Inventory of the entire body of ancient literature

[Eleatic Guest]

Do you know if modern scholarship has compiled an inventory of the entire body of ancient literature that we know of? Specifically, I would like to know the number of
- authors (also by name only)
- titles (also by name only)
- letters, words, pages
that have survived.

In short, the full quantitative approach. I know only of one estimation, that of Gerstinger in 1948, otherwise the linked article focuses on book losses.

[Sean Manning]

Do you know if modern scholarship has compiled an inventory of the entire body of ancient literature that we know of? Specifically, I would like to know the number of
- authors (also by name only)
- titles (also by name only)
- letters, words, pages
that have survived.

In short, the full quantitative approach. I know only of one estimation, that of Gerstinger in 1948, otherwise the linked article focuses on book losses.

Well, west of the Indus there is 57 million words of Greek, 10 million words of Latin, 10 million words of Akkadian, 6 million words of Egyptian, 3 million words of Sumerian, and so on ... if you want the details check out the references in my old article in Ancient History 7! The lists tend to be one language or genre at a time (FGrH for the Greek historians, CIL for Latin inscriptions, there must be something for early Christian texts), and pick different cut-off dates.

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I also remember that Roger Pearse had some statistics on the survival rate of Attic Tragedy or Old Comedy, and there is an article by Roger S. Bagnall "Alexandria: Library of Dreams" which casts a jaundiced eye on numbers for the Library of Alexandria. The linked German Wikipedia page shows the library more or less static until the time of Hypatia when it instantly vanishes, but as we both know that is a partisan view and the ancient sources don't really let us show whether some general or time and lack of funds did the most damage.

I think my main sources were:

Carsten Peust, “Über ägyptische Lexicographie,“ Lingua Aegyptica 7 (2000) pp. 245-260 http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propy.../2013/1893

M.P. Streck, „Großes Fach Altorientalistik,“ Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 142 (2010) pp. 35-58

Michael P. Streck, „Sprache (language),“ Reallexikon der Assyriologie Band 13 (2011-2013). {text in English}

[Eleatic Guest]

Thanks for them. I later found this catalogue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codices_La...ntiquiores

I remember the linked German Wikipedia made it even in the news when it was published, but when I read it these days again I found its current anti-Christian bias to be overt and tedious.

[Julian de Vries]

The excellent Quasten’s Patrology series catalogues all ancient Christian literature.
More Info:
https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2007...available/

The blog “History for Atheists” has quite a few articles on ancient texts and their transmission, for example the survival rate in Photius’ Bibliotheca and on the history of the Library of Alexandria.
https://historyforatheists.com/

One can best start with the latest article since it has many cross-links to the subject of interest: The Great Myths 8: The Loss of Ancient Learning.
https://historyforatheists.com/2020/03/t...-learning/

[Sean Manning]

Tim O'Neill's study of the survival rate of pagan and Christian works in Photios looks quite handy! [edited by mod]

Its also worth saying that without a chance manuscript find, we would have no idea that Plutarch and Appian rework an Aramaic story about the Assyrian Brothers' War (Schropp and Manning, "‘Too Many for an Embassy, Too Few for an Army’: On The Origin and Scope of a Tigranic Dictum," ZPE 2019)  We are really groping in the dark to guess what once existed.

Programs of empirical enquiry recorded in writing were always fragile in antiquity, and in Late Antiquity all the winds were against them.

[Sean Manning]

The Kiwi Hellenist has a pretty good potted history of the transmission of ancient Greek literature and how it got tied up with Latin Christian / Greek Christian and Venetian / East Roman rivalries. This kind of thing is available in most big libraries, but the kind of quantitative survey that Stefan requested is more in journal articles. https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/...ure-2.html

Stefan, I think that the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae intends to contain every surviving piece of Greek literature into the 18th century and is fairly complete until late antiquity, they probably have statistics for just texts up to say the year 300.

[Robert Vermaat]

No more bickering in full forum please.