Where stories come from, and where they went.
Section V of 5
Lost books and libraries, unique copies and manuscripts that carried texts on: what is missing, when it was last copied or quoted, and evidence that it existed.
3 entries
Twelve lost books of antiquity, from Livy's missing books to Sappho, with the summaries, quotations, lists and titles that show each one existed.
Carbonized by Vesuvius in AD 79, the Herculaneum scrolls are mostly Philodemus. How they were found in 1752, unrolled by hand and, since 2023, read unopened.
The Library of Ashurbanipal is almost 32,000 clay tablets and fragments from Nineveh. Its own lists name wax writing boards too, and none of those survived.
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