Ancient History is Still Almost Completely Unknown to Us

Something is always lost in translation. Always means: even with the very best translation, and greater loss the less good the translation is. I can assert this, but how can I demonstrate it to anyone who is monolingual? And of course everyone else can see it for themselves and doesn't need any explanation from me.

And so, it seems to me, you can only get so far in studying ancient history without learning at least a little bit of ancient languages. And when you study these languages, there's the point at which you realize how little of them from the ancient world is still known to us. We're piecing together a huge jigsaw puzzle with just a handful of pieces. And the pieces are badly damaged.

And this is why we get so excited over every single puny scrap of re-discovered ancient writing, and why students of ancient Greek have been so excited since the late 19th century.

To mention just a single example of the sparsity of the ancient writing which we now know: on the Bryn Mawr Classical Review in 2006, Eric Hamer asserts that "almost seventy-five percent of the extant Latin literature of the period 90-40 BC is written by" Cicero. Peter Knox and J.C. McKeown, in a piece published on the Oxford University Press in 2013, say something similar, namely that "seventy-five percent of what survives in Latin from Cicero’s lifetime was written by Cicero himself [...] There are no extant speeches, forensic or otherwise, by anyone but Cicero till AD 100."

By my count, the Loeb Classical Library currently offers 31 volumes of Cicero, and by my very rough estimate, they average about 500 pages of main text, for a total of a little over 15,000 pages. Divide in half because half of those pages are English translation, and we're left with 7500 pages of Cicero. Which means, if the estimates of Hamer, Knox and McKeown are good ones (and I think they are), that we're left with about 2500 pages of Latin literature, besides Cicero, from the time of the reigns of Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. Not 2500 pages of historical writing, but 2500 surviving pages -- small, Loeb-sized pages -- of writing of every type. Caesar, Lucretius, Catullus, almost all of Sallust, and every one of their Latin-writing contemporaries but Cicero, from one of the most interesting, most intensively-studied eras in Roman history.

This makes it much less surprising that historians and philologists studying this era rely so much on later writers like Suetonius, and non-Latin writers such as Plutarch. What choice do they have? They must take what they can find, wherever they can find it. Studying Roman history or Latin literature, one can only go so far with just Latin, before beginning to keenly feel the lack of Greek.

For that matter, one can only go so far in studying ancient Greek history or literature without a grasp of Arabic. And for that matter, Coptic and Armenian and Syriac and Hebrew and ancient Persian each can fill in significant missing pieces of the puzzle.

And how much more light would be shown upon the ancient Mediterranean if more writing in Phoenician had survived, or if we could read Etruscan. And I've left out many of your favorite languages: Sumerian! you're shouting, or Hittite! and quite rightly so, and still more languages. We have still so very far to go. We haven't yet scratched the surface of the history of the Classical ancient world. We've learned so much, and there's so very far yet to go.

Mysteries, Solved And Unsolved

I'm still having trouble finding information about Classical Studies in Latin America. (Yes, I know I could assuage these difficulties as easily as contacting a university professor or two.) The other day, I thought that perhaps I had come across an indication of the study of ancient Latin in Peru: in Eutropii Breviarum Ab Urbe Condita, edidit Carolus Santini, Leipzig: Teubner, 1992,



on p xii and p xviii, a 14th-century manuscript of Eutropius is referred to as "Perusinus H 75." Could this be a manuscript currently held in a library in Puru? I asked myself excitedly. However, an Internet search for the term perusinus quickly taught me that it does not refer to Peru, but to the Italian city Perugia, which was once an Etruscan city. Most of the Google results in my search for perusinus refer to the Cippus Perusinus,

a stone inscribed in Etruscan, discovered near Perugia early in the 19th century. There are some claims that the Etruscan text on the Cippus Perusinus has been diciphered. However, if I have understood things correctly, the academic consensus is that Etruscan remains a lost language, not yet deciphered by modern people.

Anyway: the question of "Perusinus" was cleared up very easily. Only my laziness prevents me from beginning to learn about Classical studies in Latin America. (You know, it seems I recall that someone actually told me the titles of a couple of books on that very subject, and I've been too lazy to follow that lead, or even to jot down the titles in a place I'd remember.)

It seems that another question may remain somewhat more difficult: I've heard repeatedly from various sources that "the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament known at the time of the making of the King James Bible were from the 12th century." The more times I hear that repeated, the more implausible it sounds.

Now, it may be that the oldest Greek manuscripts actually used by the makers of the KJV were 12th century. But much older manuscripts were found by Western scholars in Egypt beginning in the mid-19th century: complete Greek Bibles, Old and New Testament, as old as 4th-century, many other copies of individual books or of the Gospels, in Greek, Coptic or Syriac, 6th century and older, and all of this before the beginning of the excavations at Oxyrhynchus began to yield New Testament fragments as old as the 2nd century.

How much of the statement: "the earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament known at the time of the making of the King James Bible were from the 12th century" can possibly be anything but stupid Western provincialism and sheer ignorance of non-Western Biblical scholarship? Are we to believe that no-one in those Egyptian monasteries which contained those much older manuscripts was actually studying them, before rich Westerners swooped in and bought them and took them away to the West? Not to mention scholarship done in Greece, Syria, Armenia, Georgia, Ethiopia, etc?

That's not just very hard for me to believe, it's impossible for me to believe. That so many Western scholars, to this very day, would be wholly ignorant of whatever Biblical scholarship has existed of the West, is staggering, to be sure -- but, sadly, I can believe it.

Frankly, it's also hard for me to believe that nowhere in Western Europe, before the 19th century finds in Egypt, was there any manuscript of the Greek New Testament older than the 12th century. Frankly, it strikes me as downright odd that there would be no Greek New Testament manuscripts as old as the 9th century or older well-known in England at the beginning of the 17th century, when the King James Bible was being made. But I don't even know whom to ask about this. I google these things and get all sorts of different answers from all sorts of different people. I can easily find all sorts of statements which are clearly nonsense. It's not at all clear to me who knows what they're talking about.