A more interesting knowledge-hole is Neo-Latin, Latin written from the Renaissance to today. Surviving from the sixteenth century alone are 10,000 times more different books in Latin than survive from all of antiquity (at least according to Jurgen Leonhardt's "Latin: Story of a World Language"). People think about the Romans when they hear Latin, but they forget that it was the international publishing language for academia into the nineteenth century (people were still writing dissertations in STEM in Latin at some European universities in the early twentieth century). Since the nineteenth century, fewer and fewer people have been learning Latin, and of those few care about anything except the Romans, so there is a vast and barely known volume of Latin out there waiting to be explored. Google Books is full of stuff that nobody has read in centuries.
See also: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu</a><p>and<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices</a><p>"Bishop De Landa, a Franciscan monk and conquistador during the Spanish conquest of Yucatán, wrote: "We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they (the Maya) regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction." Only three extant codices are widely considered unquestionably authentic."
I've been doing a lot of research on early astronomy lately and have been digging into how exactly we know what we know about the early Greek astronomers like Thales and Anaximander [1]. It turns out that it's pretty remarkable that we know anything whatsoever about these early figures.<p>Thales was active so early on that philosophers weren't really writing anything down at that point. One of his successors, Anaximander, wrote his ideas down, but did so in verse rather than in prose, and even still, those works were lost to history. But centuries later, a student of Aristotle named Theophrastus wrote a text called <i>History of Physics</i> (or something similar), which was by all accounts a thorough exposition of the thought of the major Greek natural philosophers up until his day. But this work was also lost.<p>Fortunately, however, a later author, St. Hippolytus, wrote another work called the <i>Refutation of All Heresies</i>, which used Theophrastus's text as a source and basically went point by point through the various philosophers that Theophrastus covered to explain why each was wrong. St. Hippolytus was so thorough that we can actually reconstruct the original chapters in Theophratus's work. So one of our main sources for the ideas of Thales and Anaximander comes to us two sources removed from the original.<p>There are other sources for the ideas of Thales and Anaximander, but it's a similar story where the surviving works have been filtered through sometimes as many as three intermediate works that were all lost. So understanding the ideas of these early astronomers means piecing together fragments from a lot of later works, trying to figure out the chains of transmission and the potential biases at each link. It's almost as though we were living 2000 years in the future and trying to understand the ideas of Charles Darwin, but the only sources we had to go on were a newspaper clipping from the Scopes Monkey Trial and a Reader's Digest version of a book by Stephen Jay Gould. Understandably, the error bars on our knowledge are pretty big and there's very little we can say for certain.<p>[1]: Shameless plug: <a href="https://songofurania.com/about/" rel="nofollow">https://songofurania.com/about/</a>
When you think about the scope of human history, and how little we know, it's sad to think of all the lost work. We only know things going back a few thousand years, but men who have our same cognition have been around for far longer. Plato spoke of a golden age, now long lost, where the flaura and fuana were so plentiful that men didn't need to work. Atlantis is mentioned, stories of a distant time, with men who maybe lived better than we do.
More texts are on the way. The Villa Papiri texts will soon become readable, it is hoped, through the application of modern technology. These charred scrolls were part of a library at Pompeii.<p>Odd that he didn't mention these at all.
Maybe someone on HN knows the answer to this question, which I've wondered for a while. Are there other civilizations of similar cultural sophistication to the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese whose writings have just not been passed down and so we aren't as familiar with them? Or are the ones whose work survived roughly it, even if much of their works are lost. E.g. there doesn't seem to be much surviving Persian literature, but I'm not sure if this is because it wasn't preserved well or if it's because there wasn't much of it to begin with.
Great details about a period I am sketchy about. I used this 15-min video [<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV4xYG4KMIU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV4xYG4KMIU</a>] to get caught up on Mycenae.<p>I remember grinning while reading in Lucio Russo's (2004 <i>The Forgotten Revolution</i> on 'Antikythera') caustic description of how, after Rome wiped out Greece, Greek writings became a very popular commodity with Roman book collectors. As Horace put it, "Conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium."