Question to all the historical literature experts here

[Anonymous No.22083315]

How much actual literature was produced during ancients time, before the advent of printing press and mass production.
Take China for example, they have written many classics over their history. For every classics written, was there 10 or 1000 that were also made but weren't preserved and was forgotten?

[Anonymous No.22083318]

>>22083315
An untold number have been lost to fires and war. There is also massive collections that have not been translated. A couple of years ago students were translating old documents and they found that two countries have technically been at war for centuries and simply never officially ended the war.

[Anonymous No.22083324]

yeah like for example the gnostic gospels. of course the reason they were "lost" for 1700 years or whatever is because they didn't make the cut for the official new testament, so if they're important or not kinda depends.

[Anonymous No.22083337]

This has been bugging me for a while. I've been researching classics from different cultures and there's always a short lists of literature but there must've been some other books that were written between Ramayana and Mahabharata.

[Anonymous No.22083745]

>>22083315
We've lost about 95% of it. Maybe more. So you can reverse calculate that out. they were far more literate than we are.

[Anonymous No.22083758]

also, regarding china in particular, it was common for them to write and distribute the equivalent of modern novels for their own use, women in particular. they would handoff copies of these books to other women and their network was impressive. otherwise they had a lot of literary productions passed around orally in the form of traveling performers, and they had many varieties of these, including some meant for the enjoyment of commoners. same in korea and presumably japan, since in their early days they all used the chinese characters so novels written were mutally intelligible, even if orally the languages were completely different.

regarding persia, they had copies of all the ancient greek works. it was common for persians to regard themselves is philhellenes--friends of the greeks--of course, only after the roman empire's advent. an educated persian was fluent in greek much the way in the 1800s an educated russian was fluent in french. however, when alexander came through (in the greek days) he destroyed all persian writings up to that point. so the truly ancient persian lit is lost. alexander was kind of an asshole.

[Anonymous No.22083769]

you can see this in something like dio cassius. so we have a nearly complete copy of his works, although some sections are lost or were illegible so the text has blocked-out sections to represent that, but many of the works he references, we don't have a copy of. it's like that with a lot of roman/greek scholars, they'll reference something that didn't survive to us. so we know to a degree what we're missing, but it's irrecoverable, so we base it off whatever the surviving works say about it.

or we have re-composers like the shahnameh, which is just a new composition of all the old myths into one retelling. but we have the shahnameh, we don't have the originals he was basing it off us. so the shahnameh has to be regarded both as a cultural item (myths/literature) and a historical record.

[Anonymous No.22083773]

For Greek lit, you can get a taste of how much has been lost from a Byzantine dictionary called the Suda written I think around 1000. There are hundreds or thousands of entries for lost authors listing their lost works. And the Suda only covers high literature. What we don't have is vast.

[Anonymous No.22083820]

>>22083773
so homo sapiens at that time had a skull volume larger than modern people. our iq has actually been decreasing for several hundred years. you can see this in their writing. read history written by some roman guy, and it's clear he understands hundreds of years of history in vivid detail on a personal level, as if he were acquaintances with everyone involved, and he can turn it into a cohesive story with consistent characterization accurate to all the figures. modern historians regurgitate a bunch of disconnected names and dates, ignore everything in the middle, have no cohesion and a disjointed narrative, don't investigate the figures at any depth and only list them and perhaps who their parents were or what area they came from, as if that makes up for understanding of the fundamental character, and filter it all through a standard distanced academic voice, afraid to conclude anything or add their own intuition, afraid to connect two dots or postulate, masking their dearth of knowledge with feigned academic distance. they are PATHETIC. i can't even read modern historians, they're all retarded fuckign midwits who know less about the subject than some enthusiastic internet autist. no passion, no mastery.

not only do we not have the historical works, but we wouldn't be able to understand them even if we did. we mishandled all the gifts from our forefathers, saw all their writings burnt, and fell into dysgenics. by 2100 humans will be so fucking retarded they won't be able to read dostoevski and will throw all his novels in the trash thinking them weird ramblings.

[Anonymous No.22084602]

>>22083769
>cassius
>>22083820
>iq has actually been decreasing for several hundred years. you can see this in their writing. read history written by some roman guy, and it's clear he understands hundreds of years of history in vivid detail on a personal level, as if he were acquaintances with everyone involved, and he can turn it into a cohesive story with consistent characterization accurate to all the figures. modern historians regurgitate a bunch of disconnected names and dates,
In part the modern writer is trained to write in the bad way that they do, but one can read works from the 1700's; written in the same good manner, to demonstrate that the actual level of physical cognition hasn't dropped in the 2,000 yrs.

>PATHETIC
(pathe+tic : driven/moved/worked by pathos; emotionalism)

>>22083315
>>22083318
>>22083773
>lost
You mean burned by the Christians, of course, when the learned persons; doctors, engineers and scientists, were considered to be magicians channeling demons for their wisdom, and the trivium was considered a god of sorcery.

[Anonymous No.22085583]

>>22084602
>physical cognition hasn't dropped in the 2,000 yrs.
what a pseud. go ahead and explain what "physical cognition" is. you threw words together because they sounded good. you have no argument except "christians bad" when people have been destroying writings for thousands of years before christ arrived.

[Anonymous No.22086463]

>>22085583
>physical cognition
psychical cognition : as in the brain has not deteriorated in 2,000 yrs to the point that humans have 'naturally/physically' lost their cognitive abilities (such as losing their feet through evolution), as anon suggested.

the physical act of cognition.

>you threw words together because they sounded good
you are a coddled egotist with a baseline opinion who has learned, like others before you, to cloak their ignorance and superiority complex in a thing called A Religion.

> "christians bad" when people have been destroying writings for thousands of years before christ arrived.
No, I was just pointing out that 'lost' was incorrect; many were not 'lost' they were destroyed purposefully in acts of censorship or 'tard rage' when the anon of the day couldn't win an argument and summoned the equivalent of a janitor to erase the evidence of the their error or someone elses superior work.

Not sure what you problem is, you rabid taliban you.

[Anonymous No.22086473]

>>22085583
>pseud
And thank you, I am something of a pseudo-(of great men of better days). i.e. literary and intellectual successor.

[Anonymous No.22086531]

>>22086473
holy cringe

[Anonymous No.22086539]

>>22086531
is that all your response will be? some buzzword? to appeal to the most naive member of the presumed audience to lead them astray? ha i can see why the chinese and japanese thought to execute you people on sight. fucking sophist

[Anonymous No.22086545]

>>22086539
>comes into thread
>contributes nothing
>insults people contributing
>then preens
get a life

[Anonymous No.22086548]

>>22086545
the way you're dancing around the topic is bizarre.

All you did was tell me I was WAH WAH ANNIE CHRISCHAN because I mentioned how come we have so many lost literary works.

Go and drink, it's what your family did best.

[Anonymous No.22086574]

>>22086548
lol ur reterd

[Anonymous No.22086579]

>>22086574
fuck off chris chan, go burn your house down.