# What if most of the world's lost ancient texts were discovered? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [April 8, 2014, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-most-of-the-worlds-lost-ancient-texts-were-discovered/685675 "2014-04-08T22:54:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-most-of-the-worlds-lost-ancient-texts-were-discovered/685675/41 "2014-04-11T18:59:24Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > Clearly you’re not thinking about your career with a sufficiently entrepreneurial attitude. I tried to focus group a “documents say whatever you want them to say” product, but it turns out the ancient sages are no better at guessing the Powerball numbers than anyone else. Even Kickstarter called me a fraud, and god knows they have no standards. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2014, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-most-of-the-worlds-lost-ancient-texts-were-discovered/685675/42 "2014-04-11T19:43:29Z")
> [@Maeglin](#): > > I tried to focus group a “documents say whatever you want them to say” product, but it turns out the ancient sages are no better at guessing the Powerball numbers than anyone else. Even Kickstarter called me a fraud, and god knows they have no standards. Wrong question. Your question should have been, “What do you think people 2000 years ago knew the most about?” You might include a list of items like Diet, Polical Theory, Farming, etc. Then devlop your “discoveries” from that. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2014, 11:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-most-of-the-worlds-lost-ancient-texts-were-discovered/685675/43 "2014-04-12T11:41:27Z")
I would have to agree with the above posters that most items even if they had not been destroyed by fires, would not have survived to the modern age in readable form. Heck stuff today in books, computer disks, flash drives or other media probably won’t survive 1,000 years. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2014, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-most-of-the-worlds-lost-ancient-texts-were-discovered/685675/44 "2014-04-12T21:22:14Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > . . . Heck stuff today in books, computer disks, flash drives or other media probably won’t survive 1,000 years. But we can hope (can’t we?) that the data will be forwarded to the next generation of storage media. (A materials-science engineer once gave a lecture at my old university on super-hardened glass, with micro-pitting, as a long-term archival data medium. Glass and ceramics last a deuce of a long time.) ---
**Author:** ![Superhal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b4bc9f/32.png) [@Superhal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Superhal)\ **Post date:** [April 12, 2014, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-most-of-the-worlds-lost-ancient-texts-were-discovered/685675/45 "2014-04-12T21:39:48Z")
Oo, just thought of another: Old testament snark. Must. See. ---
**Author:** ![Maeglin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/8baadc/32.png) [@Maeglin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maeglin)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2014, 1:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-most-of-the-worlds-lost-ancient-texts-were-discovered/685675/46 "2014-04-13T13:17:18Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > I would have to agree with the above posters that most items even if they had not been destroyed by fires, would not have survived to the modern age in readable form. > > Heck stuff today in books, computer disks, flash drives or other media probably won’t survive 1,000 years. Learning how to read and restore them is a specialized subfield of philology called papyrology. [Papyrology - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrology) I was looking at this document yesterday for my own work: [http://www.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/dlo?obj=princeton.apis.p612&size=300&face=f&tile=0](http://www.columbia.edu/cgi-bin/dlo?obj=princeton.apis.p612&size=300&face=f&tile=0) It’s a petition to a magistrate concerning some frauds allegedly perpetrated by the petitioner’s mother and legal guardian. ---
**Author:** ![NeonMadman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/58f4c7/32.png) [@NeonMadman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NeonMadman)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2014, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-most-of-the-worlds-lost-ancient-texts-were-discovered/685675/47 "2014-04-13T18:45:17Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > 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. Well, that’s all cool, but your comment that was challenged referred to the Dead Sea Scrolls, not the Nag Hammadi documents; these were two completely different finds containing very different sorts of manuscripts. The Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi are generally ignored because they are much later than the canonical NT documents and no reasonable argument can be made that they were written by the purported authors. There has been some question about the age of the Gospel of Thomas, but scholars generally date even that to at least the mid-late 2nd century, long after its claimed author was dead. As far as the Dead Sea Scrolls, they didn’t cause the revolution in the Judeao-Christian tradition that some were expecting because, rather than contradicting the canonical OT texts, they generally confirmed their reliability in a rather remarkable way. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-if-most-of-the-worlds-lost-ancient-texts-were-discovered/685675.md?page=2)