(ORDO NEWS) — This is a fairly relevant question for the ancient world. My knowledge in this area is mainly related to ancient Greek and ancient Roman texts.
Most of our copies of Greek and Roman literature are from copies made during the medieval era.
There is a well-known case with the writings of Tacitus, which is very relevant here; his main works are the Histories and the Annals, and at one point only one copy existed in Western Europe.
It was kept in the library, which had a water leak, and two whole chapters were lost, which could not be restored.
I found very few sources to support this story, but it came from a lecturer in Roman literature and illustrates how dangerous the existence of these texts was.
Many ancient works were first fully translated only in the 18th and 19th centuries, and before that we have only partial translations or translations of what was available at that time.
Sometimes we were lucky and managed to find more than one medieval copy of this or that ancient work.
If we recall Tacitus again, it was claimed that the first 6 chapters of his work were fake, until an additional copy with chapters 1-6 was found elsewhere.
This may sound to you like an unreliable transmission of historical texts, and it is. You are right when you question editorial changes and additions.
In fact, an even more important point is how a person makes a translation: is he striving for a strict, accurate translation, or is he trying to convey meaning? So how do we figure out what has been added?
As I said before, it helps a lot to find different translations or copies of the same work.
Those who specialize in linguistics often look at the language of the earliest translations; that is why we know that parts of the Iliad and the Odyssey do indeed belong to the ninth century BC, since some expressions do not correspond to classical Greek, but do correspond to what we know about ninth-century Greek.
This can also be done with translations to keep track of changes in style and wording, especially if the new wording does not make sense in a document of a certain period.
To give a modern example, it is very easy to determine that the Good News version of the Bible is modern – its linguistic choice is very different from, for example, the King James Version.
However, in the case of Herodotus, we were especially lucky.
Those scrolls you were looking at were not our original sources for the work of Herodotus (they were medieval copies), we found them archaeologically in the site of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.
Actual ancient copies of the text, even fragmentary ones, are incredibly rare. They allowed translators to a limited extent confirm the accuracy of later translations of the text.
It’s such a rarity that we’re allowed to do it. So what you are looking at is something that can be used as a partial confirmation.
Herodotus is also a rare text in terms of completeness.
If we list some of the major representatives of the ancient world, then the book of Thucydides ends unfinished and abruptly, which, apparently, is associated with his untimely death.
Tacitus is missing 3 complete chapters. The story of Diodorus is missing many of the earliest chapters.
Most of the biographies written by Plutarch are lost, including most of the ones we desperately wish we had access to.
Many texts are known to us only as fragments or references in the works of others, such as Pompeius Trogus, whose only remnant is a summary of his work written by someone else!
I can think of about 30 different ancient Greek historians who were very important, but we don’t have any of their works, except when they were quoted by others.
Why are some literary works better preserved than others?
In some cases – an accident; Oxyrhynchus simply turned out to be the place where the papyri were dumped, and where the lack of groundwater preserved them.
Accidents, unfortunately, are often used. In other cases, it is because more copies of the work in question originally existed.
In many cases, the surviving works of Greek and Roman literature are the hit list of the most popular works in the ancient world at the time.
This also led medieval translators to put more effort into restoring and translating them, although I have yet to find evidence that medieval translators actively rejected any classical material they were exposed to.
We are also indebted to Islamic science.
Ironically, they preserved more ancient literature than the Byzantines, who disassociated themselves from their ancient identity and identified more closely as Christians.
Keep in mind that by the time Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453 AD, over 1800 years had passed since Thucydides wrote his History of the Peloponnesian Wars.
In addition to the relatively meager preservation of the originals in Europe, the other main source of medieval copies of ancient Greek and Roman texts were the translations originally made by the Abbasids in the 9th century CE. or Persia as a whole.
In fact, there are great difficulties that often determine the study of these works of ancient literature. Many questions and unknowns remain.
But without an additional addition or a new translation that you could justify for this or that work, it makes sense to doubt the accuracy of the edition.
After all, if you rule out the entire book of Herodotus for possible copy inaccuracy, what exactly are you left with?
However, skepticism is a healthy thing, and the desire to know where and how our ancient literature came from is a very good question.
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