My question is, how have so many ancient documents survived the ravages of time?
Now I understand how and why many Jewish and early Christian writings survived. The principal institution preserving documents in Europe after the fall of Rome was the Church, so naturally “religious” writings received priority. However, as I sat down to begin reading Tacitus’ The Histories last night I wondered, how (and why) did this survive? Many Roman and Greek writings are preserved for us today, but HOW? Who, in say 732 CE, decided that copying out a letter by Cicero would be a good idea?
Is the Church responsible for most (90%+) of preserved ancient European writings? (I understand some will have been preserved extant by happy happenchance, and others preserved by Moslem sources.) Why did the church decide to preserve random Roman/Greek writings? What other institutions/groups are responsible for the wealth of ancient documents we have today? And how many survive today only because of Moslem (or non-European) preservation efforts?
The online dictionary says prior to th fall of Rome circa 475 AD.
Really ancient documents were clay tablets, papyrus, and pyramid texts painted on burial chamber walls.
The writings of various and sundry Greek and Roman authors were copied more for contemporary usage than long term preservation as far as I can tell.
I think you will also find that there is a sharp curve. The ones we see that survived are simply the ones that survived. Countless others must have become lost including many classic works and religious documents. The documentation for the life of Jesus Christ for instance is really piss poor if you think about it (I am Christian). He is born, pops up a couple of times as an adolescent, and then makes his first real appearances as a 30 year old that is going to be crucified in a few years. That isn’t a very thorough biography and there has to be much more information that people tried to keep.
People that study ancient texts often confront the problem of a surviving work referencing works thought to be lost and maybe even more important than the surviving one. That is very frustrating.
What I am saying is that a huge number of important works were created of the past 2000 years or so and we have a relatively small number left. People undoubtably tried to keep more of them but even one library fire or trouble in a monastery could wipe out many words for good.
There is a bright side. Technology now lets us recreate fractional and damaged works better than ever. The Book of Judas was recently recreated from badly damaged documents found in Egypt.
Yeah, I’m not really concerned about cuneiform tablets (etc) or burial texts which have survived; how and why they survived is obvious. Mainly I’m wondering how stuff like random correspondence (Cicero’s letters, letters to the emperor, Pindar’s odes, etc) have survived. Was there a deliberate policy to preserve “ancient” writings in post-Roman Europe or is it all happenchance? Or are Circero’s letter preserved only because they were copied for contemporary Roman usage?!
Shagnasty, your point about the majority of ancient texts being lost is noted. However, a number have survived and I want to know why. Christian/Jewish writings, their survival is obvious. Who, however, decided copying the entire text of Frontinus (of no relevance to medieval Europeans) was a good use of their time?
Major collections of books have been amassed since the days of Alexandria in the fourth century BCE. Both individual collectors and scholars and rulers at various levels and in a multitude of countries put together thousands of titles. These were handed down or sold to others of interest. Most importantly, they were copied in a vast industry that took place in every city that had wealth in every century. They were often translated into the local argot, but the importance of Greek, Latin, and Arabic works were recognized and the major authors sought after century after century.
I think what really surprises people is not how many books survived from ancient times, but how many books were written back then. The number is in the hundreds of thousands, and the survivors are only a tiny percent. While the popular notion is that we know all about Greek writings, for example, most of them have in fact disappeared, and our knowledge is based on references that survive rather than from the texts themselves. If you think of these texts as the barest fraction of what once existed, they suddenly seem to be very meager indeed.
In I, Claudius, Graves has Claudius considering the use of a primitive time capsule involving documents being sealed in wax and all sorts of other complex sealing methods, and buried for somebody to read in “two thousands of years”. Claudius ended up not bothering, and yes I know I, Claudius ain’t exactly an historical document itself, but I wonder if Graves had some information that preservation of documents was carefully considered and/or done by the ancients, or if it was whimsy on the part of his modern mind?
I also wonder if any archaeological digs have ever uncovered items that looked to have had some effort put into their preservation.
i am by no means an expert on this issue, but from what i understand, we are lucky, and should be thankfull, that we have have so much of written history surviving as we do.
i mean, as a single example, what if the dead sea scrolls were found a thousand years ago, and used as kindling for a lonely hermit’s dinner fire?
and what about the intelligent beings who will live a thousand years from now? are they going to be able to decipher what we today record on hard drives, cds, and flash drives? i doubt it.
Royal palaces, temples, and other government or quasi-governmental institutions often maintained their own archives where official correspondence was kept for reference or just as part of bureaucratic procedure.
For private correspondence, some of it came from personal family collections that happened to get handed down instead of thrown away. And some of it has been retrieved from garbage dumps. The massive Oxyrhynchus papyri collection is one example of a huge treasure trove of ancient documents that were preserved, paradoxically, by being thrown away.
Somewhat later, but on somewhat the same principle, is the collection from the Cairo Geniza, an accumulation of medieval Jewish documents—mostly fragmentary—that were kept around instead of being thrown in the trash because they might contain the written name of the Deity.
Remember that ancient papers were a lot different than those made in the modern era. The acids in modern paper virtually guarantees it will crumble away to dust given a century or two. If you look at a newspaper from the Civil War era, as an example, chances are it will look like it was printed yesterday. A newspaper from the 1970s, though, will be fragile and discolored, crumbling at a touch.
Climate had a lot to do with preservation as well. Paper does best in a steady humidity level of about 50%. In desert climates, it may crumble from being too dry, and in moist environments, it can mold, but the worst enemy is* fluctuation.* It causes the fibers to contract and expand, leading to crumbling.
Papers which survived were likely stored in enviornments which protected them from change, either by design or accident.
The crucial moment was the transition from papyrus to parchment. Vellum really is durable - much more so than anyone who hasn’t handled it might think - and, although it might be reused, once copied on to it, the chances of a substantial work surviving immediately became much less remarkable.
The Church didn’t decide to preserve anything. What was copied was pretty much a matter for each individual scriptorium or even individual scribes. And this is the answer to the OP. It was hardly as if every monk wanted to read only Christian religious texts and it should not be assumed that they were necessarily prevented from reading other works if they so wished. Enough idiosyncratic decisions were made along the way that some classical works were copied, even if many more were not.
As other posters have noted, most ancient documents did not survive. In many cases, those that did survive were preserved by accident. In general (with some very important exceptions) nothing survived unless every century or so somebody who had a tattered copy decided it was worth re-copying. Very few original documents survive.
Very much by accident. Our knowledge of Tacitus’ Histories depends on one surviving manuscript. (See Tacitus and his manuscripts)
This is a special case. Late Roman educated people often wrote their letters with a view toward eventual publication. Cicero, in particular, was later viewed as a superb Latin stylist, so his letters were preserved because they’d be an aid to developing good Latin style yourself.
Egypt was also a special case. Kimstu refers to the Oxyrhyncus papyri (http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/Poxy/mainmenu.htm); other finds are also important. What made Egypt different was that, after a period of economic resurgence, most of its history in late antiquity was one of slow impoverishment. Irrigation failed and was not repaired, so the area of farming and village life drew steadily in toward the Nile. This meant that within a period of a few decades towns went from “habitable, with water” to “bone dry, in abandoned desert.” Any papyrus documents lost or thrown away during that period had a good chance of survival. Also, throughout late antiquity Egypt had a craze for mummies; not only mummies of people, but mummification of animals. The process needed lots of “waste paper” to wrap the mummies or make cases for them; so there was a constant market for used papyrus documents. Which, again, wound up preserved.
Consequently, Egypt gives us a unique sample of ancient documents. Where almost anywhere else in the ancient world documents have survived only if they were repeatedly re-copied, in Egypt almost anything could survive by accident. So we’ve got, for example, not copies but originals of all sorts of things – tax papers, letters home, schoolwork; and also literature once familiar to many educated people, which by chance survived in Egypt because somebody threw away a worn-out copy in the garbage dump just up-hill from town…
Exactly. Amazingly, the one and only book (actually short piece thereof) in the Etruscan language that has survived was found on the back of linen mummy wrappings.