Hacker News Reader

Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

This could eventually completely transform our understanding of Antiquity. It is estimated that only around 1% of the ancient works in Greek and Latin have survived to the present day, much less in other languages such as Punic [0]. Some works and some authors we only know by name because they were alluded to in later texts.

It's also well known that surviving texts survived because they were copied again and again on costly animal skin during the Middle Ages, by monks who had to make a choice and naturally favored topics that were of most interest to them.

This could quite literally change everything.

[0] https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2021/09/25/are-there-more-...

View on HN

I'm not sure what you expect to find that would completely transform our understanding of the time period. The most likely discoveries are going to be filling in details about things we already knew. This period of time was already pretty well documented. Even if we found something amazing like some of Aristotle's lost works, we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them. Really the most interesting and useful finds would be more mundane things like household records, and personal diaries.

> we basically already know what they were and (roughly) what was in them

So we can just get ChatGPT to fill in the blanks.

Disagree. My understanding is that most surviving works have been transcribed repeatedly over the centuries, often times based on preferences of the people living at the time. There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.

I think it's less that the stuff would be considered heterodox, as just not as good/relevant. Like certain texts were used in the Roman world for school, just kind of universally taught to the literate class. The Aeneid was one of these but before it was written the Annales by Ennius was the classic poem everyone had to learn. Then the Annales became less popular, stopped being taught, and now we only have some fragments of it.

> There’s a big chance that excavation could find deeply heterodox stuff, I think.

Heterodoxy (or really, orthodoxy) wasn't really a thing in 79ad, and you're not likely to find much of it in the private library of a wealthy Roman's vacation home. The only forbidden work you're going to see from that era is stuff critical of the emperor.

I mean heterodox as seen by medieval monks, so deeply unchristian things, for example.

It's hard to imagine something more heterodox than Ovid (he managed to get himself exiled by Augustus), and that survived. Medieval readers didn't seem to mind that sort of thing in Greco Roman writing, it was part of their heritage, no one was seriously worshipping those gods so it wasn't seen as a threat. The people in the past behaving in a way that was seen as immoral wasn't a problem.

The folks in the monastery were more open minded towards those who proceeded in the previous millennium than we are to those a thousand years ago.

That said, they had limited resources. This is very cool

Epicureanism was fairly heterodox/countercultural even during its heyday, and our sources on it are much more limited than the sources on more acceptable schools such as Stoicism. For example, we don't really have any writings from Epicurus except for short fragments, when we know from his students that he wrote many books. Much more survives from his students, but even then one of the main sources of our knowledge of Epicureanism (especially before we started recovering Herculaneum scrolls) was Seneca, a Stoic writing about it as a rival school. None of this was forbidden at the time, but it was unpopular (especially among the ruling class) and eccentric (ditto).

We've seen this happen already once with the recovery of palimpsests. Outside of a few lucky discoveries, the vast majority of what monks were discarding were things that were not seen as useful - outdated (to them) legal texts, liturgical books, etc.

The exception though would be Greek literature. Greek literacy collapsed in the early medieval era and a large catalogue was probably just scrapped or discarded before even being collected in Monasteries. Herculaneum could represent a legitimate treasure trove in that regard.

A _lot_ of greek literature survived via the Byzantine Empire and through Arabic translation, though.

Could change our understanding of history - slavery, early Christianity, politics, secularism among roman elite, etc

Or of technology- steam power, mechanical computation (like the Antikythera mechanism, which is the only known example of such a thing until 1300 years later), mechanized production, mining techniques, etc

For our understanding of Christianity, the Pompeii eruption was too soon to the events, so unless the owner was amongst the first Christians worldwide and there is a dated letter from St Luke foretelling the destruction of the temple I don't think it'll be too revolutionary

https://www.jjmjs.org/uploads/1/1/9/0/11908749/wayment_and_g...

Precisely how early Heliocentrism began to be seriously considered is a very much open question, but of its more lucid proponents, very little survives, if anything at all. Usually only in snippets told by others.

And that's just one thing, who knows what else those old Greeks/Phoenicians/etc were kicking about.

> I'm not sure what you expect to find

What dodecahedra were for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com