonderful video!
You are officially my favorite ancient history pop historian
I love working out with these videos in the background, it’s like I’m working out my brain at the same time
I've watched many of your videos now and I just wanted to say thank you for the entertainment. I even got your book but haven't started it yet (got a puppy last week) are you writing another?
Love the visuals on this one! Much lol!
Awesome video! I always thought that disasters like the fire in the Library of Alexandria and sacks caused most ancient books/literature to be lost. It's really interesting to know that it was really more about people not caring to maintain the information that caused far more of it to be lost than a single fire in a library. "Decaying for centuries on a monastery shelf until they were swept away with the dust" was excellent writing!
Yay, I like the advertisement for "local" advertisements! I thought it was so unique last year when you were mentioning the Woosh drains in Astoria. I think this is a funner and more genuine way of finding sponsors and I hope it works out for you and for the businesses sponsoring your channel going forward. Cheers
The new intro music kicks ass
Man, that ending to the video was depressive. All those lost pieces of literature...
ikr i had to rummage through my medicine cabinet for some spare antidepressants just so i could cope..
Nowadays, text and pictures disappear when formats change, and I don't copy it over to the new Smartphone or something else.
We're also starting to see lost originals and a constant decline in quality caused by copying copies of copies. Then there's also stuff from the even mid to late 2000's that are simply gone from the internet.
Updates to windows and microsoft office sometimes completely breaks previous versions of document files, too.
The unimaginable loss of all that knowledge always saddens me to the core of my soul. The burning of the library of Alexandria and the sack of Constantinople are painful and horrific events for all of humanity…
This loss of literature and other works has always happened and likely always will. It is happening now, and the internet and social media has accelerated the process, e.g. pre-COVID DVD format was a thing, during the pandemic streaming really took off and now DVD is gone, and not everything that was available in older formats as Dr Ryan points out is copied across to newer formats. How many people threw away their vinyl records in the 1980’s-1990’s with the advent of music CDs? And now in the age of Spotify the CD is dead too. Or, when mum or dad or other relatives pass away and their home is cleared, how many people throw away all or most of the departed’s books, etc? The same thing happened in many libraries (with some exceptions) with the advent of the internet, libraries discarded much hardcopy. Another modern problem is artificially created scarcity were corporations buy up the rights to content in whatever format and then put it behind a paywall or if it competes against their own products make it permanently unavailable.
The carbonized scroll from Herculanium is a really great visual for correlating our gaps in ancient textual evidence with gaps in our organic fossil record. We can identify an indirect relationship between thing A and thing C, but we’re missing thing B that would give us a specific understanding of exactly how we got from A to C!
Best sponsors in the biz.
I really like the small business ads that are even relevant to the content
Nothing changes. This reminds me of all the lost media that gets filtered by failing to successfully leap through all the hoops of format conversion. Film to VHS tape, VHS tape to DVD, DVD to Blu-Ray, Blu-Ray, to digital, arbitrary digital codec, resolution and storage format A to arbitrary digital codec, resolution, and storage format B ....
Just think about much historical media will be lost through hard drive failures.
The very first history video that made me laugh out loud in the first 10 seconds. I went to a party once where they had an old HP laser printer and a sledge hammer. Let me tell you, those suckers are tough. They're going to be digging those up in good condition in another 2000 years.
If universities offer a degree in historical meme creation, you'll be the professor 👨🏫👌
I wonder what pieces of classic literature we lost and how the world would have changed if these manuscripts made it to us. What a pity!
Was reading up about Democritus (c.460-370 BC), and was saddened but not really surprised to learn that of his 72 known works on a huge range of subjects, all are lost, and we only know of him from other writers (especially Aristotle).
This video was painful to watch. It hurts to think about how many things that's happened and will never be known...
...died quietly... until they were swept away with the dust... Jesus what an insightful and bleak ending. Bravo.
Here's an idea: skeuomorphs. Parthenon has good examples of timber design & construction carried thru' to stone elements as 'vestigial' echoes.
Well, who’s to say our Cloud saves will be here in 100 years? You could equate that to any “ancient” library of the past.
You have the most random ads in the best possible way
Hopefully centuries from now, our literary masterworks will be preserved, so future generations can marvel over The Very Hungry Caterpillar
How far are we on the Herculaneum scrolls? There’s got to be some casual literature in there somewhere.
From the day I learned "Britannia insula est" in the Fall of 1965 until I was reading De Rerum Natura in the '80's, after a long detour in my education, I have mourned the loss of Ancient Literature. So many think the ancients were "primitive" and not capable of complex thought. We suffer as a society when we don't study the Liberal Arts and the Classics.
Still one of the most painful events in history to think about... :c
I recently discovered your channel. You are doing great work. I am curious, why did you leave academia?
just when i thought my friday night couldnt get any better a new vid from told in stone drops
I dearly wish that more of the writings of the presocratic philosophers survived. It's just so upsetting we only have a few dozen sentences from Heraclitus.
It’s a measure how wet Houston Texas is that we can grow both papyrus, and in higher areas (read that as a foot higher), we can grow flax. We live an hour drive (60 miles) from the ocean in Galveston and yet are only 30 feet above sea level.
I do wonder how many works would have been preserved if we kept writing in clay.
Many huge libraries were burnt and the writings about the burnings were burnt. The object was to change the meaning of Biblical words. There is a 6000+ old image of a printing press in Egypt.
Huh?
babe wake up new toldinstone video is up
Don't think i didn't notice the lick in the intro music
I'm sorry to learn that I'll never read Aristotle's Fear and Loathing in Vesuvius, but oh well
it is sad story, all this ancient books has vanished, thanks for your video .
Maybe we'll find some carbonized or chemically dehydrated Punic libraries in Tunisia.
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Hey, the Huntington Library, in San Marino California is the North America's largest library of ancient books!! That, and surrounding property is a must see, for anyone looking for historical, cultural enlightenment. They also have a large collection of original Gainsborough paintings including The Blue Boy.
As a book lover it agonises me to think of all the knowledge that has been lost. Imagine if we still had all of it...
If that were the case, Classical Philologists wouldn't feel the need to turn to French Theories for another five hundred years.
0:15 I love the nod to Office Space. Brilliant movie!
Interesting as usual. If we only had 1/10 of what was lost we'd be inundated with info.
there was the rescuers of ancient literature and knowledge during the dark ages, the monks of Ireland, who faithfully copied and transcribed classic works. You can read about this in the book, “how the Irish saved civilization.” Henry 8th then closed those monasteries and took anything that was valuable for the money.
At least humans can decypher the DNA now and explore the history of life and populations. Which is a little consolation for the vanished literature.
This is why Google and internet space should be broken into many separate, independant pieces.
I hate to think of this. But it must be talked about.
Didymus was the Garth Marenghi of the ancient world
"I'm one of the few authors who has actually written more books than I've read." 😂
You got a "thumbs up" as soon as I saw the "Office Space" image
I am also reminded of "The Swerve" by Stephen Greenblatt, about the loss of classical documents to "the teeth of time".
I was thinking about that book while listening to this video! That, and The Fourth Part of the World by Toby Lester, about the Waldseemuller map.
Sometimes I think the good doctor is from the UK due to his subtle use of dry understated humor.
Why did it disappear?
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Ii liked that book. :) Nice
Trey the Explainer did a two part video about this with examples of lost books.
Where did he get them from?
@@TiberentenTV Ask him.
If the Earth were hit by a massive solar flare storm today, think of the irreplaceable electronic TicTok postings that would be lost.
😄
i already do