Do we have many (or any) ancient greek texts that are sitting somewhere waiting for someone to become interested in reading them? Or are all the ancient greek texts we have translated into a modern language somewhere?
(By “we have” I mean we know about its existence and have physical access to it.)
I would guess they’re all translated, which does, however, not mean they’re not retranslated from time to time by scholars who are either dissatisfied with the quality existing translations, or believe that the usage in modern languages have changed to the extent that existing translations are hardly accessible to modern readers. Remember the way ancient texts were tradited to us: It’s not that originally ancient documents have been lying around in libraries and archives for two or three millennia, gathering dust while they were sitting on the shelf waiting to be translated. The vast majority of ancient texts (both Greek and Latin) were preserved through the Middle Ages in libraries, often in monasteries, where writers would manually copy the texts from documents accessible to them. These copists did understand Greek and knew what they were writing, and others would base secondary literature on these ancient texts. So there was, throughout the centuries, a constant reading and interaction with the tradited literature going on. It’s not as if they were fundamentally new.
This does not mean that “new” ancient texts are not occasionally rediscovered; a common practive in medieval libraries was to re-use writing material, e.g. parchment, due to its price: The writing on it would be scraped off, then new text written on the surface (palimpsests). That way, modern technology may sometimes reveal a text demmed lost on a layer below another text, and this re-found literature will then, of course, have to be translated.
If you feel like grad school is in your future, you could get into textual criticism - that’s still ongoing. The emphasis is not on finding as-yet untranslated texts and translating them but on finding and comparing different versions of the texts to try to figure out if it was written by a single author, who that author might be, whether or not anyone edited it along the way, what the original version looked like before the edits, how ancient readers would have interpreted it, etc… There are ancient documents where 98% of the text is unquestioned but there is a paragraph here and a chapter there that are considered by some to be a later addition by another author because those sections are missing from copies found in Athens and Cairo but present in copies found in Damascus, and those sections make much greater use of loanwords from Aramaic while the rest seems to be more inspired by Ancient Egyptian phraseology.
One way in which Greek is used for textual criticism today is comparing the Septuagint (an Ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament) with the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew as it exists today. One of the major points of this is that the Septuagint seems to be translated from a Hebrew original that is not exactly identical with what you find in the standard Hebrew versions today. The NIV translation of the Bible includes notes indicating that while their Old Testament was translated from the Hebrew Masoretic Text (the standard Hebrew version of today), it was compared with the Septuagint in order to gain better insight into its meaning and aid in finding the best way to render the verse in English.
Have there been any notable hoaxes? That is, purported discoveries of previously unknown ancient texts, which turned out to be faked? Someone coming forth with a scroll of Aristotle’s Comedy, for instance, and it’s all about farting?
I think there’s some stuff recently come out of Elephantine.
I believe there’s still some cuneiform that needs doing too, if you’re looking for something to keep you busy.
Getting away from Ancient Greek specifically for a moment, I had an idea of a distributed translation system where large numbers of volunteers translate works between whatever languages they feel they are confident in, and other users vote on the quality of the translation, with the final goal being to translate large numbers of public domain texts into open source/freeware texts in other languages. Eventually you would be able to click and download The Secret Garden in Thai or Moby Dick in Hungarian, all free of copyright fees. I did some quick research and it seems this concept already exists.
There’s also the strange case of Linear A. Some old documents were found in a completely unfamiliar sort of writing, which long puzzled scholars, until someone realized that it was just Greek, written in a made-up alphabet.
The so-called Gospel of Barnabas purports to be an authentic account of the life of Jesus, but it seems to be riddled with anachronisms, such as treating “The Christ” and “The Messiah” as two separate concepts. Seems it may have been written in the Middle Ages by a Spanish or Italian-speaking convert to Islam.
Depending on your religion, you could claim that the Book of Mormon is a very notable hoax, but it may not qualify since the CoJCoLDS claims that the original text that Joseph Smith translated from (i.e. the golden plates) is no longer on Earth, so there’s nothing to carbon-date or dust fingerprints off of.
That’s Linear B. Linear A, an older form of writing, is still undeciphered.
“Made-up alphabet”? In a way, all alphabets are “made up” by people. The “Linear” symbols seem to be an actual writing system. So-called “Linear B” inscriptions are simply Greek texts written in a syllabary rather than using the Greek Alphabet as it is known today. If you know Ancient Greek and learn the syllabary, you can read Linear B as Greek. This is nothing special - transliteration can be done today in many languages - think about how you can spell out Japanese phrases in the Roman alphabet, gomen-nasai, onii-chan. “Linear A” texts seem to use a similar or identical set of characters, but the underlying language is unknown. It’s possible that it’s not a language at all by a system of decoration/dingbats, but it’s probably more likely that it encodes an ancient language now lost or represents an alternate encoding of a known language (Latin? Aramaic? Egyptian? Proto-Norse?) but we haven’t been able to figure out the encoding, e.g. how different characters are pronounced or in what order they should be read.
Linear B is a form of Greek, Mycean language written in Linear A script.
It can be read.
linear A is not understood, and it is not Greek.
Its from Minoan Ancient Crete , which implies it could be an isolated language with no descendants , Which makes sense as Crete is an island. Crete then joined into greek world but at the time it was apparently quite separate…
The idea is that linear B would be Mycean greek written phonetically by linear A writing.
Linear C appears to be a language of Cyprus written phonetically using Linear A glyphs,
as evidenced by the fact that Linear C is PURELY phonetic.
I don’t know about in modern times, but back in the middle ages there were lots of texts that purported (and were often believed) to be written by some famous writer from antiquity, but were not. Some were probably genuinely ancient, but just not by who they were taken to be by. Some might have been deliberate hoaxes, and some were just misattributions. There were certainly lots of texts purporting to be by Aristotle, some of which were quite influential on scholars for a while, which really were not. The Secret of Secrets is a significant example.
Another important text that was misattributed in the middle ages was the Corpus Dionysiacum, a Christian text that was long thought to have been written by Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian mentioned in the Bible (Book of Acts) as having been personally converted to Christianity by St Paul. The true author was an otherwise obscure Christian theologian (whose name may, possibly, have actually been Dionysius) from several centuries later, but because of his supposed direct connection to Paul, his ideas (about angels, and suchlike) were taken a lot more seriously in the middle ages than they might otherwise have been. Although it has long been known that the Biblical Dionysius was not the true author, the influence of this work lingers on in Christian thinking.
Ah, my mistake on the Linears. By “made up alphabet”, I meant that it doesn’t correspond to any known language, but I didn’t realize that all three of the Linears used the same set of characters. That does seem to imply that there was a real (but now lost) language that used those characters natively, and that the untranslated ones are in that lost language.
There’s a ton of untranslated cuneiform, simply because there’s both a large written record and a small number of scholars with knowledge of sumarian/old persian/etc.
I don’t think that’s true of Greek though. Because Biblical languages and classical languages are probably the two sets of ancient languages that have attracted the most interest, and since Greek is both, there’s a (relatively) huge number of people that can read at least konine and attic Greek.
So I suspect the only Greek texts that haven’t been translated are those that are still buried in undiscovered archaeological digs.
No boring tax or court records that somebody’s sure they’ll get to some day?
I’d wager Loeb Classical Library and the Collection Bude probably cover the vast majority of surviving ancient greek texts.
Unlikely. After all, the fact is that we have very few (if any) manuscripts at all that actually, physically date from ancient/classical Greek times. The vast majority of the texts that have survived did so because someone thought it was worthwhile making a copy of them (and, usually, because copies of copies of copies of … were made). Only the important and interesting stuff got copied (and not always that).
I think most writing that was not intended to last, in ancient Greece, was actually written with a stylus on a board coated with wax. It was not designed to last at all, and it didn’t. If you wanted to keep something, you could write it on papyrus, but papyrus was expensive (it had to be imported from Egypt) so you only did that with something you really, really wanted to keep. And then, ironically, papyrus actually does not last very well at all in the damp climate of Greece. It might last decades, even maybe a century or two if you are lucky, but not many centuries. (Some ancient papyri survived in Egypt, but that is because they were buried in the desert, and remained very dry.)
I would not be too gobsmacked if a few “boring tax or court records” written in Greek survive from the later Byzantine period (perhaps written on parchment - which would survive better, but would still be rather expensive for such purposes), but I think that that is not really what the OP is asking about. He said “ancient Greek”.
On the other hand, most of the untranslated cuneiform that has been mentioned, probably is “boring tax or court records”. Cuneiform was mostly incised into clay tablets, which last only too well.
“Linear” as opposed to what? Are there exponential alphabets?
What it seems like happened is that the language of Linear A, which is unknown today but referred to as “Minoan” by scholars, was once spoken on Crete and written using the Linear characters. Later on, for whatever reason (conquest, politics, migration, religious conversion, whatever), the island switched to speaking Greek, but the old writing system was kept and used to write Greek.
It also seems that Linear B Greek is older than the traditional Phoenician/Semitic based “Greek” writing in the Greek Alphabet (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc.), so it’s possible that there was no Greek literacy until Linear A-speaking Minoans taught Greeks to read and write. Maybe the Greeks were like the Borg - they encountered the Minoans, adopted cultural distinctives of the Minoans (reading and writing in Linear characters), and then assimilated the people.
I think you’re right. A very large percentage of Christian clergy, and a fair number of lay believers, can read Hebrew and/or Greek to some extent, as studying those languages is important to understanding the Bible. One would imagine that if there really were large numbers of texts sitting in drawers at universities and museums waiting for a translator to become available, there would be opportunities for Greek and Hebrew readers to make some extra money translating Athenian love letters, Corinthian court records, and price lists from the Thessaloniki Fruit Market. Where are these opportunities?