Inspired by this thread, what are some of the most apparently revered / important (i.e. referenced contemporarily) documents that have been lost to time, ala Aristotle’s Comedy (if such a thing actually existed)?
Certainly the “lost” plays of the three great Greek tragedians (Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides) would qualify.
Those were the first ones that came to my mind. Aeschylus’s Myrmidons cycle survives in sufficient fragments to allow reconstruction (as was done for a 2004 performance in Cyrpus. They survived due to pure luck–a few dozen verses were contained on mummy wrappings.
This wikipedia page lists a number of other lost works from many different fields, including science and philosophy as well as theatre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_work
One lost Greek document which that page doesn’t mention, but which would be of great interest to classical art historians and archaeologists, is the Canon, a text on art theory and proportions written by the great Classical sculptor Polykleitos. Of course, none of Polykleitos’ original sculptures survive, either–we only know his work through Roman copies! The same goes for most other ancient Greek sculptures and paintings. We know they were famous and revered, because the Romans made copies, and many (thought not all) of the Roman copies were preserved…but even those copies represent only a small fraction of what the Greeks actually produced.
The rest of the Illiad.
It’s not an ancient work but I wouldn’t mind reading Emily Brontë’s second novel, the draft of which was destroyed by her sister Charlotte after Emily’s death (or so Juliet Barker claims in her biography of the Brontës).
How about the New Testament? The discoveries at Qumran gave us a rather decent collection of ancient copies of the Old Testament, but what about the New Testament? Extant copies of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John would be nice. Or how about the Q source? That’d be nice, eh?
I agree it would be nice to see Q, but I don’t know that I would categorize the canonical gospels as being ‘lost.’ We have some pretty old manuscripts for them, and there is no reason to believe that they are significantly different than the originals, apart from minor errors/edits.
Quite true. Maybe it would be useful to outline how textual criticism of the New Testament works? We have a significant number of ancient parchment codices, and a very large number of papyrus fragments. The importance of the numbers is that, while copying a manuscript can easily introduce errors (or intentional changes), the likelihood of copyists in different places introducing the same errors is very small. In the case of other documents, we’re often stuck with a very few manuscripts, so the possibility of copyist’s error is higher. But in the case of the New Testament, we have so many ancient manuscripts that we can use them to correct each other. In consequence, even if (for example) somebody had tried a few centuries later to tamper with the text of Mark, we’d be able to see through that attempt; they’d have been undermined by chance survival of earlier copies.
The Sibylline Books.
What about the rest of the Kubla Khan?
I don’t think “lost in the ether” counts. 
I’d like to see Shakespeare’s Loves Labours Won found some day.
It’d be nice to find the original copy of the Ten Commandments just to get an idea of wheter or not the translations thru the years were accurate.
extant
a : currently or actually existing b : not destroyed or lost
We do have “extant copies.”
The original handwritten document of the Declaration of Independence that was signed by President of Congress John Hancock and the Secretary Charles Thomson on July 4, 1776, went to the printers and was apparently lost. A typeset copy from the printer was inserted into the minutes of the Continental Congress. The following month an engrossed copy on parchment was signed by delegates, and that is the copy on display at the National Archives.
Vice President Spiro Agnew’s 1973 letter of resignation was stolen from the National Archives.
What about the second volume of Poetics of Aristotle?
What?
Oh. Never mind.
Tris
How about the entire Etruscan language, which survives only as tomb inscriptions and part of one book found as a mummy wrapping?
There are a lot of Greek scientific works that have been completely or parly lost, and we tantalizingly only have their titles in many cases. we only have one book by Hipparchus, for example, and it’s only a commentary, not a major work.
Besides the greek plays, there are a great many poetic works and books on mythology that haven;t survived. We have only a few fragments of the work of Pherekydes, who preceded Apollodorus by about half a millenium. Apollodorus quoted a lot of Pherekydes, which we know because he says so, and because we have a few fragments of quotation by others.
There are a great many lost Christian texts, too, but most of them were regarded as apocryphal or heretical by the powers-that-be of the established church. It would be very interesting to see what they looked like, to get a picture of developing Christianity.
Any surviving text (if one existed) of Mithraism would be of enormous help. Our state of knowledge about this religion has to be based upon artwork and what others have said about it, mixed with a lot of speculation.
My wished-for finds are endless, but I’ll limit it here to three:
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Only three complete (and one fragment) Maya codices still exist to the present day. It would be quite helpful in our understanding of the Maya if more existed.
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The Ur-Hamlet (probably, though not certainly, by Thomas Kyd) that inspired Shakespeare’s version of the tale.
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In 1922, the Irish Public Records Office was destroyed by the IRA. Based on some of what is known to have been lost as a result, one wonder what else was there of interest.
Some historians of the Gilded Age and early Progressive Era would be most happy if the original data for the 1890 United States Census had not been destroyed in a fire.
Upon his death, the widow of Sir Richard Burton burned the diaries he had kept all during one of the most astonishing lives ever lived. What a loss!