Ancient texts

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Physics Guy
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Ancient texts

Post by Physics Guy »

In a recent thread there were debates about how to criticise ancient (or hypothetically ancient) texts. I'm not sure how well I really followed the debates but it occurred to me that the word of power "text" probably had a pretty different meaning in ancient times from what it has today.

Especially in the case of scriptural texts, a lot of modern people care about ancient texts, but if we don't understand how texts have changed since ancient times, we may be like visitors to palaeontology museums who see the big dinosaur fossils and imagine that dinosaurs were bony skeleton creatures.

So this thread is a request to Kishkumen and Symmachus, and anyone else who actually knows anything about this stuff, to bring us all up to speed. By way of a kickoff, even if all it does is tell the experts how much of an ignorance barrier they face, here are the impressions I have.

I don't think there was such a thing as publication before Gutenberg. I think that written texts were simply lecture notes for reading aloud to small audiences. I think that both readers and writers thought of texts in that role. In effect "oral culture" didn't die at all with the invention of writing, but only with the invention of printing. Until Gutenberg, writing was an extension of oral culture, not a successor form of culture that displaced it.

Such at any rate is my impression, however ill informed it may be. To me it accounts for the frequently miserable level of editing in ancient writing. Of the handful of ancient texts that I have tried to read, many have seemed to me like first drafts, desperately in need of revision. But I don't think that ancient writers were really incompetent. I just think that they weren't taking writing seriously as writing for publication in our sense. I think they were all basically writing notes to be read aloud among friends over drinks.

And so it seems to me that when we think about how ancient texts might relate to each other, we'll be messing up badly if we think of the question as similar to the one of how modern texts can relate to each other. I imagine that if ancient writers were aware of other ancient writings besides their own, they probably thought of them more as "stories I heard somewhere once" than as "books I have read" in our sense today.

On the other hand maybe ancient writers thought of other writings as recipes, or even magic spells, that had to be repeated verbatim or not at all, lest something essential be lost.

I don't know. I'm just suspicious that in thinking of ancient texts "simply as texts" we may be committing a fundamental kind of anachronism without realising it. What were texts, after all, in ancient times?
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Re: Ancient texts

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I will defer to my colleague whose knowledge is far superior to my own. I will say that in Mediterranean antiquity that there were bookshops and libraries, and that works were deliberately circulated publicly or "published." I would not agree that it takes mass manufacture or mechanical reproduction of a text to have publication, but that is just my sense of things. I would also not agree that oral culture died. Evidence abounds of oral culture up to the present. It may not be oral culture along the lines of Homeric bards, but it is oral culture nonetheless. To counter your point about notes, I would point you to evidence in the letters of Pliny the Younger that he submitted his work to his friends, and they reciprocated, providing each other minutely detailed criticisms of the texts they were all working on.
Last edited by Kishkumen on Thu Jun 10, 2021 8:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Ancient texts

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There lies a fundamental problem in discussing ancient texts with mopologists, there is no assumption the the Book of Abraham and Book of Abraham are ancient texts. They are modern fiction until demonstrated otherwise. As both have a myriad of problems - good luck.
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Re: Ancient texts

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Hi PhysicsGuy,

You are asking some very perceptive questions. In this post, about halfway through, I spent some time talking about a book by Assyriologist Marc Van De Mieroop that is relevant to some of your questions. You might find that helpful.

There are quite a few things I’d like to say, but I think before I dive into the particulars I’m gonna wait on some other input and make some broader comments about context. You really aren’t talking about just ancient texts, you are talking about scriptures. This immediately complicates things.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (and by extension Mormonism) has conditioned the way we talk about ancient texts because there are lots of antecedent issues that directly impact those respective faiths. If you aren’t careful, you can get swept down one path when what you really want to do is go down the other.

In my opinion there are two broad ways to speak about texts: materially and conceptually. The material concerns things such as history, archeology, and the economic issues surrounding ancient texts. The conceptual deals with philosophy and theology, to include doctrines like the divine inspiration and preservation of scripture or the hermeneutical strategies one ought to employ in the interpretation of texts.

For example, English speaking Evangelicals have certain anxieties about their texts and seek to alleviate those anxieties with apologetic arguments that transgress the boundaries between the material and conceptual. You can see this with arguments that seek to establish the resurrection of Jesus Christ by material means when the issue can only be meaningfully addressed by conceptual issues. All that noise about how wildly reliable the gospels are as historical documents and how mind blowing it is that women were the earliest witnesses is just smoke and mirrors to hide more relevant issues. As far as someone like William Lane Craig is concerned, it is better to lay out a minimal case for the best explanation of the empty tomb rather than explain how Jesus being executed fits within the divine economy of sin expiation as detailed in the Hebrew Bible. You start picking apart Hebrews and comparing that text with Leviticus, you open up a multitude of avenues to undermine Christian scriptures in a far more meaningful fashion than anything a Bart Ehrman or Richard Carrier could hope to accomplish.

Mormon Apologists are in a similar boat. They will confuse the material with the conceptual to draw people away from the actual text and into the weeds with theories of how Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon or absolutely irrelevant observations about supposed ancient cognate languages.

Your questions are those that have to do with the material and deserve answers from that end. For what it is worth, my first comment in regards to that is that there is a great deal of cultural relevance when talking about people’s relationships with texts. The Greeks didn’t treat texts like the Assyrians, and the Assyrians didn’t understand the concept of literature in the same way the Sumerians did. Answers to your questions are going to be different based on where in time you are talking about and the geographical location.
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Re: Ancient texts

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Kishkumen wrote:
Thu Jun 10, 2021 6:37 pm
I will say that in Mediterranean antiquity that there were bookshops and libraries, and that works were deliberately circulated publicly or "published." I would not agree that it takes mass manufacture or mechanical reproduction of a text to have publication, but that is just my sense of things.
Yeah, actually I knew this, too. I've seen the cool three-story Roman library in Ephesus. Just how many libraries were there, and how many books did they have? If publication existed, how did it work? Was a significant fraction of slave power devoted to copying books?
I would also not agree that oral culture died. Evidence abounds of oral culture up to the present. It may not be oral culture along the lines of Homeric bards, but it is oral culture nonetheless.
Yeah, TikTok is arguably as much oral culture as Homer was. Maybe there's a statement about how closely oral and written culture overlapped, though. Neither died but they drifted apart?
To counter your point about notes, I would point you to evidence in the letters of Pliny the Younger that he submitted his work to his friends, and they reciprocated, providing each other minutely detailed criticisms of the texts they were all working on.
This must just have been harder then that it would be now, when I can just edit my file. Did Pliny really pull up a new roll of parchment and write it all out again in a new draft in response to feedback from his friends? Or did he just tell his slave to do that? If that, then I can't help wondering how much input the slave might have ended up having in the final product. I mean, was the slave just writing out every word as Pliny dictated his revised version, or was the slave more like a doctoral candidate revising a thesis chapter on general instructions from Pliny as his advisor?
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Re: Ancient texts

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DrStakhanovite wrote:
Fri Jun 11, 2021 12:38 am
You really aren’t talking about just ancient texts, you are talking about scriptures. This immediately complicates things.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (and by extension Mormonism) has conditioned the way we talk about ancient texts because there are lots of antecedent issues that directly impact those respective faiths. If you aren’t careful, you can get swept down one path when what you really want to do is go down the other.
My idea was to ask about texts in general, as a basis for subsequent discussion of scriptures in particular, but in retrospect it was a little silly of me to imagine that this distinction between "texts in general" and "scripture" could be upheld while asking what texts at all even were.

I guess I really just want to avoid focusing too much on what people today may think ancient texts should have been and find out instead, as far as we can, what texts actually were to ancient people. And in that sense I'm probably more concerned about the material conditions of reading and writing in ancient times than about historical trends in conceptual content of texts. Once you can even frame the issue confidently as one of conceptual content, it seems to me, you have already crossed a certain Rubicon of assuming that we understand how to read ancient texts. What I want instead is to hesitate on that bank for a while, looking around.
The Greeks didn’t treat texts like the Assyrians, and the Assyrians didn’t understand the concept of literature in the same way the Sumerians did. Answers to your questions are going to be different based on where in time you are talking about and the geographical location.
Sigh, yeah. I didn't think at all about that, but now you say it, it's obvious. "Ancient" covers a lot of time and space. In some ways we might hope that ancient cultures were at least somewhat less diverse than modern ones, because there were fewer technological possibilities, just as our descendants may well view our whole world as quaintly homogeneous. Everyone was just banging the same rocks together, after all, before Google. But actually right before Google there were a bunch of different search engines, each with all its own quirks, and the technological breakthrough of page rank brought convergence, not diversity.

So again, I don't know what to expect, and will welcome any enlightenment offered. I can maybe toss in a tidbit from my one fat book of subcontinental Indian history, to the effect that the whole genre of chronicle literature, on which so much of the history of other parts of the world is based, hardly seems to have existed in India. There are ancient coins with inscriptions, ancient inscriptions on stone, and ancient epic poems. Ancient Indian societies were literate. But there just don't seem to be any ancient historical records in India. Writing little accounts for a ruler of the glorious deeds of his ancestors doesn't seem to have been a thing. I don't know why not, and I'm not sure anyone does.
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Re: Ancient texts

Post by Kishkumen »

Physics Guy wrote:
Fri Jun 11, 2021 8:14 am
Yeah, actually I knew this, too. I've seen the cool three-story Roman library in Ephesus. Just how many libraries were there, and how many books did they have? If publication existed, how did it work? Was a significant fraction of slave power devoted to copying books?
You might find the book Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome helpful. There is a chapter devoted to bookshops that is both informative in the sense of telling you interesting information about the book trade and in the sense of letting you know how little, unfortunately, there is to know about some of these questions. Some of the great libraries of the Hellenistic era were in Pergamon and Alexandria, as well as Rome, but there were plenty of sizable private collections. Booksellers probably sold used books and produced new ones. Slaves were engaged as scribes to copy manuscripts.

This brief web essay may be helpful too:

https://sites.dartmouth.edu/ancientbook ... n-economy/
Yeah, TikTok is arguably as much oral culture as Homer was. Maybe there's a statement about how closely oral and written culture overlapped, though. Neither died but they drifted apart?
I don't know. I will say that I marvel at the number of young people who use constructions like "would've" in their speaking and writing, which is evidence of a lapse in literacy, in my view. On the other hand, I am heartened to see young people mispronounce words that they have acquired from reading but have not heard before and thus do not know the conventional pronunciation. In other words, the cross-fertilization of textuality and orality seems to be alive and well.
This must just have been harder then that it would be now, when I can just edit my file. Did Pliny really pull up a new roll of parchment and write it all out again in a new draft in response to feedback from his friends? Or did he just tell his slave to do that? If that, then I can't help wondering how much input the slave might have ended up having in the final product. I mean, was the slave just writing out every word as Pliny dictated his revised version, or was the slave more like a doctoral candidate revising a thesis chapter on general instructions from Pliny as his advisor?
With Pliny the Younger we are talking mostly about speeches and poems, not something like his uncle's Natural History. My recollection is that he was sending out single speeches or single poems and that he expected his friends would praise and criticize his work, sometimes even recommending specific/individual lexical choices. If I have time I will dig up some passages from his letters to illustrate what I am clumsily adumbrating here.
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Re: Ancient texts

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So you have a prodigious writer like Origen who produced over 2K works in his lifetime, who hands his original works over to scribes/slaves who spend their days making copy after copy? In one respect it would be nice as one who likes to read and learn to be exposed to the bleeding edge discussion of the day, but on the other hand, producing copy after copy of the same scroll would be the definition of tedium.
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Re: Ancient texts

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Kishkumen wrote:
Fri Jun 11, 2021 1:45 pm
This brief web essay may be helpful too:
https://sites.dartmouth.edu/ancientbook ... n-economy/
That is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to get from this thread. Thank you. That short essay is an eye-opener. It points to a bunch of other things that I would love to follow up if I can, but even if I stop there, I've learned a lot of what I wanted to learn.

There was an elaborate publication economy, it was based on slave labor, books were a luxury good. So some of that is much more similar to nowadays than I had imagined, some of it is really different. Like the fact that what we would call typos were common, and people paid more for texts that had fewer: frequency of errors in texts produced by hand by slave labor is something I never would have considered, but paying more for better spelling is exactly what we'd do now if we had the same issue.

What does all that mean for how we should read ancient texts? I don't know. Maybe it's not as much of a mistake as I feared, to read them as if they were written today? Or maybe that feeling is just that anything seems more understandable in general when you know a bit more about it.

What chance do we have to find out analogous things about other ancient places and times besides the Roman Empire?
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Re: Ancient texts

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This is pretty interesting, Reverend. How does real ancient book economy compare to the Book of Mormon account of itself?

Tell me where you think I'm off base here.

The author(s) of the Book of Mormon held a fundamentalist view of the Bible. Joseph Smith said the Book of Mormon is the word of God, and the Bible, as far as translated correctly. Translation errors include 'careless scribes' and minor interpolations, but if those were fixed, then from Adam and Eve, to the tower, to slaves in Egypt, everything happened in the most literal way.

The author assumed that "powerful writing" was a mark of the most Godly men. Bets are hedged by Ether lamenting the awkwardness of their hands; if it's not convincing, don't defy the lord with criticism. That other guy though, in the sealed 2/3, Mohonri, that guy could write better than anyone.

Most importantly, it's the prophets of God who write with their own hand on metal plates, so that no errors in transmission can crop up. The Book of Mormon assures us of its own provenance. Metal records handed down from prophet to prophet, no errors.

At the same time, however, the Book of Mormon boasts of having a literate society. How does that happen with metal plates? Is it like, okay, you've got the brass plates, that's the original copy, and then the slave labor produces documents on soft materials to make it more accessible? I don't think there is a reference to anything but plates though...
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