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Comment by sakri | Hacker News Reader

That Aztec illustration!

I was a bit disappointed with all the mentions of "ancient" and the oldest thing on that page was 400 AD.

Glad to see it, especially when compared to the fate of Mayan codices that fell into catholic hands:

"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." (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices)

Catholics, in particular Franciscans, have also been extremely useful in describing, preserving and creating codices describing the life, history and mythology of the precolumbians, not to mention their roles in the syncretic emerging culture. Once could cite [Bernardino de Sahagún](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardino_de_Sahag%C3%BAn) for instance.

That was true of much of the Aztec written culture as well but there were some notable exceptions. We can thank Fray Bernardino de Sahagún for saving some important parts of the Nahua tradition despite his personal views:

http://beta.wdl.org/en/item/10096/#collection=florentine-cod...

This particular text is already widely available. (There are scans of the whole thing on Wikipedia, for instance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Borgia#mediaviewer/File:C... .

You don't have to go too many centuries before then and you start running out of writing.

400AD is closer to today than it is to the invention of writing.

That said, as you go back there is a lot less writing. Less writing happened and less survived.

The Hamurabbi code from 1754 BC is amazing partly because it's an island. A longish piece of text when all we have from the periods around it is lists of names and other short texts. Reading the Hamurabbi code (or the best translation we can get) really lets you feel like these people were real.

Still, there's a huge difference between that and something like Plato or Sun Tzu 100 years later. They were literate in a way we would recognize as literate and they could explain themselves through text, writing to convince other literate people like us, like we are doing write now on These guys really do exist through their works. You can form a mental model of how they think.

There are much finer examples of ancient literature, surviving versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh can be as old as the Code of Hammurabi, some Old Babylonian tablets from 1800 BCE survive though the version Sîn-lēqi-unninni compiled in Akkadian is a relative latecomer at 1200 BCE.

While I have only read it in translations, I find that it deals with concepts of personal death, friendship, loss, jealousy, love and sexuality in ways that are remarkably erudite and sophisticated.

"The Lament for Ur" is utterly stunning to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lament_for_Ur

and "The Debate between Bird and Fish" or "The Debate between Winter and Summer" are incredibly creative works:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_bird_and_fish

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_between_Winter_and_Summe...

Some of the Pyramid Texts of the 5th and 6th Dynasties (about 2400 BCE) --especially Utterance 373 for the Pharaoh Teti-- are quite beautiful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Texts#Examples

And if legal codes and injunctions are your thing "The Instructions of Shuruppak" or "The Maxims of Ptahhotep" are probably 700-900 years older than The Code of Hammurabi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_of_Shuruppak

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maxims_of_Ptahhotep

And the saddest truth about the really ancient writings: most are still unread, remaining in some closed vaults, or are being often actively destroyed!

Specifically: clay tablets written in cuneiform aren't easy to read: experts are needed, and we have much less experts than the material. So there is a lot of stuff in the vaults of the big museums never read. One of the big problems is matching the texts: when you have unsorted tablets it's like having only the single pages from many books without the page numbers. There is a story somewhere but it's hard to reconstruct.

http://theamericanscholar.org/an-epic-in-flux/

Situation on the field is much worse: robbers and wars (US-led Iraq war was a very dramatic example(1)) are destroying a lot.

(1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4461755.stm

We also have the Laws of Eshnunna, preceding the Code of Hamurabbi by a couple of hundred years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Eshnunna

I enjoy these texts from our deep past, and I wish we had more of them. They show that our ancestors wrestled with many of the issues we contend with today. Thanks to several thousand years of prior work, we may have a bigger toolbox of solutions than they did.

Here's a fun thought, there's probably been more written since the dawn of the 21st century to today, than from the invention of writing to 400AD.

Well, that Virgil at least is technically ancient, as 400AD in the Western Roman Empire counts as part of late antiquity.

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