(04-02-2020, 01:43 PM)Eleatic Guest Wrote: Do you know if modern scholarship has compiled an inventory of the entire body of ancient literature that we know of? Specifically, I would like to know the number of
- authors (also by name only)
- titles (also by name only)
- letters, words, pages
that have survived.
In short, the full quantitative approach. I know only of one estimation, that of Gerstinger in 1948, otherwise the linked article focuses on book losses.
Well, west of the Indus there is 57 million words of Greek, 10 million words of Latin, 10 million words of Akkadian, 6 million words of Egyptian, 3 million words of Sumerian, and so on ... if you want the details check out the references in my old article in Ancient History 7! The lists tend to be one language or genre at a time (FGrH for the Greek historians, CIL for Latin inscriptions, there must be something for early Christian texts), and pick different cut-off dates.
I also remember that Roger Pearse had some statistics on the survival rate of Attic Tragedy or Old Comedy, and there is an article by Roger S. Bagnall "Alexandria: Library of Dreams" which casts a jaundiced eye on numbers for the Library of Alexandria. The linked German Wikipedia page shows the library more or less static until the time of Hypatia when it instantly vanishes, but as we both know that is a partisan view and the ancient sources don't really let us show whether some general or time and lack of funds did the most damage.
I think my main sources were:
Carsten Peust, “Über ägyptische Lexicographie,“ Lingua Aegyptica 7 (2000) pp. 245-260
http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propy.../2013/1893
M.P. Streck, „Großes Fach Altorientalistik,“ Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 142 (2010) pp. 35-58
Michael P. Streck, „Sprache (language),“ Reallexikon der Assyriologie Band 13 (2011-2013). {text in English}
Nullis in verba
I have not checked this forum frequently since 2013, but I hope that these old posts have some value. I now have
a blog on books, swords, and the curious things humans do with them.