Most Apparently Revered / Important Lost Documents?

Factual Questions
21

The Q document

WIKI QUOTE
*
Q (Q for German Quelle, “source”) is a postulated lost textual source for the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke.

The recognition of 19th-century New Testament scholars that Matthew and Luke share much material not found in their generally recognized common source the Gospel of Mark, has suggested a second common source, termed the Q document. This hypothetical lost text—also called the Q Gospel, the Sayings Gospel Q, the Synoptic Sayings Source, and in the 19th century the Logia—seems most likely to have comprised a collection of Jesus’ sayings. Recognizing such a Q document is the essence of the “two-source hypothesis.”

The two-source hypothesis forms the simplest and the most widely accepted solution to the synoptic problem posed by textual correspondences between the two gospels, with the Gospel of Mark forming one source, and Q the other*

Before her death Martha Washington burned all the letters between herself and George and Thos. Jefferson did the same for his wife also Martha - almost the entire John Adams-Abigail Adams famously celebrated “partnership” was because of their surviving correspondence – I would love to see what the George-Martha Thomas-Martha relationships were like (and these documents no longer exist precisely becuase they would tell me to MYOB)

22

Good grief I did not know that! WTH was she thinking??? :mad:

23

It would be nice to have the complete Epic of Gilgamesh. It is consider to be the oldest known piece of literature and we are missing much of it.

Jim

24

I would like to have more poems of Sappho than the few fragments that survived in quotations in other books. Some of the fragments are only a couple words long. Two or three complete poems have survived. To the ancient Greeks, Sappho was considered the equal of Homer in poetic genius.

25

Ptolemy I of Egypt was a general under Alexander the Great and wrote a history of the Asian conquests. Heck, any contemporary history of Alexander would be astonishing.

Ralph Ellison never really completed his second novel, Juneteenth. He lost a big chunk in a house fire, and dawdled over the rest, ultimately leaving a 2,000 page unfinished manuscript at his death.

Truman Capote claimed an ex-boyfriend stole the draft for “Another Insult to the Brain”, a chapter from his unfinished Answered Prayers. It’s now unclear if the chapter even existed in the first place. If Capote did write it, he almost certainly didn’t give it to the boyfriend, but lost it somewhere else.

26

The missing and damaged portions of the Percy Manuscript (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Percy_Folio; http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~kiernan/ENG620/percyfolio.htm), the most important single source for early English ballads (note that contrary to the impression given by the Wikipedia article, the manuscript was not bound until Percy rescued it; the binder then inflicted additional damage).

27

I think the first draft of “Our Lady of the Flowers” by Jean Genet was discovered by a prison guard and burned, or something to that effect. Genet rewrote the whole thing while still in prison.

28

My guess would be that she was thinking something along the lines of “diaries are not generally intended for public consumption, and are usually no business of anyone’s but the diarist’s”? :confused:

29

Moses broke the original copy that was said to be written by G-d himself. The one the Hebrews kept in the ark of the covenant was a second copy that was carved by Moses.

30

I’d like to rescue the Incan manuscripts and knotted-rope books that were collected and burned by the Conquistadores.

I’d also like to rescue Proto-Esperanto:

Most surprising bit of text I’ve read this week (from the Wikipedia article on L.L. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto):

31

Well yeah, obviously, too bad she wasn’t in charge of Ann Frank’s as well, eh?

32

She also burned his intended for publication manuscript of The Perfumed Garden. She was acting to protect his reputation. She was a little late for that. What an odd couple they were!

33

Only about one-fourth of the Avesta, the sacred writings of the Zoroastrians, survived the fall of the Persian empire and the coming of Islam. Most of the ceremonial and devotional material has survived, as it was used in daily religious worship by the Zoroastrians, but much of the historical, legal, philosophical, etc. text has been lost. It’s as if all that survived of early Jewish religious writing was the Torah, Psalms, and fragments of the Talmud.

The holy book of Manicheanism (once a major world religion), the Arzhang, has been totally lost.

Most of the ancient Chinese philosophical works were destroyed by the Legalists in the late 200s BC.

34

Fermat’s original Last Theorem proof. (Assuming he wrote it down somewhere other than the margin which was famously “too small to contain it”.)

35

Here’s my wish list.

The lost books of Livy’s History.

The missing books of the Annals of Tacitus, especially those parts dealing with the fall of Sejanus and the reign of Caligula.

The last few books of Lucan’s Pharsalia.

The rest of the Satyricon by Petronius.

Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Won (if indeed there was such a play and the title is not merely an alternative one for a known play.)

36

Cardenio Shakespeare’s other lost play.

The original ending to Mark’s gospel. The earliest known manuscript stops after the tomb is found opened and empty.

37

The ancient Greek migration legends ca 2000 BC: the tales of the conquest of what would become Greece.

38

Only The Arquebus- another one of the Paratime Police stories that H. Beam Piper was working on when he committed suicide. It’s thought he destroyed the manuscript shortly before he shot himself, but there’s still some hope that there’s a copy sitting in someone’s desk drawer somewhere…

Most of the production records for the Tula Arsenal are missing, too- no one has any idea how many Nagant M1895 revolvers were made, for example, because the Soviets torched all the records before the Germans could get there.

Also, the entire contents of the Great Library of Alexandria. Who knows what classical treasures were lost when that was torched?

39

The original broadcast of Super Bowl I.