The Precariousness of Knowledge
The continuous transmission of a literary corpus often hung by a thread.
In my previous post about how often I think about ancient Rome, I wrote about how the relative ubiquity of information and learning on ancient Rome is a key factor in how much we know about it. Even though surviving texts in Latin and Greek about the Roman world number in the few hundreds, that is quite a lot, and most certainly a lot more than most other ancient civilizations outside of India and China. Most of Rome’s neighbors were either preliterate, like the Gauls, or like the Carthaginians, produced no literature that survives to the present day. So we know quite a lot about Rome and Greece relative to other civilizations because knowledge about those civilizations has been continuously preserved into modern times.
We live in a world so awash in knowledge that we often forget just how precarious the survival of knowledge used to be. Today, anything typed up on a computer and sent over the internet will instantly exist in multiple copies; the more copies made, the harder it is for the text or manuscript to be lost. When the chain of transmission declines, or is broken, a work is eventually lost. Often, we may think of this as some cataclysmic, sudden even, like the sack of Rome, the burning of Alexandria, or the Mongol annihilation of Khwarazm.
But more often, knowledge is lost over time as a culture declines: the transmission (and creation) of Sumerian seems to have gently declined after Babylonia—which highly regarded Sumerian as a holy language along with its native Akkadian—lost its political independence, and even coherence as a political unit. Still, almost six centuries elapsed from the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire to the Persians in 539 BCE to the final Sumerian work, which is dated to around 75 CE. Empires and nations come and go, and because, in premodern times, most people were not literate, the decline of a literate class, the change of a religion, the shifting of a political power, all eventually meant that in many cases, an entire culture’s literary tradition would cease to be passed down to future generations.
From the entire ancient tradition of the pre-Christian Near East—the civilizations of Sumer, Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, the Hittites, Arameans, and so many others now lost to history—only one work survives to the present day in continuous, unbroken transmission: the Hebrew Bible. (If pre-Sassanid Persia is included, then parts of the Zoroastrian canon, the Avesta, and its commentaries, the Zend, have also survived.) Other texts that we now have, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Book of the Dead, have been rediscovered and deciphered in the course of excavations, and even then, they are not complete texts. We are lucky, however, that the dry climate of the Middle East is optimal for preserving texts, especially in the deserts of Egypt. On top of that, the Mesopotamian tradition of baking cuneiform clay tablets is useful; in India and Southeast Asia, texts are traditionally copied on palm-leaf manuscripts, which easily decay in humid and rainy weather. This may explain why some of the best-preserved Hindu and Buddhist works are found in the deserts of Xinjiang or in drier, cooler Nepal.
It is hard to find exact data in regards to how many texts from other ancient civilizations survived (and also, the question arises as to what counts as a “text” versus something like an inscription), but it seems that perhaps something like 300-500 texts each survive in Latin and Classical Greek, and maybe double this amount, 500-1000 texts each, for Sanskrit and Classical Chinese. Given the continued usage of these languages for literary and administrative purposes almost up to modern times, the corpus of documents in these languages is much larger, but in terms of older texts, there are just a few languages with continuous transmission of ancient texts.
There are a just handful of languages that have a tradition of continuous transmission from ancient or medieval times and a large corpus: Classical Greek, Latin, Arabic, Classical Persian, Sanskrit, Pali, and Classical Chinese. Other languages, such as Classical Syriac (a form of Aramaic), Old Church Slavonic, Tamil, Old Khmer, and Classical Japanese also have a surviving corpus going back centuries or millennia, but their influence is localized. The difficulty of copying and preserving information—the time and effort it takes to copy, the expense of ink and paper or parchment—all may explain why translation was much rarer in ancient times; it was simple just a waste of time and resources, because it would have necessitated even more copying in a new language. Beyond that, the ancients seem to have a relation to language—an appreciation of a language’s aesthetic and aural properties—that is less common in the modern day. For example, not only is meaning lost if a Sanskrit mantra is translated and spoken in another language, but its power is lost, because only a properly pronounced and enunciated mantra has potency. Sanskrit was considered dēvavāṇī, the voice of the gods, after all.
The converse of the culture in decline is a culture in a state of vitality: a country that is rich and prosperous, one that can patronize the creation and copying of literature; one in which there a thriving, leisured aristocracy creating poems, drama, and works on the arts and sciences. Minus these factors, the texts that continue to be transmitted will only be transmitted so long as a literate group of people perpetuate the knowledge they believe is important to preserve using their own means and their own motivation. Often, these texts will be religious, which explains why the Hebrew Bible and Zoroastrian canon survived to be continuously transmitted long after the ancient Jewish and Persian kingdoms vanished. India presents a good case study of the aforementioned phenomenon: the surviving Sanskrit literature seems to be skewed in the direction of the religious and philosophical, preserved by Brahmins who did not need state patronage to continue preserving sacred literature. On the other hand, after much of North India came under Turkic Muslim rule in 12th century CE, Persian replaced Sanskrit as the language of administration and patronage; literary production in Sanskrit declined, and the transmission of many non-sacred works, such as the political treatise the Arthashastra, (apparently) ceased.
The Arthashastra was thought to be “lost” until a manuscript was rediscovered in South India in 1905. This manuscript wasn’t unearthed like Gilgamesh was, but was found in a private collection. So obviously, it was not actually lost, since the existing Arthashastra manuscript was the result of people continuing to copy and preserve that text. But it did not seem to be widely circulated or known about, and the finding may compared to the story of how, during the European Renaissance, manuscript hunter Poggio Bracciolini found a copy of the Roman poet Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in a German monastery. (There seem to be a lot of rare manuscripts scattered throughout India in private collections, and it is my hope that more people will discover and publish these texts for the public. The rediscovery of these manuscripts may change the notion that Sanskrit literature is particularly skewed toward the sacred.)
The Bracciolini story and the rediscovery of the Arthashastra go to show that the preservation of knowledge and literature often do hang by a thread, both because continuous transmission is not guaranteed, and because even if a text is transmitted, it may languish in obscurity somewhere. Beowulf is known from only a single text that was neglected for several centuries before it was transcribed and studied. The precondition for the rediscovery and for renewed interest in ancient texts is generally a cultural moment, like the Renaissance, in which people are actively seeking to find manuscripts and spread the knowledge found in them. In modern times, we have less to worry about preserving our own culture, because it is so easy to distribute print and digital copies of new works. However, I do hope that we continue to discover and preserve ancient texts as well, because there are still many that need to be found, and their survival is by no means guaranteed. To conclude on a cool note, an AI recently read text from a previously unreadable charred scroll that was found buried in Herculaneum, near Pompeii, after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. May more and more knowledge be discovered and read.