Imagine, if you will, a team of charity workers in the Himalayas discover a lost lamasery and within, reams and reams of scrolls. Texts of lost works by writers from both East and West. The world knows of the discovery (but not the extent) within minutes because they have a satellite phone. Say it’s essentially a copy of the Library of Alexandria and the far-Eastern equivalent. Say there’s a copy of 95% of all the works written between 1000 BC and 500 AD.
What would be the effects on literature? Science? The world?
Hopefully it’ll have schematics for the time machine used to get the documents for 500 AD, seeing as how the Library of Alexandria burned BCE. That aside, it probably wouldn’t have anywhere near as useful an impact on 21st century life as it would have had if it was found in, say, 500 AD. A full copy of all of Euclid’s work probably would have been amazingly important.
If they find the “lost” chapters of the Bible and Qu’ran that say “Just kidding!”, then quite an impact. Otherwise it’s just the Arts and Humanities that get put on puree.
At one point, early on, we were told that the Dead Sea Scrolls would be world-changing revelations which would completely revise our understanding of Christianity, Judaism, the Bible, etc.
As it turns out…not so much.
That said, it would be wonderful, in the abstract, to have the lost writings of Plato and Aristotle, and all the ancient dramas that have been lost. It would be a Great Thing (tm.) It might even promote a wave of neo-Hellenism in the arts, somewhat along the lines of such waves in the past. (I’m thinking specifically of Alma-Tadema’s “Coign of Vantage,” just 'cause it’s so darn purty.)
We might end up with just a little more infusion of ancient Greek word-roots into our modern language. A shallow influence, perhaps, but an influence.
In regards to the Old Testament, we would probably discover a lot of the transitional material from Canaanite mythology to Judaic Monotheism and alternate versions of the stories we have today but with the names and locations changed (e.g. Chemosh instead of Yahweh and Mt. Pe’or instead of Mt Sinai).
For the New Testament, we would probably find a lot of 1st Century copies of the apocryphal works that currently are dated to the 2nd Century. We’d probably see the scales of evidence for what Jesus preached tip in favor of Gnostic and Jewish-Christian teachings.
For the Qu’ran, I expect that we would see a few iterations of the work that precede the current “divine revelation” version and show clues of multiple sources more clearly.
No it didn’t. Caesar’s troops caused a fire in some warehouses by the harbor where some overflow stock from the library was stored, but the library itself (and Alexandria’s status a center of learning) survived much longer.
There is a pretty strong scholarly consensus that no writings by Plato (of any significance) have been lost. After all, The Academy continued as a functioning institution for many centuries after his death (and then, after a hiatus, was revived and survived until the late Roman era), and would have continued to use his works as their main texts (which were also quite widely read outside The Academy too).
However, much by Aristotle was lost in antiquity, and most if not all of the writings by most of the other Greek philosophers were lost. Some of these were very admired and influential figures in their time, and even sometimes for centuries after, and there is every reason to think that much of their work would be just as interesting and sophisticated as the Plato and Aristotle that we do have.
However, these days this would all be almost entirely of historical interest, modern science having, by now, so far surpassed the understanding of the world attained by any of the ancients. If such manuscripts had been rediscovered in the Middle Ages, or even the Renaissance, it would have been a very different matter, and the world today might look distinctly different.
I’m also guessing that the largest effect would be with respect to religion, specifically potential discoveries of texts that significantly contradicted current scriptures and/or gave them a significant new historic or literary context.
There might also be some interesting historical tidbits for those who are really into history and, of course, for academics, but finding out that Alexander the Great passed specific laws regulating child day-care centers or that King Tut was a big apple pie lover would be unlikely to make a huge impact on the world.
I’m not expecting any huge STEM leaps. Sure, we might find out that certain discoveries or inventions were actually made before we think they were, but it’s not like we’re likely to find warp drive plans in there.
Which time? I believe it had a fairly significant number of scrolls burnt when Julius Caesar hit Alexandria, then again in the 250ADs [Hyapatia was Librarian] and then again in the 800ADs for the final death knell. It wasn’t so much the Christians as the Muslim being the death of the original Library of Alexandria. [Both the Christians and the Muslims more or less had the belief that if it wasn’t in the correct holy book, it wasn’t needed, and if it was in the correct holy book, it still wasn’t needed. Fire time.:dubious::smack:]
There have been a number of important ancient texts discovered one by one. The was the palimpsest of Archimedes that showed he did a lot of the work that Newton and Leibniz did to invent calculus 2000 years later. There is no telling what Archimedes knew that he did not survive or he did not write down. There are the Nag Hamadi texts, which include a number of gnostic gospels. Found in the 1890s. A gospel of Judas was also found more recently.
When I was an undergrad, I studied a text found in the 1890s which is usually attributed to Aristotle and describes the constitution of Athens. It is probably a collection of student notes. They had known it had existed because there were ancient references to it and to a survey that Aristotle and his students performed of the various local city-state constitutions.
Apart from the initial remark about Caesar, this is far more inaccurate than the claim (that I already responded to) that the library was destroyed BC, in Caesar’s time. The rest is almost certainly almost entirely wrong. Hypatia was not the librarian, although she may have been a user of what was left of the library by her time (and she was almost certainly killed for political rather than primarily religious reasons). On the other hand, the library was almost certainly long gone well before the Muslims arrived. The stories about it, or parts of it, being destroyed by Christian mobs, whether in Hypatia’s time or at other times, are also pretty questionable. Both the stories that blame the Muslims and those blaming the Christians are essentially propaganda against those religions, and generally seem to have been first told in relatively modern times.
The truth is that there is little solid evidence about the fate of the library after Alexandria fell under Roman rule. There are a lot of myths, some of which are demonstrably false, and the rest of which are implausible or baseless. Most likely, the library, having lost the financial and political support it enjoyed under Ptolemaic rule, declined fairly gradually over several centuries, with books being lost one or a few at a time, to theft, wear and tear, and perhaps occasional accidents such as fires too. There does not need to have been one catastrophic event, such as a major fire, or even several such catastrophes, to explain its eventual disappearance.
There was, by the way, a brilliant Donald Duck story (with Huey, Dewey, and Louie) by Don Rosa, where all of the lost literature of the past was found to have been compiled…
The discovery would have enormous implications because of what it would do for the humanities. We would have access to entirely different ways of thinking about what it means to be human, what the right way to live is, and in general be made aware of countless cultural possibilities about which we are currently ignorant. Handled properly, the result of the discovery would be a new Renaissance which would shift our culture and so change our societies for ever. At a minimum, we would be able to live fuller, deeper lives because we would have so much more information about how our predecessors failed and/or succeeded in making the most of human life.
I’m not sure how I would give a cite on that beyond suggesting that you read some of them.
But to give a more nuanced explanation, the Nag Hammadi texts are largely Gnostic texts. As such, they’re held to be irrelevant to Christian teachings because Gnosticism is an entirely different religion. And that’s basically a reasonable argument to make as a reason to study Gnosticism as an independent entity from Christianity, until you note that the early Gnostic groups claim Jesus Christ as their founder, that these groups existed within the 1st Century (e.g. the Ophites, Nicolatians, and the Cerinthians), and that the accepted Christian teachings are descended from St Paul’s camp - a man who never met Jesus and founded his religion separately some years after Jesus’ death. So while it is true that Gnosticism is basically an entirely different set of religions, anyone who wants to have a deeper understanding of the teachings of the actual Jesus Christ would probably do well to track down all of the pre-Valentinian writings in the Nag Hammadi.
I love reading the translations available of newly-discovered ancient texts. The Nag Hammadi stuff is fascinating…and all too brief!
I think my interpretation would not be that the Dead Sea Scrolls are “ignored,” but that they have simply been rationalized. Anything in them that might have been challenging has simply been explained away. But this is a pointless thing for me to say, as I don’t know what they say that might have been challenging! That’s part of why I asked: do the Dead Sea Scrolls really contain verses that would upset any of the conventional views of theology or history?
The Gnostics were very “mystical”. A lot of the Gnostic writings are detailed explanations of the various constructs that form the universe and what that means for us in absolute terms. For example, Sophia (a being somewhat equivalent to an angel) seems to be one of the most well-documented and commonly shared concepts across the Gnostic sects.
Here’s the Wikipedia overview:
So obviously, quite a bit different from common Christian teachings. As said, it’s basically a different religion. As a Mystery Religion, we would expect that a lot of the teachings were “secret” and would slowly be revealed to the faithful as they gained trust from the church. E.g. if you stay with the church for 5 years, the priest might reveal and explain to you the Ophite Diagrams.
Now whether any of this has any practical difference… That probably depends on whether you’re a Christian or not. As an outsider, to me there’s not much difference between the moral advocacies of most religions. Whether Buddhist, Hindu, or Christian, the basic rules are to trust the gods, be kind, obey your family and local hierarchy, and avoid greed. Gnosticism doesn’t really change that. It just changes the metaphysical explanations that underpin those teachings.
It would completely destroy the whole concept of the Papacy, which would have a real-world effect.
It’s also likely that Jesus’ church never let go of the ideas that you needed to eat kosher and to be circumcised. Based on the Nag Hammadi library, it seems likely that St. James took over Jesus’ church in Jerusalem after the crucifiction. According to the Bible, during a famine St. Paul visited the Jerusalem church and donated money to save them from starvation (this is the first time he interacted with any of Jesus’ disciples), and while there pitched them the idea that the gentiles he had been teaching “Christianity” to should be aloud to forego these requirements. St James and crew agreed to it, but they maintained the Jewish restrictions for themselves and their followers.
So if people started to follow the Gnostic/Jewish-Christian theology that Jesus probably taught, the dietary shift in the US would be huge at least. You’d also spot a lot of unhappy boys and men.
