The survival rate of ancient literature

[Robert Vermaat]

To those interested, I recommend you buy the book "The Rise and Fall of Alexandria", it starts with the foundation of the city until its demise by the Muslim Arabs in the 7th century AD.

Well, that sounds like they missed a bit, namely the period when the city grew back into a major city! :wink:

There was quite a bit destroyed during the Ottoman conquests to, I believe!

No, the city was long destroyed and abandoned by that period. However, the city was conquered by the Persians in the 7th century AD, but briefly reconquered by the Romans and finally conquered and destroyed afterward by the invading Muslim Arabs. So, the city's fate was worse than you might suspect.

Destroyed and abandoned by the Ottoman period? That's simply not true.
Two sources describing the fall of Alexandria.
If the city was in ruins, then why would the Byzantines even have bothered to attempt a reconquest in 645, 3 years after it's being surrendered to Amr?
A nice page with opinions about the destruction of the Alexandrian library.

3. The arabs of this time period were actually very accepting of knowledge and science. It would be out of character for them to mindlessly destroy all the knowledge within the library.

Yeah, they destroyed both Alexandria AND Carthage, the two greatest cities on the continent, which were never again inhabited afterward. Sounds very much in character to destroy ancient buildings.

Sorry, but that's just very wrong. Of course Alexandria was inhabited afterwards, it still had a a Christian organisation of the Church for later Muslim leaders to abolish. That would be difficult with an empty ruin..
In fact, Alexandria was by no means destroyed at all, but negected by the Arab invaders, who made a new capital at cairo. Commerce went further in decline after that.

Carthage, of course, was very much damaged in the Vandal conquest, and despite being recovered by the Byzantines it never really got back on it's feet.

Why did it take this long for someone to mention Constantinople ? Everyone always jumps on the Arabs and the Latin monks but Constantinople had its own library and the city never fell to invaders until 1204. There's nothing the Arabs "preserved" that did not already survive in Constantinople.

That sounds logical, but I also read that the Orthodox church developed a very negative attitude towards earlier Classical learning. Do we know for sure what survived in Constantinople or are we just assuming things here?

Many were translated from Greek into Arabic, then lost and back-translated from Arabic in the Middle Ages. It's a crapshoot any way you look at it.

No (and yes). The Greek originals were preserved in Constantinople and translated into Latin during the Renaissance as Greek scholars and artisans fled from the Ottoman onslaught. Besides, the Arab translations were flawed so it is doubly fortunate that the Greek originals were rescued and translated directly to Latin. There was no need for the Arab middleman. And the Arabs were highly selective in what they deigned to translate - for instance they completely ignored anything to do with Greek political theory.

That sounds like a very partisan view to me. Is there really evidence that the re-emergence of Classical texts et al came directly from Constantinople? This sounds to me like a denial of the Arab connection in favour of a so far unsupported view, bent on denying any Arab role in the passing on of Classic culture. I'd like to hear more proof of this.

We should remind ourselves that relations between Byzantium and the West were soured and sometimes extremely bad. Before even thinking about Greek scholars fleeing to Western monks, we should remember that there was a very anti-Catholic sentiment around, with people crying out they'd rather would be Muslim than Catholic. I cannot see any Greek scholars going to monks for the tranbslation of ancient texts despite this sentiment.

[SigniferOne]

by the time Greek scholars were fleeing to the West, they had to have someone to flee to, namely an already established humanist culture in Italy which received them. This culture already recovered much of Latin literature, and the only thing the Greeks brought with them from Constantinople were Greek works, e.g. Sophocles and Plutarch. Cicero's works, e.g. letters and essays, were copied by Catholic monks, i.e. "in-house", which explains why so few Roman works survived. An estimate was made that 10 million classical Greek words survive, to 1 million of classical Latin.

[Theodosius the Great]

I'd like to add another point for the general discussion : why is it that everything we know about the Persians comes from Greco-Roman sources ? Was this a failure of the Persians to preserve their history ? Was this due to the Arab destruction of Persia ? Or did the Persians simply have no tradition of recording their history ?

As bad as the loss of so much knowledge from the Greco-Roman world seems to us, we in the West are more fortunate than the Iranians who have an older culture / history. Again, we should put things in perspective.

Well, that sounds like they missed a bit, namely the period when the city grew back into a major city!

No, the Christian, Greek speaking Alexandria died many centuries ago. Even the Patriarch resides in Cairo. The modern city is just a namesake with no significant ties to the old one.

If the city was in ruins, then why would the Byzantines even have bothered to attempt a reconquest in 645, 3 years after it's being surrendered to Amr?

1. Simple : two reasons
   
2. Strategic : It still contained a valuable port that could and did launch raiding fleets across the Mediterranean (much as the Vandals vis-a-vis Carthage).
   
3. Religious : It's embarrassing to have the second ranking See of Eastern Christendom being occupied by foreign infidels.

Of course Alexandria was inhabited afterward, it still had a a Christian organisation of the Church for later Muslim leaders to abolish. That would be difficult with an empty ruin..

It became a shanty town much like Rome in the 6th century which only had a few hundred residents which sometimes swelled to a couple thousand when it had a garrison. So, I suppose one could say both were still inhabited but this is far from the one million inhabits both cities once housed. And who can blame the inhabitants ? Both cities were repeatedly put under siege.

That sounds logical, but I also read that the Orthodox church developed a very negative attitude towards earlier Classical learning. Do we know for sure what survived in Constantinople or are we just assuming things here?

Why is this relevant to the question of the thread ? Whether or not the Orthodox Church valued classical learning the point is that Constantinople housed the largest repository of Greek works from the classical period. They weren't destroyed by monks unless, on occasion, paper was so scarce that they recycled the old books to write prayers on. This wasn't done out of malice but out of scarcity.

That sounds like a very partisan view to me. Is there really evidence that the re-emergence of Classical texts et al came directly from Constantinople?

Yes, read more on Willem van Moerbeke, the Flemish Dominican friar and one time Latin bishop of Corinth from the mid 13th century. He translated all of the works of Aristotle and many by Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria and more. He translated "Politics" which was never translated into Arabic.

Due to Willem van Moerbeke's translations European thinkers by the late 13th century had a much more accurate and complete understanding of Greek thought than any of the prior Muslim philosophers.

This sounds to me like a denial of the Arab connection in favour of a so far unsupported view, bent on denying any Arab role in the passing on of Classic culture

I don't deny the roles the Arabs or the Latin monks played in copying ancient texts but my point is that both were ancillary at best, at least with Greek texts.

The two main figures who are responsible for the preservation and transmission of Greek thought to Western Europe were Isidore of Seville and William of Moerbeke. Spanish students were already familiar with Aristotle before the Arab invasion on 711 AD.

I cannot see any Greek scholars going to monks for the translation of ancient texts despite this sentiment.

Ditto to what SigniferOne said. By that time, Europe had many secular scholars that could have received scholarly Greek refugees.

~Theo

[Sean Manning]

I hope this doesn't sound arrogant, but lets try to keep our modern political/religious sympathies out of this, shall we?

Sean Manning wrote:
But yeah, there are a lot of things to weep over, like all the times someone decided to make another copy of St. Jerome rather than copy something profane like a centurion's memoirs of a war the copyist had never heard

Actually, I think you're being too harsh here, Sean. The most documented portion of ALL Roman history that survives in greatest detail is the Late Republic. Mostly because we have Cicero's letters from the period which allow us to read about the politics of the time often on a day to day basis. No period previous or subsequent is so thoroughly preserved.

Yes, Cicero was one of the secular authors lucky enough to have been accepted by the Church early on. But there was a period of about 400 years where hardly anyone in western Europe seems to have cared about preserving pagan literature, and that is when the greatest loss of Latin literature probably took place. Then again, after the last Roman aristocrats died out clergy were the only people in the West doing much to preserve Latin literature.

As far as I know, the Byzantine world went through a shorter period where nobody wrote or copied much secular literaure, and when a signicant part of the heritage of antiquity was lost. They also seem to have slowly lost some ancient literature after Manzikert, whereas in the West pretty much everything that was around in Charlemagne's day has survived.

Timotheus wrote:
3. The arabs of this time period were actually very accepting of knowledge and science. It would be out of character for them to mindlessly destroy all the knowledge within the library.

Yeah, they destroyed both Alexandria AND Carthage, the two greatest cities on the continent, which were never again inhabited afterward.
Sounds very much in character to destroy ancient buildings.

Eh? As far as I know, Alexandria has been occupied continuously since 330 BCE. I'd want sources to believe that it was reduced to a few hundred population- I thought Roma always had a few thousand left? And I'd want to read sources to believe that the Arab invaders permanently destroyed Roman Carthage, especially since as Vortigern said Belissarius and the Vandals did a lot of damage too.

Whatever was available in Constantinople, the intellectual Renaissance of the Twelfth Century got started in Moslem Spain and multi-religious Sicily. Most scholars who have studied the period see the mixture of cultures in these areas as crucial to the type of scholarship they produced. On the other hand, the recovery of Greek literature in the original in the fifteenth century did depend on Byzantium.

Vortigern, Theodosius is right about getting many Greek works from Constantinople in the 15th century. In the 15th century a few scholars came to Italy from Constantinople with books and started teaching the Latins Greek again. The popes also dug up some old manuscripts and passed them on, because the Church's attitude towards pagan culture was becoming friendlier.

And the Arabs were highly selective in what they deigned to translate - for instance they completely ignored anything to do with Greek political theory.

Sounds just like in Latin Christiendom :^) where political theory and practice was based on Christian, Roman, and German ideas. Or the Orthodox world, where it was based on Roman and Christian ideas. As far as I know nobody paid much attention to Greek or Republican Roman political thought until the Renaissance or later, although a few people read it. I haven't seen evidence that translations of the Politics towards the end of the middle ages changed this.

[Theodosius the Great]

Yes, Cicero was one of the secular authors lucky enough to have been accepted by the Church early on.

1. And many more on the same period :
   
2. Caesar's 'Commentaries'
   
3. Catullus
   
4. Livy
   
5. Vergil
   
6. Tacitus
   
7. Suetonius
   
8. Ovid
   
9. Horace

All of these deal with poetry (some of which being vulgar to Christians), pagan mythology and history. A classically educated Roman Christian would have been versed in many if not all these pagan authors. Christians also thought of themselves as Romans and to be cultured was to be classically educated. This remained true in the 4th century and far afterward. I think you may have a misconception that one's Christian identity automatically obscured one's Roman identity which just isn't accurate. Christians could be just as nationalistic as any pagan Roman.

But there was a period of about 400 years where hardly anyone in western Europe seems to have cared about preserving pagan literature, and that is when the greatest loss of Latin literature probably took place.

Could you please be more specific about which 400 years you're referring to ?

Then again, after the last Roman aristocrats died out clergy were the only people in the West doing much to preserve Latin literature.

Yes and no. The old Roman aristocracy (i.e. the Senate) never died out. That would've been almost impossible since its membership was numbered at about 1,000. Many of them became Popes, Cardinals and Bishops.

As far as I know, the Byzantine world went through a shorter period where nobody wrote or copied much secular literature, and when a significant part of the heritage of antiquity was lost.

Yes, this is true. That period was indeed a dark time for the Empire. It was being assaulted annually by Arab raiders and barbarians in the west which put it on a defensive mode. The Eastern Romans were just focused on surviving and couldn't afford the luxury of recording even contemporary events, let alone preserving ancient texts.

I see no evidence of the claim that any cultural malaise was being actively precipitated by the Church which I think is what you are alluding to.

They also seem to have slowly lost some ancient literature after Manzikert

Why at that time ? The battle of Manzikert resulted in the loss of Anatolia to the Turks. What effect could the loss of Anatolia have on the library of Constantinople ? Something doesn't seem to track here.

Eh? As far as I know, Alexandria has been occupied continuously since 330 BCE.

George Sandys, a traveller from 1610 AD visited the site that was Alexandria and wrote this about what he saw :

"Queene of Cities and Metropolis of Africa : who now hath nothing left but her ruins; and those ill witnesses of her perished beauties : declaring that Townes as well as men, have their ages and destinies."

I'd want sources to believe that it was reduced to a few hundred population- I thought Roma always had a few thousand left?

Rome, in the chaos of 6th century Italy, housed only a few hundred people. Sometimes Belisarius or the Goths would garrison the city with a few thousand soldiers. The senators had their own private villas they could retreat to where they could better protect themselves.

And I'd want to read sources to believe that the Arab invaders permanently destroyed Roman Carthage, especially since as Vortigern said Belissarius and the Vandals did a lot of damage too.

First of all, not only was Carthage destroyed by the Arabs in 697 AD, but it was lost and only rediscovered in modern times.

Secondly, the claim that Byzantine Carthage was somehow an ailing, tottering outpost is simply outdated scholarship based on Charles Diehl. It was NOT in economic or demographic decline. Read the book "Carthage : Overseas Trade and the Political Economy" by M.G. Fulford.

North Africa in the 6th and 7th centuries was still a very rich, vibrant land with a thriving agriculture. And the Arab chronicles confirm that that was how they inherited it.

Byzantine Carthage was financially and militarily self-sufficient being ruled by an Exarch in the name of the emperor. In fact, it was so powerful that Heraclius launched a rebellion by sending a naval and land expedition to seize the throne of Constantinople from the usurper Phocas. Carthage was rebuilt and maintained by the Byzantines for 164 years, long after the Vandals did their damage. It also outlasted the Vandal occupation by about 64 years.

As far as I know nobody paid much attention to Greek or Republican Roman political thought until the Renaissance or later, although a few people read it. I haven't seen evidence that translations of the Politics towards the end of the middle ages changed this.

Then you should study the history of Northern Italy : the rise of the city states and not just Venice. They were inspired by the ancient models and created their own Republics.

~Theo

[Eleatic Guest]

...and the only thing the Greeks brought with them from Constantinople were Greek works, e.g. Sophocles and Plutarch.

Don't forget PLATO whose works were brought to Florence from Constantinople in the 15th century and immensely influenced and enriched Reneaissance philosophy (Neoplatonism).

An estimate was made that 10 million classical Greek words survive, to 1 million of classical Latin.

By whom?

[Sean Manning]

Hi Theodosius,

Sorry for the late reply, but I needed time to write a full answer.

Yes, Cicero was one of the secular authors lucky enough to have been accepted by the Church early on.

1. And many more on the same period :
   
2. Caesar's 'Commentaries'
   
3. Catullus
   
4. Livy
   
5. Vergil
   
6. Tacitus
   
7. Suetonius
   
8. Ovid
   
9. Horace

All of these deal with poetry (some of which being vulgar to Christians), pagan mythology and history. A classically educated Roman Christian would have been versed in many if not all these pagan authors. Christians also thought of themselves as Romans and to be cultured was to be classically educated. This remained true in the 4th century and far afterward. I think you may have a misconception that one's Christian identity automatically obscured one's Roman identity which just isn't accurate. Christians could be just as nationalistic as any pagan Roman.

But there was a period of about 400 years where hardly anyone in western Europe seems to have cared about preserving pagan literature, and that is when the greatest loss of Latin literature probably took place.

Could you please be more specific about which 400 years you're referring to ?

To be safe, say 500 to 800 CE (only 300 years, I know). The date at which books began to be lost on a large scale seems quite debatable, and you could make a case for as early as 400 CE. The Carolingian Renaissance seems to have stopped the large-scale loss of Latin books. Many new works were written in the 'dark ages', like Geoffrey of Tours' history and Isidore of Seville's encyclopaedia and the written versions of the Germanic law codes, but book copying seems to have been on too small a scale to preserve most ancient literature in the west. Similarly, only a few people were educated enough to appreciate most ancient literature: not many were reading Cicero or Virgil or Horace. The Carolingian Renaissance much reduced the rate of loss by reviving basic education and book production and bringing political order.

According to Warren Treadgold, Renaissances Before the Renaissance p. 11, “The measure of the disaster is that the great majority of the Latin literature that was ever lost disappeared between 550 and 750, when secular texts were left uncopied and were often even erased or discarded.â€

[Theodosius the Great]

Hi Sean,

No worries. I've done the same thing (should probably do it more :oops: )

To be safe, say 500 to 800 CE (only 300 years, I know). The date at which books began to be lost on a large scale seems quite debatable, and you could make a case for as early as 400 CE. The Carolingian Renaissance seems to have stopped the large-scale loss of Latin books.

Makes perfect sense. That exact period really was 'dark' (especially for Britain) due to the chaos of the time. So, I have no qualms to the use of 'dark ages' when referring to it

Sean Manning\\n[quote] According to Warren Treadgold, Renaissances Before the Renaissance p. 11, “The measure of the disaster is that the great majority of the Latin literature that was ever lost disappeared between 550 and 750, when secular texts were left uncopied and were often even erased or discarded.â€

[Robert Vermaat]

I'd like to add another point for the general discussion : why is it that everything we know about the Persians comes from Greco-Roman sources ? Was this a failure of the Persians to preserve their history ? Was this due to the Arab destruction of Persia ? Or did the Persians simply have no tradition of recording their history ?

That has more to do with modern Western science. There is actually a lot of source-material around that is not translated into English, but which is available in Russian and occasionally in German. But how far back that goes I don't know. A lot of ancient Persian material was destroyed I think because the Sassanids fought a lot harder and longer against the Arab invaders, whereas Syria, Egypt and Africa fell relatively easy into their hands.

I'll stop discussing the fate of Carthage and Alexandria as that is, as you say, OT for this thread, with my statement that I disagree very much with the opinion that both were near-empty ruins due to and after the Arab conquest. But maybe we can set up another thread about that? It's still part of Roman history, after all.

That sounds logical, but I also read that the Orthodox church developed a very negative attitude towards earlier Classical learning. Do we know for sure what survived in Constantinople or are we just assuming things here?

Why is this relevant to the question of the thread ? Whether or not the Orthodox Church valued classical learning the point is that Constantinople housed the largest repository of Greek works from the classical period. They weren't destroyed by monks unless, on occasion, paper was so scarce that they recycled the old books to write prayers on. This wasn't done out of malice but out of scarcity.

Well, it has to do with the thread, because it is a reason for the people of the time to decide what to copy and what not to copy. If the Church frowned on, say, Plato or Aristotoles, that would mean their manuscripts were not reproduced? Not destroyed, but not replaced either?

That sounds like a very partisan view to me. Is there really evidence that the re-emergence of Classical texts et al came directly from Constantinople?

Yes, read more on Willem van Moerbeke, the Flemish Dominican friar and one time Latin bishop of Corinth from the mid 13th century. He translated all of the works of Aristotle and many by Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria and more. He translated "Politics" which was never translated into Arabic.

But that's entirely different! hock: Van Moerbeke was one of the clerics attached to the Latin Kingdoms who conquered and effectively destroyed the Byzantine Empire in the 13th century. he worked with the sources preserved by the Byzantines before the new Latin master took them by force. Of course he did! He must have been watering at the mouth to find all that stuf, which for so long had been unavailable in the West, hidden or at least not made available by the Byzantines.
Not proof, as I asked, of Greek scholars supposedly fleeing to the west with a bundle of Classic manuscripts hidden in their baggage, which they then supposedly brought to the Catholic church to have it copied.

Please, please, tell me you did not fall for the Fjordman report or similar writings. I read this stuff (and I studies Islamic history) and it's so anti-Islamic that it scared me. hock: If so, send me a PM, for it's modern politics.

[Eleatic Guest]

I think it should be added that the widespread late antique practice of creating concise summaries of lengthy works like Livius' paradoxically reduced the amount of ancient literature, as they took the incentive away to read (and copy) the original works. Sad to see how a well-intended idea worked so counter-productive in the long run.

[Eleatic Guest]

I'd like to add another point for the general discussion : why is it that everything we know about the Persians comes from Greco-Roman sources ? Was this a failure of the Persians to preserve their history ? Was this due to the Arab destruction of Persia ? Or did the Persians simply have no tradition of recording their history ?

I raised the question earlier in another thread: How did the Persians view the Romans

In my impression the loss of ancient Persian literature was partly due to later Islamization (somehow analogous to the Christian bias in the West against the classical heritage), but much more the Persians did not have historiography in a true sense of the word.

We should not forget that historiography a a critical science was only introduced two times in history, by the Greeks in the 5th century BC and by the Chinese around 100 BC. All other historiographical traditions are either from a much later period or adopted from the Greek model (in the Far East from China: Japan & Korea).

[Sean Manning]

My original question has been answered in this thread and by a PM from someone who probably didn't want to get into this argument, so why don't we stop now or start a new thread?

Sure. I learned some new things from the thread.

~Theo

I sure did! It sounds like under 1% and maybe about 0.1% of ancient literature survives. I'll read up on medieval Alexandria and Carthage and judge their history for myself.

Robert, I know that a fellow named Manuel Chrysoleras came to Italy about 1400 CE to teach the Italians Greek and make some good Latin translations of Greek texts. There is an article on him and people like him here. I have no idea how they justified the switch, unless they hadn't been in the angry mobs screaming “better the Sultan than the Pope!â€

[Endre Fodstad]

Bit to late to contribute much, but Walter Bersching wrote a book on the very subject: "Griechisch-lateinisches Mittelalter. Von Hieronymus zu Nikolaus von Kues" in 1980, later translated into english as "Greek Letters and the latin middle ages: From Jerome to Nicolaus of Cusa" ( http://www.amazon.ca/Greek-Letters-Lati ... 0813206065 ) that answers a lot of the questions raised here. Another is "he Sacred Nectar of the Greeks: The Study of Greek in the West in the Early Middle Ages" (Michael W. Herren, http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Nectar-Gre ... 0951308513 ). The "study of greek studies" in the latin medieval west have in recent years undergone a bit of a revision from the old setup; it seems far more was available than was believed 50 years ago. But of course that has already been stated here earlier in the thread.

[Theodosius the Great]

OK, my last post here, I promise :

I think it should be added that the widespread late antique practice of creating concise summaries of lengthy works like Livius' paradoxically reduced the amount of ancient literature, as they took the incentive away to read (and copy) the original works. Sad to see how a well-intended idea worked so counter-productive in the long run.

Indeed, that phenomenon continued well into the Renaissance ! It also happened with both Isidore of Seville and Willem van Moerbeke's translations.

That has more to do with modern Western science. There is actually a lot of source-material around that is not translated into English, but which is available in Russian and occasionally in German. But how far back that goes I don't know. A lot of ancient Persian material was destroyed I think because the Sassanids fought a lot harder and longer against the Arab invaders

I meant any pre-Islamic, Persian / Parthian authors. For example, a Persian "Tacitus" or a Parthian "Livy" .

Well, it has to do with the thread, because it is a reason for the people of the time to decide what to copy and what not to copy. If the Church frowned on, say, Plato or Aristotoles, that would mean their manuscripts were not reproduced? Not destroyed, but not replaced either?

A possibility, sure. But ultimately they're unanswerable questions. Who can know now what was lost and when it was lost ?

But that's entirely different! Van Moerbeke was one of the clerics attached to the Latin Kingdoms who conquered and effectively destroyed the Byzantine Empire in the 13th century. he worked with the sources preserved by the Byzantines before the new Latin master took them by force.

OK, but no time period was specified in your question. Nevertheless, our clean, modern translations of many Greek works are solely due to his efforts.

He must have been watering at the mouth to find all that stuf, which for so long had been unavailable in the West, hidden or at least not made available by the Byzantines.

Ah, proving that there was a thirst for rediscovering and preserving classical knowledge within the Latin Church's ranks. It sounds like we agree ?

Not proof, as I asked, of Greek scholars supposedly fleeing to the west with a bundle of Classic manuscripts hidden in their baggage, which they then supposedly brought to the Catholic church to have it copied.

The Greek refugees fled from their doomed Capital in the 15th century - making them the last generation of the Roman Empire.

Here's a nice, long list of [size=150:26h6ts3v]Renowned Byzantine Scholars[/size]
At least one of them, Henry Aristippus, is from the mid 12th century.

One more item : it's not wholly accurate to say that Western contact with Constantinople was minimal, IMO. Recall that the Venetians always maintained strong commercial ties to the Empire. And Rome remained in Byzantine hands long after the Gothic Wars of the sixth century. At a whim the Emperors could (and did) remove and install Popes at their pleasure just as they did with their Patriarchs in Constantinople.

Please, please, tell me you did not fall for the Fjordman report or similar writings

The most reputable scholars I've read are Bernard Lewis, Warren Threadgold, and Victor Davis Hanson. I'm sure they all have detractors - who doesn't these days ? I'll leave the matter there.

I raised the question earlier in another thread: How did the Persians view the Romans
In my impression the loss of ancient Persian literature was partly due to later Islamization (somehow analogous to the Christian bias in the West against the classical heritage), but much more the Persians did not have historiography in a true sense of the word.

We should not forget that historiography a a critical science was only introduced two times in history, by the Greeks in the 5th century BC and by the Chinese around 100 BC. All other historiographical traditions are either from a much later period or adopted from the Greek model (in the Far East from China: Japan & Korea).

Thank you, Stefan. I, too, thought I remembered reading that historiography was a Greek practice adopted only by the Romans and one or two other Far Eastern civilizations (independently from the Greeks, of course).

I sure did! It sounds like under 1% and maybe about 0.1% of ancient literature survives.

:lol: That figure sounds suspiciously precise and confident. Like I said, who now can possibly know what was lost and when.

But I really don't know how much the Latins copied from the Greeks, how much they stole from them, and how much turned up in obscure libraries across western Europe when the Italian humanists started looking for texts in Greek.

If you're interested, please see the list of Byzantine scholars I posted above. It's a good place to start.

Endre,

Bit to late to contribute much ... The "study of greek studies" in the latin medieval west have in recent years undergone a bit of a revision from the old setup; it seems far more was available than was believed 50 years ago. But of course that has already been stated here earlier in the thread.

Thank you for these links. I'm sure these books can shed a lot of light on the subject. It's always good to keep up with the latest scholarship.

~Theo

[Timotheus]

One item I would like to point out is before anyone can really determine who destroyed all the books we really should realize that we dont even know how many manuscripts we are talking about.

I have heard 250,000 thrown around as the number of manuscripts held at the various libraries of Rome but that is a very vague number since we dont know if that is total scrolls, collections of scrolls, does it count redundent copies.

In addition we do not know how many manuscripts existed in other cities beyond the main one.

All we really know is that violence destorys books and close minded extremists like the early church destroys books even more because they target the books as opposed to general warfare that will destroy books as collatoral damage.

So I really want to know how someone can say things like 8% of Medievel texts have survived to modern times. There is really no way of knowing what was there to begin with to be able to compare it to what is left.