05-14-2012, 08:31 PM
Quote:Assuming by "Persia" you mean Iran or Persis, doesn't that have a danger of creating a circular argument "they created no new knowledge because none survives in writing, and no writing survives because they created no new knowledge"?
Well, this shift took place among all every literate people, so the conditions for the archaeological preservation was the same for all ancient corpuses of literature.
What must be necessarily the starting point of any analysis of the quantity and quality of ancient Persian or Carthagian literature (or any literature for that matter)? Obviously, always the material we still know of today, be it archaeological and epigraphical evidence, surviving texts or ancient references to lost texts. This is comparatively scarce and rudimentary for both peoples. So the only way to go against the evidence and assume that the Persians nevertheless possessed a rich and highly developed literature is by assuming that the survival rate of their writings was so much lower than, e.g. of that of the Greeks, Chinese and Indians. But I have never seen anyone seriously daring to make a case of some exceptional Persian rate of loss.
Even in the case of the 'extinct' Carthaginians I would find such an argument hard to hold much water: Punic was, by the testimony of Augustinus, a spoken language until at least the 5th century AD, so almost as long as Latin. Still, the Punic corpus is very small and, save some agricultural works, unimpressive.
So, absence of evidence does not necessarily mean evidence of absence. But in the absence of evidence which helps explain the absence of evidence it is still the most viable hypothesis to assume that we have no Persian corpus of true literary arts today because Persia never developed one.
Stefan (Literary references to the discussed topics are always appreciated.)
