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The discovery, in 1822, of Cicero's De re publica was one of the first major recoveries of a lost ancient text from a palimpsest. Another famous example is the discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest , which was used to make a prayer book almost 300 years after the original work was written.
Gnosticism used a number of religious texts that are preserved, in part or whole, in ancient manuscripts, or lost but mentioned critically in Patristic writings. There is significant scholarly debate around what Gnosticism is, and therefore what qualifies as a "Gnostic text." [1]
Seals showing Indus script, an ancient undeciphered writing system Page 32 of the Voynich manuscript, a medieval manuscript written with an undeciphered writing system. Many undeciphered writing systems exist today; most date back several thousand years, although some more modern examples do exist.
Much of the cultural heritage of classical antiquity was lost as a consequence of the loss of books in late antiquity, which in the west was the period from the late third to late sixth century CE. A major part of antique Greek [ 1 ] [ 2 ] and Latin literature was lost during this period, and only a small number of works remained extant to the ...
The parchments could be reused after scraping off the ink of the old texts, and writing new books on the previously used parchment, creating what is called a palimpsest. [21] Fortunately for modern scholars, the old writing can still be retrieved, and many extremely valuable works, which would have otherwise been lost, have been recovered in ...
The following is a list of the world's oldest surviving physical documents. Each entry is the most ancient of each language or civilization. For example, the Narmer Palette may be the most ancient from Egypt, but there are many other surviving written documents from Egypt later than the Narmer Palette but still more ancient than the Missal of Silos.
Ancient literature comprises religious and scientific documents, tales, poetry and plays, royal edicts and declarations, and other forms of writing that were recorded on a variety of media, including stone, clay tablets, papyri, palm leaves, and metal.
Diogenes Laërtius lists, in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 230 CE), works of Aristotle comprising 156 titles divided into approximately 400 books, which he reports as totaling 445,270 lines of writing; [10] however, many of these are lost or only survive in fragments, and some may have been incorrectly attributed.