Re-Discoveries of Ancient Texts

Someone just posted a comment asking if I could write about "how they're looking for lost texts."

First of all, thanks for the comment. It's always nice to hear from a reader. It hasn't happened enough yet that it's even beginning to get old.

But, to be honest, I can't really say much that I haven't said in other posts. And the most important thing I have to say is: ask an expert. I'm not an expert. If you're interested in ancient Jewish texts or early Christian texts, then ask a Professor who specializes in biblical studies, or early Christianity, or biblical archaeology, or some related field. If you're interested in ancient, non-Christian Greek or Latin, ask a professor of Classics.

I should ask these professors more questions myself.

If there's anyone out there who's read all of the posts in this blog -- first of all, thank you -- and also, the following will be somewhat repetitive for you.

My especial interest is in Latin, and I know less about ancient texts in other languages than I know about Latin. Most of the recent discoveries of ancient texts, as far as I know (check with an expert!) have been in Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, and Hebrew.

The biggest thing that's happening these days in re-discovering ancient texts, the biggest just in terms of sheer volume of texts, is the project concerning the tremendous number of scraps of papyri found by Oxford professors Bernard Grenville and Arthur Hunt around the turn of the 20th century at Oxyrhynchus, the site of an ancient city in Egypt.

These papyri, ironically, have been found in garbage dumps. What people threw away in Oxyrhynchus between the 3rd century BC and the 6th century AD is precious treasure to us today. Grenville and Hunt found so many pieces of papyrus at Oxyrhynchus that, to this day, more than a century later, scholars are still editing and publishing them, and have still only published a small fraction of the entire find. Almost all of the Oxyrhynchus papyri are written in Greek, but there are also some written in Latin, Coptic and other languages. They include Bible passages and other Christian writings, Classical Greek literature (and a tiny amount of Classical Latin), personal letters, official government documents and more. Most of the ancient texts being re-discovered these days are in Greek.

Next, after Oxyrhynchus, I suppose, would be the numerous pieces of papyrus and parchment which turn up here and there at random in the Middle East, both at archaeological digs and at antiquities markets. Some of the texts which appear at these markets are modern forgeries, unfortunately, but many are genuine.

Then there are palimpsests. A palimpsest occurs when a piece of writing is scraped off of a parchment and something else is written on it. The palimpsest is the identations left by the earlier writing. And scholars have found ways to read those texts, even thought the ink is now gone.

Then there is cartonnage: papyrus which was made into a material sort of like cardboard and made into the coverings of mummies or book covers. Some very clever scholars have found ways to take this material back apart into the original papyrus and read what is written on it.

There is a large amount of Medieval Latin writing contained in archives in Europe. Medieval scholars are going through these archives, preserving as much as they can. Some have expressed the concerned that they may not be able preserve everything before the parchments rot away.

And every now and then -- say, every few years or so -- a lost ancient Latin text is re-discovered by some means which doesn't fit into any of the above categories.

That sums up what I know, but, again, the people to ask would be professors of Classsical Greek and Latin, biblical scholars, archaeologists and so forth.

The Difference Between The Date Of A Text And The Date Of A Manuscript Of That Text

Some of my readers may find it strange that I am devoting a blog post to such things. Some of my readers are academics and other people who are long since thoroughly familiar with everything I'm going to say here. However, some of my readers are in other fields, and only an academic who has not spent a lot of time discussing ancient literature and textual transmission with the general public, and who has not read a lot of stories about new finds of ancient manuscripts in the mainstream media, nor watched a lot of TV shows about those subjects, knows these things, while being unaware of how many people do not know them.

The date of a text is the date when a certain piece of writing was first written. The date of a manuscript of that text is the date when a particular copy of that piece of writing was made. The general public almost never seems to show any significant interest in ancient texts other than the texts of the Bible and other Jewish and Christian writings, and this post is for the general public, so let's explain this with reference to those texts.

The 27 books of the New Testament are far and away the most thoroughly-researched texts in Western civilization. (I don't say they're the most most thoroughly-researched in the world because I don't know enough about texts from other civilizations to say so. For all I know, the scope of knowledge and research of the Vedas, or of the Koran or of Buddhist or Confucian texts, may utterly dwarf that of Biblical studies. I simply don't know.) There are tens of thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament. Many of these manuscripts are from the 5th century or earlier.

There are no original copies of any of the texts of the New Testament. By the way, scholars of ancient literature refer to a original copy as an "autograph." There are no autographs of the New Testament, there are no autographs of the Old Testament, or, as far as I know, of any ancient texts which are referred to as "literary" texts, which means: texts meant for a public audience: not just poems and plays and novels but also works of history and philosophy, and religious works such as the Bible. Scholars refer to all of such works intended for a public audience as "literary," in order to distinguish them from private letters, shopping lists, contracts, instructions from a government official to a subordinate, reports from such subordinates to their superiors, etc. We happen to have autographs of every one of those "non-literary" kinds of ancient writing, mostly in the form of papyri discovered since the late 19th century, a great many of them from the garbage dumps outside the ancient town of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, where about a million fragments of papyri with writing of some sort or other on them have been found. About 5000 of those fragments from Oxyrhynchus, both literary and non-literary, have been published so far.

So. Anyway. To get back to the main theme of this post: The date of a text, the date when those particular words were first put to writing in that particular order, is different from the age of a manuscript containing that text, and when it come to ancient literary texts, that is: texts meant for a public audience, including religious texts like the Bible, we have no autographs. We have copies made later. The date of a Biblical manuscript is always later than that of the text recorded on that manuscript.

For very many ancient literary texts, we have no manuscripts made within 1000 years of the original text. For ancient Latin, pre-Christian, so-called "pagan" Latin ("pagan" originated as a term of abuse applied to those pre-Christian people by Christian authors in the 4th century and maybe earlier), it is very rare to have any manuscripts older than AD 800, older than the foundation of Charlemagne's Empire. Charlemagne did a tremendous amount to revive education and preserve those "pagan" Latin texts.

In the case of the Bible, until the 19th century, the oldest-known manuscripts for the Greek New Testament were from the 12th century, and the oldest-known manuscripts for the Hebrew Old Testament -- I don't know. Sorry. Pretty sure they were 10th century or more recent, but I don't know.

Then, starting in the 19th century, great discoveries of Biblical manuscripts were made. First, manuscripts from the 4th century were found here and there between Alexandria and Sinai in monasteries and antiquities shops, including the tremendous Codex Sinaiticus, a nearly-complete 4th-century copy of the Greek New Testament along with the Greek translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, discovered by Constantine von Tischendorf in pieces at Saint Catherine's Monastery at Sinai in Egypt beginning in the 1840's and gradually put together over a period of decades, and now in 4 different libraries, but most of it in the British Library.

Beginning in 1896, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt found the huge piles of pieces of papyri at Oxyrhynchus, which I mentioned above. Most of these pieces of papyri are just little scraps which were discovered and preserved not long before they were going to become dust. So in that respect they're completely different than the nearly-complete Bible contained in the Codex Sinaiticus. However, many of the Oxyrhynchus manuscripts are quite a bit older than the 4th century AD. Some are as old as the 3rd century BC. They contain literary texts as well as the non-literary items described above. And these literary manuscripts include scraps of the New Testament from as early as the 2nd century AD, copies made with decades of when the text was first written, quite possibly within the lifetime of the original authors, something otherwise unheard-of for ancient literary texts.

In the 20th and 21st centuries the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library and other very old papyri and parchments containing biblical and apocryphal texts have been found and continue to be found, although so far there has not been another find as huge as that at Oxyrhynchus. In 1979 in Jerusalem two silver scrolls were found containing the Priestly Benediction ("May the Lord bless and keep you..." etc) from the Book of Numbers. The verses were etched into the scrolls before 600 BC.

Have I cleared anything up or just confused you worse? I hope this has helped. Be careful when you're reading news stories or watching TV shows about these sorts of things, because sometimes these stories and shows have mistakes, like saying "4th-century text" when they should say something like "4th-century manuscript of a 2nd-centiry text" or what have you.

So how do people figure out how old the texts are? The same way they figure out how old the manuscripts are: I don't know. That is to say: I know some of the criteria used, such as handwriting styles, which vary quite uniformly over time and place or origin, and things mentioned and not mentioned in the texts, and where the manuscripts are found, and carbon-14 analysis and multi-spectral analysis and many other things. And I know that the experts very often disagree about the date of a certain manuscript or of a certain text, but that usually these disagreements have to do with very small differences in age: a decade or two, or sometimes as much an entire century, in the age of a manuscript 2000 years old or older. But if you hand me a manuscript and need an expert opinion of how old it is, chances are the best I will be able to do is hand it right back and refer you to some actual experts. I do know some experts.

Greek -- Eek!

For a while now I've felt a need to learn Greek. Ancient Attic Greek, mostly, but Homeric Greek, too, and other ancient varieties. I've been reading things written in Latin, and Latin seems to pull one strongly in the direction of Greek. The culture and mythology of ancient Rome borrowed very heavily from those of Greece. Classical scholars go into raptures about how beautiful Greek is. One of them, I wish I could track the quote down, once said that Latin should be taught to all children, and Greek saved as a special treat for the brightest ones.

So these and related inducements to learn Greek have been building up for a while. But recently the urge has become a significant step stronger, because I read Sein Und Zeitby Martin Heidegger, and although I am quite bewildered by the book, I am also quite fascinated, and Heidegger says that there are things to be learned from the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers on the question of being, a question, Heidegger says, which has been neglected since the pre-Socratics. Hermann Diehls collected a volume of the primary materials by and about the pre-Socratics.Some wrote little or not at all themselves, and most of what they did write has been lost, but still, the fragments of their writings and the oldest descriptions of their writings fill up Diehls' fairly large book, a recent edition of which, I gather, is still regarded by some as the definitive one.

So I've been looking at Diehls' book, and it is so tantalizing, because, you know, I can't read Greek. I'm not even sure what one particular lower-case letter is. I think it's theta, and that German-speaking Classical scholars write lower-case theta differently than English-speaking Classical scholars, but I'm not completely sure about that yet, although it has been preoccupying me for a couple of days.

I've been learning languages on my own for the past couple of decades -- Spanish, Italian, Latin, now dipping my toe into Greek -- after having learned German and French in college. Spanish, Italian and French are all related to Latin, and German is related to English, so that helps with learning. Greek belongs neither to the Romance not the Germanic sub-family of the Indo-European languages, although it is Indo-European, and hence not so completely foreign to one such as me as Finnish or Japanese would be. Still, I'm almost 50 years old, which is an unusual age to be learning a new language, and the thought of it makes me tired. Also, if I continue learning autodidactically, I continue to have the problems of autodidactic learning. I don't really know how fluent I am in Latin. No one is giving me grades, there are no other students around me with whom I can compare myself, I have no one to speak or hear the language with. Learning a new language is very, very difficult for almost all people, most certainly including me. There are a few linguistic geniuses who can pick up a new langugage as quickly as Mozart learned to play an instrument. Not me. But alongside the difficulty there is a delicious fascination in linguistic study for me, and this fascination and pleasure grows ever stronger.

I don't know if I'll ever get very far with Greek. I do know I'll be spending some time on it in the immediate future. And there are classes available for such things, if I ever decide to supplement my self-teaching method. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Heraclitus, Aristotle... Hesiod, Homer... And of course, the farther back one goes in Greek history, the larger do loom Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the lost languages of the Hittites, for example, and let's not forget the lost Etruscan language, someone has to decipher that, too, it's not going to decipher itself is it? And so forth, endlessly. Eek, he cried weakly, but with a smile on his tired old face.