[null and void]

My God! Ye Gods! What a treasure!

[aruanan]

ALMOST all the texts we have of the ancient classics derive from generations of scribal copies, separated by many centuries from the originals.

With the exception of the New Testament documents, virtually all the other classic texts are represented by only a very few copies written many hundreds of years after the originals. The generations of scribal copying isn't too bad a thing unless one has only a very few copies to work with in which case it is difficult to get a good idea of what the original documents actually were. Polar opposites are the early Christian literature/New Testament and the Koran. In the former, there is such a wealth of literature that most of the New Testament can be reconstructed from quotes in the early church fathers alone. There is a very good degree of certainty about the text of the original writings as they existed in the latter half of the first century and the early second century. In contrast, "reformers" in Islam caused non-authorized versions of the Koran to be rounded up and burned. The discoveries in Herculaneum are truly wonderful and terribly exciting.

[Jurist]

Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said:

O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you.

Solon in return asked him what he meant.

I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you why. There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes...."
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html

Keep in mind, the collective Western memory has been largely destroyed by the Burning of the Library of Alexandria, along with all the book burnings from the Sack of Rome, to the Dark Ages forward. We in the West suffer from a collective cultural amnesia.
Library of Alexandria #1
Library of Alexandria #2
Library of Alexandria #3

Jurist

[Fish out of Water]

fyi

[Don Myers]

bttt

[father_elijah]

FYI

[kiryandil]

ping

[VOA]

bump

[SunkenCiv]

Just adding this to the GGG homepage, not sending a general distribution.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.

[fella]

I wonder if a MRI could tell the different layers apart in the scrolls and if it tell ink from the paper and finally if it could then digitally unroll the scroll?

[SunkenCiv]

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