I'm currently working on a Neo Latin translation from Marsilio Ficino. He is famous for catalyzing the Italian Renaissance by translating Plato (and many other Greek works) into Latin, making it available in the west after about 1000 years. He also restarted "the Academy." He was a prolific philosopher himself.
The book I'm helping to translate is "De Voluptate", or "On Pleasure." In it, he integrates Epicurean hedonism and Platonic virtue. I mean, after translating all those works himself, I feel like Ficino deserves having his works available to scholars today.
It was assumed, at the time of the writing, 1894, that his audience was Latin fluent.
I highly recommend this[1] blog post about contemporary Latin knowledge.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/rationibus-colloquendi-Supplementa-Hu... [1] http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignora...
In fact, the US, UK, and every other culturally Anglo country could sink into the ocean tomorrow and I suspect English would still be a dominant international language for the foreseeable future.
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
"Bishop De Landa, a Franciscan monk and conquistador during the Spanish conquest of Yucatán, wrote: "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction." Only three extant codices are widely considered unquestionably authentic."
/s
Thales was active so early on that philosophers weren't really writing anything down at that point. One of his successors, Anaximander, wrote his ideas down, but did so in verse rather than in prose, and even still, those works were lost to history. But centuries later, a student of Aristotle named Theophrastus wrote a text called History of Physics (or something similar), which was by all accounts a thorough exposition of the thought of the major Greek natural philosophers up until his day. But this work was also lost.
Fortunately, however, a later author, St. Hippolytus, wrote another work called the Refutation of All Heresies, which used Theophrastus's text as a source and basically went point by point through the various philosophers that Theophrastus covered to explain why each was wrong. St. Hippolytus was so thorough that we can actually reconstruct the original chapters in Theophratus's work. So one of our main sources for the ideas of Thales and Anaximander comes to us two sources removed from the original.
There are other sources for the ideas of Thales and Anaximander, but it's a similar story where the surviving works have been filtered through sometimes as many as three intermediate works that were all lost. So understanding the ideas of these early astronomers means piecing together fragments from a lot of later works, trying to figure out the chains of transmission and the potential biases at each link. It's almost as though we were living 2000 years in the future and trying to understand the ideas of Charles Darwin, but the only sources we had to go on were a newspaper clipping from the Scopes Monkey Trial and a Reader's Digest version of a book by Stephen Jay Gould. Understandably, the error bars on our knowledge are pretty big and there's very little we can say for certain.
[1]: Shameless plug: https://songofurania.com/about/
The chapter titles give the idea: I. The Ironical Man II. The Flatterer III. The Garrulous Man IV. The Boor V. The Complaisant Man VI. The Reckless Man VII. The Chatty Man VIII. The Gossip IX. The Shameless Man etc
https://www.eudaemonist.com/biblion/characters/
[0] A taste of La Bruyere:
Children are haughty, disdainful, quick to anger, envious, curious, self-seeking, lazy, fickle, timid, intemperate, untruthful, secretive; they laugh and weep readily; the most trivial subjects give them immoderate delight or bitter distress; they wish not to be hurt, but they like hurting others: they are men already.
https://www.ourcivilisation.com/smartboard/shop/bruyere/inde...
"Aristotle in his will made him guardian of his children, including Nicomachus, with whom he was close. Aristotle likewise bequeathed to him his library and the originals of his works, and designated him as his successor at the Lyceum. ...Under his guidance the school flourished greatly—there were at one period more than 2000 students, ...and at his death, he bequeathed to it his garden with house and colonnades as a permanent seat of instruction. His popularity was shown in the regard paid to him by Philip, Cassander, and Ptolemy, and by the complete failure of a charge of impiety brought against him. He was honored with a public funeral, and "the whole population of Athens, honouring him greatly, followed him to the grave."
Check out Shwep.net.
Did you know that Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler credited Pythagoras for heliocentrism [1]? And Newton credited Pythagoras for the inverse square law [2] of gravity? Pythagoras is best...
I find the reality even more interesting. What were humans thinking about 40,000 years ago, with their modern bodies and brains?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...
I also think about how some of the really great works have stood the test of time — like Plato’s. Then there are really great works that were once common and popular but have fallen out of contemporary thought.
Given the rich and documented history we do have at our disposal, it feels to me that the present era is much less diverse and more ignorant than it ought to be.
That's an example of the belief that all things were known in a golden age, and that the process of discovery is actually rediscovery of the knowledge of the elders. Common in a lot of pre-modern societies that had ancestor-worship. In old B.C.E. pre-imperial Chinese philosophy, before deductive reasoning had been formalized/discovered, one of the basic tests of whether a thing was true was "conformity to the teaching and practice of the ancient sage kings." Which meant that you had to cite a mention in works about the ancients of the practice or belief that you were recommending, or grounds for a reasonable belief that they practiced it.
It's the opposite of Whig history.
Perhaps Gilgamesh is the equivalent of I Dream of Jeannie.
:-)
Odd that he didn't mention these at all.
There is simply no money to support the scholarship that would preserve these works. It's incredibly sad.
edit: anyway this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28663948 has some pointers
Joking aside, our methods of recording information are hellishly vulnerable. This comes with the density of record. A clay tablet from Mesopotamia does not carry more than 2 kB of info, but 4000 years have gone by and it is still readable.
But, the danger is really high that they will be all thrown out alongside of the yellowed Harry Potter books.
Contrast this with another ancient language: Etruscan. Although we have a number of longish texts in the language, we can't translate much of them. Etruscan has left no descendants, and Emperor Claudius's books on the language haven't survived. There is one bilingual text of more than a few words (the Pyrgi tablets). The other language is Phoenician. We can read that.
Most digital data would be lost within 10-20 years. Maybe sooner. We could at least try to pint out wikipedia.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/720ad4a5-5a51-4b97-b521-2a1d1fa...
So... that happening.
I remember grinning while reading in Lucio Russo's (2004 The Forgotten Revolution on 'Antikythera') caustic description of how, after Rome wiped out Greece, Greek writings became a very popular commodity with Roman book collectors. As Horace put it, "Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium."
The problem with books buried in Rome is, that Rome isn't exactly a desert with natural conditions to preserve books.
