Wish List of New Discoveries of Ancient Texts

There's nothing at all realistic about this post. It's pure wishful thinking.

Trogus was highly regarded as an historian by his Augustan contemporaries, and yet, except for an epitome and a table of contacts, his work has disappeared. Why did the work of an esteemed historian vanish? Some say that's the wrong question, and perhaps they're right. They say the real question is,how did any ancient literature survive at all, all the way down to our own time?

As regular readers of my blog know, and as others can see by clicking here, I wish the missing books of Livy would be discovered. He wrote his history of Rome in 142 books, 35 survive, plus a few additional odds and ends. Livy's reputation as an historian has often risen and sunk. I believe it's risen recently, as some archaeological finds support his versions of various events. But Livy is still avidly read even by those who put no stock in him as an historian, because he's a good writer, who tells stories in a very engaging manner.

Texts by Livy as well as by many other ancient Latin authors disappeared in the late 6th century. It would be great if we found out that some people of that time had hidden collections of ancient Latin, just as, a fewer centuries earlier, some Gnostics and other Christian heretics had hidden their favorites texts, and if we were to stumble across some of those collections of the ancient Latins, as we've recently stumbled across some of those collections of early Christian writings. Other than stumbling across them, how can we find such collections of Latin texts mentioned and quoted until the late sixth century, and then no more? (How long was Petronius' Satyricon, all together?) You might as well ask me how exactly to go into a forest and find a unicorn.

Time has not been kind to ancient Phoenician manuscripts. We possess very little Phoenician literature today. On p 588 of The East Face of Helicon, Martin L. West fantasizes about coming across a corpus of ancient Phoenician the size of the Old Testament. Why stop there? Imagine a mighty chest, longer than a small canoe and fat as a keg, so well-built by the best and proudest of Phoenician Carthage's craftsmen that it preserved almost immaculately the hoard of the choicest Phoenician literature on papyrus and parchment with which it was stuffed to the brim, then to be hidden from the Roman fires, hidden until our own time... I mean, it'd be nice to get the other side of the story of that conflict, wouldn't it? Round things out a bit, it might. Not to mention the many centuries' worth of an entire civilization's poetry, history, science...

I don't wish so intensely for more and more and still more finds of ancient papyri of the Bible and other Early Christian texts, but that's okay, there are many others fervently wishing that in my stead. It would be nice to have the entire collected works of the Classical Greek tragedians, and more than just fragments of the pre-Socratics, and every lecture Aristotle ever delivered.

I don't know enough yet about the Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians or ancient Persions to even know what more to wish for from them. And as far as the rest of the world, let me put it this way: my first introduction to Lao Tzu and the Tao is about a week old. I'm reeling from that. (In a good way. A very good way.) I'd never, ever before seriously asked myself: can I learn to read Chinese? Anyway, to return to the theme of this post: I don't know enough about any ancient literature other than Latin and Greek to know of any lost writings to specifically long for. The Vedas? I don't know much more than the name. When did the Japanese begin writing? Beats me.

Please feel free to mention your own wishes.

The Origins of Philosophy

From the Hellenistic age down to our own, Aristotle and Plato have been very widely studied in "the West." Aristotle studied under Plato; Plato and others sat adoringly at the feet of Socrates; Socrates learned among the last of the pre-Socratics; and the first pre-Socratics, as we all know, sprang, fully-formed and philosophizing away, from the brow of Zeus.

What?! There was no philosophy before the pre-Socratics? Yes, that's exactly what it says here, on p 10 of Wisdom of the West by Bertrand Russell, London, 1959:

"Philosophy and science, as we now know them, are Greek inventions[...]Philosophy and science begin with Thales of Miletus in the early sixth century BC."

Okay then. That's all cleared up. And what exactly is philosophy? Russell covers that too, same book, same page:

"Philosophy begins when someone asks a general question."

Got it!

Seriously, though: although I find Russell to be eminently sensible almost all of the time, what he is saying here is absurd. Even though, as far as I have been able to determine -- I don't know how far that is -- very few "Western" scholars seem to be saying anything different about how philosophy, or at least "Western" philosophy, began.

One of the few exceptions is Arthur Schopenhauer. In his Parerga und Paralipomena, part I, in the chapter "Fragmente zur Geschichte der Philosophie," in the section on the Pre-Socratics (Saemtliche Werke, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt aM, 4th printing, 1996, vol 4, pp 45-56), Schopenhauer points out how some of the positions of the pre-Socratics are anticipated in Egypt and in the Brahmanic philosophy of the Vedas. He even mentions (p 56) Apuleius' assertion that Pythagoras had traveled as far as India, and been personally schooled by Brahmans.

You might say that it's absurd to accept Apuleius' account, written well over half a millennium after Pythagoras' death, as anything more than an amusing anecdote. And you might be right about that. But is it more absurd than assuming that no Brahmanic, or Egyptian, or Phoenician, or Babylonian, or other philosophy found its way to Greece before the career of Thales was over?

I submit that what began with the Greek pre-Socratics is that the individual tidbits of wisdom began to be preserved in connection with the names of individual wise people. A very significant development, and even more so to authors concerned about receiving the proper credit for their work than it may be to the public at large.

But to arbitrarily advance several thousand large steps past that and flatly assert that before Thlaes, no-one, anywhere, had ever stopped and asked what it all means, is, I must say so in all directness, thoroughly absurd.

And I say so even though I have only found one Western philosopher, Schopenhauer, who also says so. I have found many "Eastern" scholars, and laypeople from all parts of the Earth, who agree with me on this point. It's not the only point in which I feel that Schopenhauer and I are a bit lonely. There's also the matter of Hegel. There are so very many perfectly intelligent scholars who admire Hegel so very much. And yet, when I read Hegel, I see what Schopenhauer describes: an empty-headed charlatan, a pseudo-intellectual par excellence, a sheer horse's ass who is shamelessly wasting everybody's time. A Sam Harris of the early 19th century.

There is yet another point where I find myself and many, many other laypeople on one side, and almost every single Western scholar on the other: the scholars almost all state quite flatly that it is quite certain that Jesus existed, and is not merely a fictional character in a myth, a character perhaps cobbled together from the biographies of John the Baptist and some other real people.

I do not take it at all lightly when the academic consensus is so overwhelmingly against me. It troubles me, it truly does. But no academic consensus will persuade me to stop thinking for myself.

History of the World, Condensed Version, Part II, Clearly Hampered By My Having Studied Mostly Just Western Civ.

By the way, that "Clearly Hampered[...]" in the post title is not meant to be flip or sarcastic. The "History of the World" is the sarcastic part. A lot of "Histories of the World" have been written, and a lot of histories of Western civilization which are not much different, or actually more all-encompassing. I'm very ignorant of the majority of the world which lies outside of the scope of Western civilisation, and I'm a pretty typical Westerner in that regard. I've begun to learn a little about the rest of the world but it's just been baby steps.

So if you're understanding me clearly, my referring to these modest posts as a "History of the World" will make you smile wryly. What I'm trying to do here is to make some very general remarks about what I believe I know about certain things I find interesting. This is in part an exercise for me to see how well I can summarize some things. It is one of the quirks of the culture in which I live is that such remarks are sometimes referred to as world history. There is a lot of hubris in our culture.

To back up chronologically from the end of Part I of the Condensed Version: By several tens of thousand of years ago, humans had migrated from Africa into Asia, Europe and Oceania.

If you want to start an argument, bring together several dozen anthropologists and archaeologists selected entirely at random and bring up the question of when humans first migrated to the Western Hemisphere. That should start a nice vigorous argument for you.

Most anthropologists and archaeologists seem to agree that humans crossed the land bridge from Siberia to Alaska 10 or 12 thousand years or so ago. The disagreements begin when the questions are: did humans come to the Western Hemisphere earlier than that? How much earlier? Did they come by other routes in addition to the land bridge? Perhaps by boat across the Pacific from Asia?

Archaeologist A will present an object and say it is an artifact formed by human hands in the Wesern Hemisphere 20, or 30, or 40, or 60 or 60 thousand years ago. Archaeologist B will regard this statement by Archaeologist A and assert that it shows that A is engaged in wishful thinking as opposed to science, and that the object occurred naturally and show no evidence of having been shaped by human hands.

I don't know whom I should believe.

Meanwhile, back in Western Civ.: after the hegemonies of the Sumerians and Egyptians and Babylonians and Hittites and Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians and Persians, Alexander the Great created the Hellenistic world by conquering land as far eastward from Greece as Afghanistan and parts of India. His vast empire fragmented after his death, but in many parts of it the rulers continued to be Greek for a while. Meanwhile, both east and west of Egypt, as far west as Spain certainly, the Phoenicians had an empire as well. They were good sailors, and some people have speculated that in ancient times they sailed to the Western Hemisphere, although that seems extremely far-fetched to me. The Phoenicians had been a major power at least as far back as the eighth century BC, but not long after Alexander, who ruled his empire in the second half of the fourth century BC, the Phoenicians, and the Greeks, had a new rival for control of the Mediterranean: the Romans. In the third and seconds centuries BC Rome, which as late as 500 BC had been not much more than a village which managed to throw off the overlordship of the Etruscans, finished conquering the Italian peninsula, then conquered Phoenicia and Greece. In 30 BC the last bit of Mediterranean coastline not yet in Roman hands passed to them from Egypt, from Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh and a descendant of one of Alexander's generals.

The Israelites had rebelled against the Greek successors of Alexander, and they rebelled against the Romans. In AD 70 the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed, and in 73 AD the Jewish revolt came to an end when the Romans took the fortress of Masada. In the next several centuries Christianity, a sect arising from Judaeism, gradually spread throughout the Roman Empire until in the fourth century AD it became the official state religion and all other religions began to be persecuted and stamped out. In the fifth century Germanic tribes overran the western part of the Empire, and from this point on, only the eastern part continuously survived, until AD 1453. In a major example of the Western hubris I referred to above, to this day many otherwise well-educated Weserners continue to refer to the end of the weserrn part of the Roman Empire as the end of the Roman Empire, and refer to the surviving eastern part as Byzantium, as if it were not in fact the Roman Empire.

Things went very poorly in the West for several centuries which we usually, and I think quite rightly, call the Dark Ages. Some people use the terms "Dark Ages" and "Middle Ages" synonymously. I think it makes more sense to use "Dark Ages" for the period between 476, when Romulus Augustulus, the last Western Emperor, surrendered to Odoacer, a Germanic chieftain, and 800, when Charlemagne, in an act by no means free of unrealistic connotations, was crowned Emperor by the Pope, and to use the term "Middle Ages" to describe the entire time between the fal of the western part of the Empire until the Rennaissance: say, 1350 in Italy, and later as you head north.

End of Part II of the Condensed Version