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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5 days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysia

Edit: Reading the article, I'm surprised they don't seem to have done any computer-based textual analysis of the authorship. We have other plays attributed to Euripides so matching 98 lines of text shouldn't be too difficult.

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> There's such a volume of lost plays. Athens held annual festivals where you'd have perhaps 20 tragedies and 5 comedies over 5 days[1]. That's just one city state. Only 32 full plays survive.

There's such a volume of lost everything. Original masters taped over, archive fires, etc. Now we have new problems like obsolete formats and failing to pay your cloud bills (no more recovering something from an old tape forgotten in a warehouse).

In 2000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if no contemporary television managed to survive.

All that survives is The Love Boat, and future humans will fashion their entire understanding of ancient American history, culture, and religion around this show.

That honestly doesn’t sound too bad.

Could be Jersey Shore...

At least Jersey Shore is anthropological in nature

"On The Tastes of Women in the Hamburger Kingdom: Doc as the Personification of Female Desire"

There is a satirical (paper) RPG called "Diana: Warrior Princess" that takes its inspiration from this idea. The idea is it is a representation of the idea of 20th century culture as viewed from a millennium into the future, focusing on Princess Di who is depicted as a great leader who fights against Hitler and has advisors like Charles Darwin. It's mocking how "historical fiction" often takes great liberties with fact and mixes people who never lived at the same time together.

Upon seeing "Warrior Princess" I had first been expecting they'd given DFS an ambiguous (sororal or sapphistical?) companion:

  In short, when I can tell you how I break the laws of gravity,
  And why my togs expose my intermammary concavity,
  And why my comrade changed her dress from one that fit more comfily
  To one that shows her omphalos (as cute as that of Omphale),
  And why the tale of Spartacus appears in Homer's version,
  And where we found examples of the genus Lycopersicon,
  And why this Grecian scenery looks more like the Antipodes,
  You'll say I'm twice the heroine of any in Euripides!

[full text, footnoted: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~valkyrie/parody/xena.html ]

I am reminded of the Perry Bible Fellowship strip "Now Showing".

https://pbfcomics.com/comics/now-showing/

In 2000 years, I wouldn't be surprised if no contemporary television managed to survive.

Maybe most everything doesn't deserve to survive. Future humans will be busy enough living their lives, to learn an ever growing history of long dead ancestors. For them, it'll be mildly interesting to know that something was invented one thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand years ago, maybe the name of a chosen few relevant persons that first did something. But a complete record of everything that ever happened? I don't think so.

Most TV and movies feel horriby dated in a few decades.

Actually, I watch TV and movies done now that seem horribly dated.

I remember watching stuff during the pandemic with allusions to distancing or masking and thinking "I'm going to have to explain this to my grandchildren."

I imagine our grandchildren will think of covid the way we think of the spanish flu - as a minor historical footnote.

We lost the entirety of MySpace, which was a significant cultural moment.

I know people who have almost zero photos of their entire childhoods because they were all digital and stored on computers/online and have been lost to the ether.

> There's such a volume of lost everything. Original masters taped over . . .

Michael Bond deftly develops this problem in Chapter 5, "Paddington and 'The Old Master'", of the masterpiece "A Bear Called Paddington." [0] Even a read of the linked synopsis brings to light the combinatorial Ship of Theseus nature of all human-interpretation. The pathos brings tears to my eyes: Paddington's failure to recreate a present scrambled by a search for the past is victorious-by-proxy, despite the judges viewing it upside down--just as an artist might draw. [1]

0. https://paddingtonbear.fandom.com/wiki/Paddington_and_%22The...

1. https://www.allaboutdrawings.com/upside-down-drawing.html

My understanding from reading the article, is that the issue is not so much matching the deciphered lines, but the interpretation of that deciphering. So they want the scholarship agreement on what is actually written on the papyrus.

I imagine there are plenty of missing words being inserted, unreadable letters being guessed and so on.

So the way to do it for now, has to rely more on experience and intuition than a database search.

They didn't have to, several of the lines matched existing fragments.

Also, the classical corpus is so small that humans still beat the computers for authorship analysis.

I just hope there are good archival structures in place in society nowadays, because there are a lot of theaters worldwide performing plays known and unknown every day, but AFAIK only the best known ones get statues made and I don't believe they contain a list of their works (for example).

I mean that would make sense; make sturdy statues of authors / playwrights / etc, and embed copies of their work in a compartiment inside of them or in the material itself. Lose a few in interesting looking hills.

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