Can anyone give me a rough idea on the quantity of texts from the various periods of European/Asian antiquity (of all sorts, from histories, religious texts, to contracts and shopping lists)?
E.g.: if all primary texts that we have got from Rome, to the end of the Western Empire, not including duplications, were issued in paperback - would that take up one yard/metre of shelf space? Ten yards/metres? or a hundred?
Or: How would a complete edition of everything that we have got from classical Greece compare in shelf space to a complete edition of Stephen King’s œuvre?
This is a cool question. And here’s a piggyback question: how static are these quantities? I imagine pretty darn static, but it must occasionally happen that a new Roman text, let’s say, emerges.
That’s indeed a case. In school, I wrote a paper on Cicero’s De re publica and his political theories discussed there. The existence of this book was well known in Europe throughout the centuries, but the text itself was lost, except for certain fragments which were available because other ancient writers had quopted from them. In 1822, large parts of the text were rediscovered on a palimpsest, a piece of document that had been erased and re-used for wirting another text over it (in this case, a text by Augustinus had been written over Cicero’s text). Based on this and comparisons with quotes by other writers, it was possible to reconstruct the original text pretty accurately.
That said, I think that the quantity of ancient texts available is considerable. After all, the Roman Empire alone produced enormous amounts of documents, in many categories - literature, science, philosophy, religion, jurisprudence, but also everyday administrative paperwork or letters sent by famous Romans to friends. It’s not that all this vanished when the Empire fell - it was preserved throughout the centuries, mostly in monasteries where monks would copy them by hand. They also kept documents one might consider rather trivial.
Yes, there are lists. The problem is, what do you consider a Roman text? Something written in the era 753 BCE till 476 CE? Do you limit text written only in Italy, or Europe, or only the “Roman Empire” - and then what do you consider to constitute the “Roman Empire”? Only writings from Roman authors? How about pagan texts, we got a bunch of those; those people would usually consider those Christian texts…
I’d provide a list of texts, but it’d be wrong. The problem with the OP’s question is that it isn’t completely answerable. Does a tiny incomprehensible text found in Egypt count? The real answer to the question is millions. As to the actual “size” or “quantity” of texts, I’m not sure if anybody would really be able to answer the question. My school’s rare book library is huge and FULL of texts - so many they’re shipping many into storage. I don’t know if anybody could actually figure out the actual size of all of humanity’s ancient texts. Needless to say, it is huge and NO, you’d never be able to read it all.
I doubt if anyone really knows. Lost books turn up all the time in really old libraries that no one has known they were there. (You’d think that a monastary with a library that’s hundreds of years old would do an inventory every now and then, but apparently not.) Whenever Google Books finishes up we might have a good idea.
The list is increasing. The Gospel of Judas was released in rough translation form about two years ago. A Coptic text was discovered in the 1970’s and took many years to piece together what it contained. The result was a book that was left out of the bible but scholars knew about from other references. It was a shock to find it and gave new information about the very early developing churches that spawned modern Christianity.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are probably the most important archaeological document finds of all time and right up their with all of the greatest archaeological finds. They weren’t uncovered to the Western world until the mid-1950’s and they are still being deciphered today. They tell loads about Jewish history but also tell a lot about the development of a group of Jews called the Essenes which seemed to have spawned the account of Jesus himself.
If I may be so bold, it would help to distinguish between things like text books, plays and novels, and other scholarly items, as opposed to things like shopping lists, census records, and other data-base like items.
The Harvard University Press bookstore in Harvard Square has opractically the complete Loeb Classical Edition on its shelves. Granted there are duplicates, but the complete Grek and Latin collections take up four pretty large bookshelves. That dwarfs Stephen King’s output. And it’s not even the complete library of Latin and Greek works – it’s only what the Loeb edition has published, and I know of other works not in their repertoire.
And tha’s completely ignoring the vast amount of Egyptian Hieroglyphic, Mesopotamian cuneiform, Indian, and Chinese literature from as far or further back. Not to mention the odd Hittite and Minoan and other scripts. And the many volumes from wall texts and steles and grafitti. Suffice to say there’s a lot.
and still, there’s not enough. There are the lost works of Thales and Archimedes and other philosophers and marhematicians, the books referred to in the Bible and religious commentaries that we know only by reputation, the vast library of burned Roman history, and what was lost in the fire at the library at Alexandria.
But why are we separating these texts? The “mindless bureaucratic records” are some of the most informative texts we have! Texts written by authors, from the Enuma Elish to Caesar’s retelling of his campaigns in Gaul, are all biased to differing degrees. On the other hand, random bureaucratic records give us glimpses of how people actually lived. If you really wanted to piece together an accurate history of civilization, you’d be better off with the corpus of humanity’s bureaucracy - IMHO.
That library would have to be pretty big if you include all textual sources of the world from before, say, 500 AD. The amount of texts we have from Latin, Greek, and Egyptian is very large in itself, and the corpus of material from the Indian subcontinent would significally enlarge that. There are large numbers of Indian and Egyptian texts in libraries and collections around the world that no-one has even looked at yet. In the Egyptian Dept. of the University of Copehagen, there is what is believed to be an entire temple library. Only a handful of those texts have been published. Antiquity is still just waiting to be discovered.
OTOH I remember reading somewhere that the amount of information we have about more recent events, say WW2 for instance, dwarfs the size of any “library of antiquity” we would be able to compile.