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Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

They omitted the most important part.

Albertus Magnus knew Arabic and his sources were the books left behind after the Spanish reconquista, that were mostly in Arabic and some translated to Latin.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_translations_of_the_12...

The Arabic books were themselves translations in many cases (from Greek) but the West had no paper to print them until it was reintroduced by... again, the Islamic civilization.

Albertus Magnus and his successors like Thomas Aquinas influenced the church enough so that the inquisition doesn't kill the practitioners of science, which has merit but their ideas were not 100% original, they built on top of others. Scholasticism is influenced by Averroism.

The church still harassed scientists in the years to come, notably Galileo Galilei.

Read this if you want a more unbiased view of the world, Leibniz at least was a fan of it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayy_ibn_Yaqdhan

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> The church still harassed scientists in the years to come, notably Galileo Galilei.

This is kind of a popular oversimplification of what was likely to be a very personal and political matter at least as much as it was a matter of heresy, and it absolutely was not the case that the church held a simple antagonism toward science. Galileo worked for and published with the explicit permission of Pope Urban VIII initially.

>but the West had no paper to print them until it was reintroduced by... again, the Islamic civilization.

You don't need paper to write though – you can use animal hides (ie. parchment/vellum). Writing in Europe existed before Islam (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Brixianus). Most documents in that period in Europe used parchment and before that they were using papyrus.

Here's a chart of estimated manuscript production in Western Europe.[0]

  Century    6th      7th      8th      9th       10th      11th      12th      13th        14th        15th       
  Output     13,552   10,639   43,702   201,742   135,637   212,030   768,721   1,761,951   2,746,951   4,999,161  
  Increase            -21      311      362       -33       56        263       129         56          82

Paper was used started from the Twelfth century.[0] There is an increase to be sure, but not one large enough to support the claim that Greek texts were lost in Europe due to lack of paper.

[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-...

paper is much cheaper than animal parchment, and although animal parchment is longer-lasting than paper, paper is much longer-lasting than papyrus, so a given level of manuscript production can preserve many more texts. there are definitely many greek texts that were lost in europe during the dark ages because the only copies were on papyrus that deteriorated under conditions where paper would have survived

That argument about Greek works being lost due to use of papyrus in Europe in I assume the early middle ages is worth considering (any links would be appreciated). My argument above is about the claim that "if you have nothing to write on you cannot really have a school, library or university. And if you did there would be no material to study from. You would have to write on animal skin (parchment) and that doesn't scale at all." Specifically that the second sentence results in the first sentence being the case in Europe (ie. that there was nothing to write on in Europe).

unfortunately the texts i'd most like to link are not linkable because they were lost in medieval times

https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3290/long_paper3261.pdf says:

> It is to be noted, that historical and philological knowledge of loss rates is very scarce and elusive, but it can still be approached from various angles, such as the collection of data from ancient library catalogues, inventories, wills, as well as allusions and intertextuality [54, 4, 9]. Buringh [9] provides estimates for the Latin West, with a geometric mean of loss around -25% per century, with variations from -11% in the 9th to -32% in the 14th and 15th centuries (with local variations between medieval institutions from –3% to –71% per century). The global loss rate for non-illustrated manuscripts of several well known collections have been estimated around 93-97% [32, 38, 53, 40]. But there is a potential bias in accounting only for well known institutional collections, from which some manuscripts are known to have survived: trying to account for fully lost libraries, Buringh [9] is compelled to revise his estimates higher, to -25% by century until the 12th, up to -43% in the 15th.

(note that buringh's figures here are highest after the dark ages and the introduction of paper!)

i only have buringh's figures from this scholium because buringh's paper itself has not been preserved in sci-hub and will probably be lost in the next century

i agree that in the counterfactual history where there was no papyrus in europe there would have been even higher losses

>i only have buringh's figures from this scholium because buringh's paper itself has not been preserved in sci-hub and will probably be lost in the next century

I accessed it just fine. Try the doi link: 10.1163/9789047428640. The author is the same as the one I quoted above, and he gives the same 25% figure there. I don't see any specific argument about papyrus in the text you quoted though, which is what I was hoping you would link to. From what little I read about it, it seems parchment was the primary medium for manuscripts in Europe starting from the 4th century:

>Parchment, however, did not come into general use for book production until some centuries later, even though it had a marked advantage over papyrus in its greater durability; moreover, it was better suited than papyrus for writing on both sides. It was at about the start of the fourth century A.D. that it began to take the place of papyrus in the manufacture of the best books, and the works con- sidered worth preserving were gradually transferred from papyrus roll to parchment codex. It is in this century that the great parchment codices of the Greek Bible (the Vaticanus and the Sinaiticus; see p p . 62-7) were prepared; and the earliest extant parchment manu- scripts of pagan works date probably from the same century. But the use of papyrus did not cease then, and papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament have been found dating from the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries.[0]

So it seems difficult to blame the loss of Greek works in Europe on the lack paper specifically. An argument could be made that by the end of the Roman Empire, nobody cared about Greek science anymore, which meant they didn't feel the need to preserve it in parchment and instead only used papyrus, which later deteriorated. That is something I could agree to, as the Romans never really cared about science (or anything intellectual) in the first place. I would still want to see some links that actually make this argument (which I had assumed you had when I asked for them).

My main point here is that it is hard to say that Greek works were lost due to lack of technology (either in the strong form given by GP or the weak form you proposed here). More likely in my opinion is that literate Europe was not so interested in Greek works to begin with in the early middle ages. Most scribes were monks or part of the clergy generally, and they were mainly interested in ecclesiastical works, and that is what got written down, copied and studied. I would also suggest that Greek works were probably not universally seen as heretical at this point (early middle ages) as there was not such a strong central church/Pope which only developed in earnest starting in the 8th century (or so I recall). Although I have no evidence for that last claim.

[0] Metzger, Bruce (2005). The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 8. source found via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papyrus full text here: https://ia600208.us.archive.org/9/items/TheTextOfNewTestamen...

this is great information, thank you!

unfortunately, no, i don't have a specific source making the argument that many texts were lost because they only existed on papyrus. to me, it seems like an almost inescapable conclusion from the widespread use of papyrus, its short lifespan (particularly in anything other than the driest conditions), and the limited supplies available of animal parchment—but i'm aware that many conclusions that seem inescapable are in fact wrong, so i too would like to see a deeper investigation

i concur that roman and clerical lack of interest in both science and other branches of philosophy was a causal factor. but i don't think such works were ever branded as heretical, at least by the organized church; no classical philosopher ever made it into the notorious index librorum prohibitorum

metzger also mentions some other media used for books: stone, bone, leather, and ostraca

>to me, it seems like an almost inescapable conclusion from the widespread use of papyrus, its short lifespan (particularly in anything other than the driest conditions), and the limited supplies available of animal parchment

I agree that papyrus would fare much better in eg. Egypt than in Europe, and Buringh mentions that some of the Greek works translated by Muslims in the 8th century were in fact written on papyrus:

>Muslim scholars and scribes translated Greek and Syriac rolls and manuscripts originally copied on parchment and papyrus into Arabic and transcribed them on sheets of paper that were afterwards bound into books.

He does also mention that some of them were in parchment, however, and from the author I quoted above it seems that important works were copied to parchment already starting from the 4th century. While not about Greek works, I find this quote on the subject relevant:

>Texts perished, not because pagan authors were under attack, but because no one was interested in reading them, and parchment was too precious to carry an obsolete text; [...] amongst those palimpsested we find Plautus and Terence, Cicero and Livy, the Elder and Younger Pliny, Sallust and Seneca, Vergil and Ovid, Lucan, Juvenal and Persius, Gellius and Fronto[0]

It also seems from the same book that Greek works were still available in the Byzantine empire:

>In the twelfth century the range of translations was increased substantially. Much of the credit belongs to Burgundio of Pisa (1110-93),who had spent the years 1135-8 in Constantinople as an interpreter and returned there later, taking the opportunity to collect books. [...] Slightly better known are the inelegant and literal versions of Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy made in Sicily c. 1160 under the aegis of Henricus Aristippus, archdeacon of Catania (d. 1162), who is said to nave acquired some manuscripts sent as a gift by the Byzantine emperor to the Norman king of Sicily

I doubt these survived from antiquity as papyrus (although perhaps I am wrong here). These also don't seem to be a re-translation from Arabic either(? would be strange for that not to have been mentioned). They were likely simply copied and maintained throughout the years. This implies to me that papyrus is not the significant factor here. I think the cause was 1. the lack of interest 2. the "cultural divide" (p.79) between what was the Western Rome Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire which limited the study of Greek and the import of Greek books, resulting in 3. almost nobody in Europe could read Greek. Although further investigation is needed.

>but i don't think such works were ever branded as heretical, at least by the organized church;

I think you are right here. I vaguely recalled when I wrote that that certain classical authors were considered heretical, but from a search all I found was the condemnations of some of Aristotle's ideas in the 1200s.[1]

[0] Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature (1991)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condemnations_of_1210%E2%80%93...

> Read this if you want a more unbiased view of the world, Leibniz at least was a fan of it.

Reading the Wikipedia article, it seems like it would be more biased if anything, albeit by a different cultural context:

> Hayy ibn Yaqdhan is an allegorical novel in which Ibn Tufail expresses philosophical and mystical teachings in a symbolic language in order to provide better understanding of such concepts. This

> but the West had no paper to print them until it was reintroduced

Europe started using paper a few centuries before printing was invented there. And why do you talk about _re_introduction? I don't think paper was used in Europe before it was introduced by the Islamic world

It is true that Aristotelian texts made their way back to Europe by way of the Islamic world. Indeed, Averroes's and Avicenna's commentaries figure into the works of Thomas Aquinas. For example, he uses Avicenna's argument for the distinction between essence and existence to perfect the understanding of God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens, or self-subsisting being whose very essence is "to be".

However, I wouldn't overstate the influence of Islamic civilization. Whereas the rationality of God and the created order, and thus its intelligibility, is central to Christianity (see John 1:1, where God in the second person of the Trinity is identified as the Logos), Islam is rooted in a voluntarist notion of God. The latter is quite hostile to any bold and sustained venture to grasp reality. Indeed, you don't see a sustained scientific enterprise anywhere in history save in the Christian West, and as Stanley Jaki among others argue, this is not an accident. Yes, you have sparks and flashes here and there across all sorts of civilizations, and yes, human beings by nature have a desire to know things, but as a sustained and confident enterprise, you need powerful convictions, like

1) the world is thoroughly and foundationally intelligible by virtue of its rational first cause,

b) human beings are capable of grasping this intelligible world as rational agents,

c) it is valuable to pursue such knowledge,

d) we are "permitted" and morally justified in such pursuits, and

e) progress in knowledge has a purpose.

Most other civilizations lacked some ingredient that led to either lack of desire or some kind of timidity about the whole thing: capricious gods, a chaotic and absurd universe, the world as an endless cycle going nowhere, pantheistic notions that make examining the world seem categorically offensive and sacrilegious, hedonistic cultures hostile to reason, etc. Even the Greek enterprise basically fizzled after Aristotle. In the case of Islam, I am reminded of a description that is relevant: Allah is an exalted caliph who, coming upon a fork, does not know whether he will go left or right. Yes, we do find great Islamic scholars, but the development of Islam has not produced conditions favorable to such sustained pursuits.

Where Scholasticism is concerned, it is not a singular view, of course, but a kind of enterprise with common features and shared foundational principles and one that also laid the intellectual groundwork for science, and sure, Averroes was studied, but that's also part of the point: the Christian tradition, best exemplified by the Catholic tradition, is omnivorous, interested in truth wherever it is found. The notion of logos spermatikos, or "seminal reason", is appropriate here. Truth is truth, wherever it comes from. To quote Philippians 4:8: "[W]hatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things."

I will also add that it is untrue that "the Church" was in the business of "harassing scientists" or that the Inquisition was in the business of "killing the practitioners of science". Even the use of "scientist" or "science" in this was is anachronistic. You gave the stale example of Galileo as an example. This had nothing to do with science. Galileo was a man known for picking pointless fights, an irascible temperament, and a tendency to insult, and what we call the "Galileo affair" was not some oft-romanticized singular event caused by a clash between the Noble Galileo and the Mean Old Church, between the forces of Science and Enlightenment on the one hand and the forces of Darkness and Superstition on the other, but something that played out over decades of intermittent crankiness. It was, truth be told, incredibly boring, and one needs to go to great lengths of dishonesty to sex it up for IFLScience groupies. A better template for understanding what actually happened is the stereotype of bickering Italians with big egos than some cosmic battle between good and evil. In the case of men like the lecherous, arrogant, crank Giordano Bruno, he was not executed for "science", and he was hostile to the kinds of reasoned processes that science would employ, so it is absurd to canonize people like as some kind of "martyrs for science".

Without those arrogant individuals the food surplus that made your existence possible would not have occurred and you would not exist.

And if for some reason you made it into existence, you would be working in a farm without motorized equipment spending all your time trying to generate the calories you would then be eating right away because refrigeration would not exist either.

And everyone else would be spending all their time in the exact same way so all the innovations that make you happy would not exist.

Also, paper was as important as the translations, and you tend to trivialize the fact that if you have nothing to write on you cannot really have a school, library or university. And if you did there would be no material to study from.

You would have to write on animal skin (parchment) and that doesn't scale at all.

Paper is a really big deal but you seem to take it for granted.

paper is great, as explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41268837, but other commonly used writing media have included papyrus (dominant in europe before paper), clay tablets (great for cuneiform), wax tablets, bamboo slips, silk cloth, and palm leaves. many older texts have survived only in one of these forms. also, universities in india date back to before the introduction of any of them; the texts to study were put into poetic meter, memorized, and sung to music, permitting preservation for millennia. the first table of sines in the aryabhatiya is in such a form even though it postdates the widespread adoption of writing materials

finding ways to preserve calories for long periods of time was necessary for human migration to regions that have winter, an event that happened tens of millennia before refrigeration. techniques have included salting (used for salt pork, salt beef, bread, most cheeses and sausages), acidification (either by adding vinegar or through lactic-acid fermentation as with sauerkraut and pickles), smoking, preservation in sugar (jam, jelly), simple dehydration (jerky, pemmican, raisins, dates, hardtack and other crackers, nuts, wheat berries, flour, other dried grains, dried pulses, sesame, poppy seeds, and perhaps most importantly, olive oil), fungal growth (used by some cheeses and sausages), leaving root vegetables in the ground, and encasement in something defended by one of the above (other sausages, pies and other empanadas)

Nice. Then where is the European medieval papyrus, clay tablets, etc? Nowhere to be found. Only parchments.

there's a fair bit of european medieval papyrus, actually! but most of it has decayed for the reasons i said

> you tend to trivialize the fact that if you have nothing to write on you cannot really have a school, library or university. And if you did there would be no material to study from.

This ignores the fact that for most of human history, everything that we collectively knew about our world and our place in it and how things worked so that we could make plans that guaranteed our survival across the changing seasons was passed on from one generation to the next orally. No one needed paper.

Indeed, paper was supposedly first developed in China, a long time before any Christian or Islamic scholars were born or chose to write things down. In fact, if you believe wikipedia then by the time any of these scholars began transcribing ancient knowledge on paper it was in use as toilet paper in China because it was so common. [0] Even considering this, their development of and wide adoption of paper didn't help them preserve everything they knew so that later generations could benefit.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper

Our distant ancestors had an encyclopedic understanding of their natural world because they lived in it all day, every day of their lives. Their capacity for learning and retaining the stories across generations guaranteed our own existence today as a kaleidoscope of cultures scattered across earth's various ecosystems. We all have something to offer each other and getting hung up on who was first to do something is really unproductive and more than anything, tends to divide us along cultural boundaries. We should celebrate the fact that we have collectively made it this far and continue to work to see that every one of us, no matter where they are, has an opportunity to enjoy the technological changes that have occurred and to benefit from the advancements in knowledge on all subjects.

We have no way of knowing how many times some useful tool or bit of knowledge was developed only to be lost for generations because the small group that found that knowledge was later wiped out in some calamity that they had no skills to manage.

The paper historical record, though brief relative to our own long history, is incomplete. I would suggest that if our recent ancestors had dedicated as much time to listening to their elders relate the oral histories of their groups then many of the paper gaps would be irrelevant since our oral histories would fill those gaps.

And, in closing, if we had maintained a strong appreciation for storytelling across generations and a respect for other cultures different from our own we would not need archaeologists and anthropologists to speculate about anything. There would be no more need for every item, image, or structure discovered to be assigned a role in some past worship ritual. Seriously guys, that shit gets old.

Treating our ancestors like they were all dumb-ass cretins lucky to survive from one day to the next is doing them a great disservice when the real answer is that they were the masters of their environments, uniquely qualified among living things to spread and conquer all other species in their paths. They were more daring explorers than anyone in our living history and the tales of their exploits, told to all they encountered, allowed others to follow in their paths spreading farther and faster than any present-day archaeologist would like to give them credit.

Looks like I got off topic. LOL

Anyway, paper is not such a big deal. If our earliest ancestors were as dull-witted as some archaeologists would suggest then those storytellers would inevitably have been met with cries of "Please stop! My brain is full!" from their dullard audiences and we would all never have existed anyway as all our ancestors ended up as lion or cheetah turds.

if you read the charges against galileo or bruno, specifically what they're accused of is dissent from church dogma, and many of the specific dissenting opinions were in fact scientific truth. in galileo's case, their epistemological grounding was also entirely scientific in the modern sense

it's probably true that if they'd been easier to get along with, they would have gotten away with it. but a reasonable crude definition of 'scientist' is someone who cares more about the truth than about getting along with people

so your argument boils down to 'the church wasn't harassing scientists [and burning them at the stake], but rather harassing scientists [and burning them at the stake]'. and that's because they were not, in fact, interested in truth wherever it was found; specifically, as you acknowledge, they were not interested in finding truth in the opinions of bickering italians with good egos. in galileo's case, the church very much failed to live up to philippians 4:8, and continued to do so until 01992. bruno's case is still live

other authors in whose writings the church was not interested in finding truth, and in fact in whose writings it prohibited its adherents from seeking truth, include machiavelli, pascal, descartes, francis bacon, diderot, gibbon, erasmus darwin, and kant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_and_works_on_t...

we're not talking about the period until 01758 (at which point heliocentrism officially stopped being heretical) but until 01966

that's not even including the authors whose inclusion in the index librorum prohibitorum was eventually reversed, including galileo himself, copernicus, and kepler

here in my own country of argentina, public education could not be instituted until 01862 because of the strenuous opposition of the catholic church

in short, your account of a church that did not oppose the forces of science and enlightenment is entirely false from beginning to end

as for the greek tradition, it very much did not fizzle after aristoteles; eudoxus was another student of platon, sure, but eucleides was a quarter century later, archimedes didn't die until a century later, and ptolemaios and galenos were almost 500 years later. i recommend reading lucio russo's the forgotten revolution, which makes an excellent case that there was a sustained scientific enterprise in pre-christian hellenistic europe

and, of course, today there is a sustained scientific enterprise throughout the world, and most scientists in the west are not christian; about half of all scientists are atheist or agnostic, with the numbers being much higher in the west: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/237802311666435...

> if you read the charges against galileo or bruno, specifically what they're accused of is dissent from church dogma, and many of the specific dissenting opinions were in fact scientific truth. in galileo's case, their epistemological grounding was also entirely scientific in the modern sense

True, but that was an excuse, rather than the real reason. It might be evidence of corruption, not of being anti-science.

Other people who favoured the Copernican model had no problem with the church - including Copernicus.

IN Galileo's case much of the issue was that he claimed the Copernican model was a proven truth rather than a useful mode. It is neither true (the sun is not the centre of the universe) now was it well supported by the evidence at the time.

> we're not talking about the period until 01758 (at which point heliocentrism officially stopped being heretical)

Not accurate. Evidence heliocentrism was regarded as heretical rather thn unproven. By 1758

> and, of course, today there is a sustained scientific enterprise throughout the world, and most scientists in the west are not christian; about half of all scientists are atheist or agnostic, with the numbers being much higher in the west:

That is because western culture, and academia in particular, is hostile to Christianity. It is inevitable that a capitalist society cannot live comfortably with Christianity.

They are very much drawing on a Christian culture and tradition, and historically most scientists were .

The contribution of the Catholic Church to science is enormous:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scient...

and that is just the clergy of the Catholic church.

> other authors in whose writings the church was not interested in finding truth, and in fact in whose writings it prohibited its adherents from seeking truth, include machiavelli, pascal, descartes, francis bacon, diderot, gibbon, erasmus darwin, and kant

The index only existed for part of the history of the church, and entirely in modern times. It was an era in which books were widely censored by secular authorities for secular reasons too - just as we have widespread censorship of video today (e.g. all films publicly shown in the UK require approval by a government body).

its a remarkably short list given the huge number of books that were printed very several centuries

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