If a truly large archive were found then who’s to say that it could survive long enough to be properly studied? There are multiple sources of untouched ancient texts today which aren’t much studied. Off the top of my head, I’ve heard there are chests full of (roughly 1000-year-old) Arabic manuscripts littering the Archbishop’s palace in Toledo, largely untouched due to a lack of interest/number of scholars (and perhaps it is hard to get access). There are also many manuscripts spread out across private basements in Timbuktu, those have survived several threats but who’s to say they will survive more? On the other hand we have hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets, most of which are unread (they had the advantage that when a library burns down the tablets are often fired instead of destroyed). It is hard to decide what is worth prioritising before it has been read.

The one solace we can take is that modern techniques may let us read manuscripts after they have been largely destroyed.

This reminds me of one of the episodes of the documentary series "Endangered Civilizations". From the description[1]:

> 9. The Books Under the Sand

> During the time of trans-Saharan trading, its strategic location along the caravan route enabled it to prosper. It was also the gathering place for the pilgrims from western Sahara as they began their journey to Mecca. It had already attained the position as a prestigious economic and spiritual center. Chinguetti was considered the capital of the "Land of the Moors".

In the episode, they reference and show a lot of very old texts. If I remember correctly, they mostly came from the days when the area was replete with trading activity, around the 12th or 13th century. One of the things they discuss in the episode is the fact that there aren't enough researchers/scientists that are studying them, so many of the books end up being inadvertently destroyed or buried under the always-shifting sands.

While I was watching the show, I remember thinking how awesome it would be to have some sort-of machine that you could point at the ground and be able to just see what's buried deep underfoot, for a wide radius. There's so much history in that area that is just completely inaccessible to us because of the climate and geography.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B079J3NT2V

While not incredibly high-resolution, ground penetrating radar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-penetrating_radar) is often used in archaeology to try and find buildings/artifacts without digging anything up.

> There are also many manuscripts spread out across private basements in Timbuktu, those have survived several threats but who’s to say they will survive more?

-Which reminds me of Joshua Hammer's brilliant book 'The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu', detailing the efforts to save those collections from the latest threat to them - islamic militants.

The title alone was enough to make me want to read the book, I'll admit.

At least for cuneiform tablets, somewhere I read most of them are utterly boring, mostly inventory and transactions. Maybe you could pass years sifting through it to finally find something valuable.

Here's the cuneiform scans if you're interested:

https://cdli.ucla.edu/?q=news/machine-assisted-translation-c...

That's only the announcement that they will be scanned?

In the aggregate that data might be incredibly valuable, and valuable in a way that might not be obvious to the gatekeepers of these materials. You never know what people can do with more data until you put it out there.

But neither do the people who might do something with it, which I guess is why there's little funding for such endeavors. You need somebody with the money and conviction to make the gamble.

This is very true. A lot about civilisation can be learned from tax records but just because there are lots of tax records it does not mean they are particularly easy to read or to recognise, even for an expert.

Give me a civilizations inventory and transaction log and I'll show you their economy, and society.

"Dammit Zuel, this is the last time I'll give you grain on credit. Bring the camels next week or else!" scribles another tally onto the tablets.

There is work to recover the scrolls that were burned in Pompei and Herculaneum. I find that pretty remarkable.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/buried-ash-vesuvius-s...

Well ancient and pristinely preserved do not really usually go together... but Villa Papyri, near Pompeii, almost gets you there. The villa's name derives from the discovery of its library, the only surviving library from the Graeco-Roman world that exists in its entirety. It contains over 1,800 papyrus scrolls. The scrolls are coarbonized and rolled up, but each scroll gets very slowly unrolled, read, studied and preserved in the National Library in Naples. With the use of new technologies the analysis of the scrolls is becoming faster and allowing the recover more and more of the works. It’s possible to go visit both the ruins of the villa and the scrolls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_of_the_Papyri

The linked methods don't look promising (yet) https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6895

See also

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.09883

which is a newer paper using the same imaging method (X-ray phase-contrast tomography) plus an algorithm to separate the rolled-up layers from the 3D scan data. Results are better, though still far from being able to decode substantial portions of text.

edit: I also found an article in Smithsonian Magazine from just last month, about someone else's even more recent attempts:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/buried-ash-vesuvius-s...

The best approximation we have are the scrolls from Herculanum. They're burnt and charred, but some scientists are working on reading them using CT scans, X-Rays, etc.

An Egyptologist told me there are enough unstudied papyri in archives to keep all researchers occupied for the next 100 years. Basically there is no need to dig anymore - the limiting factor is not finding the scrolls, it is studying them to figure out if they contain anything interesting.

Surely there's some order in this "reading list" where new discoveries can take priority based on circumstantial factors of the digging site alone.

To some extent, but take a find like the Oxyrhynchus Papyri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxyrhynchus_Papyri - it is basically a giant trash heap of unorganized papyrus fragments. It was discovered in 1896 and it still being cataloged! Most of it is uninteresting, but some amazing finds like a previously unknown play by Sophocles.

To quote Wikipedia: Since 1898 academics have puzzled together and transcribed over 5000 documents from what were originally hundreds of boxes of papyrus fragments the size of large cornflakes. This is thought to represent only 1 to 2 percent of what is estimated to be at least half a million papyri still remaining to be conserved, transcribed, deciphered and catalogued.

And that is just one find.

He can contact me if he is interested in Hieratic OCR.

There are probably quite some private storages of old sources. For example I really like to see the restricted libary/archiv of the Vatikan etc. To finally have the proof, that all history was planned by the Illuminati and Aliens...

Or more likely to find out some shocking previously unknown heresy of some saints/popes I did not know anyway.

But more seriously, I think it is unlikely to find a sealed old libary somewhere, which was never mentioned anywhere. The best you can hope for are new scrolla here and there to maybe get new texts of Heraklit or alike, but that would be something. The detailed history of the cultures I am more interested at the moment, celtic druids for example, did not write down their knowledge. So it is unlikely that anything shows up in that regard.

There definitely were Roman public libraries.

Plinus reports that Pollio built the first public library in Rome around 30 BC. He was a patron of Virgil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Asinius_Pollio_(consul_4...

The scrolls from Herculaneum definitely contain a lot of non extant works, the problem is figuring out how to read them

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/buried-ash-vesuvius-s...

Everyone is hoping for a copy of Suetonius’ Lives of Famous Whores.

Many texts formerly considered lost since Antiquity, and some that were unknown, have been recovered in the last decades. It's a steady flow, not a sudden outburst.

My personal favorite would be to recover all of the texts by pre-Socratics.