Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin?

Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by jeffreyrogers on Sunday September 26, 2021 @05:14PM (#28664727)

Maybe someone on HN knows the answer to this question, which I've wondered for a while. Are there other civilizations of similar cultural sophistication to the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese whose writings have just not been passed down and so we aren't as familiar with them? Or are the ones whose work survived roughly it, even if much of their works are lost. E.g. there doesn't seem to be much surviving Persian literature, but I'm not sure if this is because it wasn't preserved well or if it's because there wasn't much of it to begin with.

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by prox on Sunday September 26, 2021 @05:38PM (#28664898)

Sanskrit in the Indian subcontinent has a long history, and not many are familiar with them. Lots of other scripts and languages in East Asia are relatively unknown (for example from Indonesia)

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by wizard-beta on Sunday September 26, 2021 @05:53PM (#28665005)

Even though people are not so familiar with classical Indian civilization, they were very highly literate and the extant corpus is enormous. It easily rivals or exceeds classical Greek and Latin. I have heard that the Mahabharata is 10 times longer than the Iliad/Odyssey.

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by prox on Sunday September 26, 2021 @06:00PM (#28665046)

On that line of thought, probably it’s Tibetan and buddhism that must have an extensive library. Most of these works have survived for a very long time.

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by dr_dshiv on Sunday September 26, 2021 @06:32PM (#28665281)

There are thousands of lost palm leaf books, in Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, rotting away.

There is simply no money to support the scholarship that would preserve these works. It's incredibly sad.

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by prox on Sunday September 26, 2021 @07:13PM (#28665499)

Do you know any libraries that need financial support for archiving this body of work?

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by dr_dshiv on Monday September 27, 2021 @02:01AM (#28667529)

I know of research institutes, yes.

Sanskrit is widely taught in younger years. Funding needs to go to bright PhD students to make the field again. It's extremely conservative and territorial after so many years of hardship.

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by Goety on Sunday September 26, 2021 @11:53PM (#28666925)

I hope they get digitized before they all fall apart. Maybe they should contact google.

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by dr_dshiv on Monday September 27, 2021 @02:39AM (#28667749)

They have to be found first. They are mostly scattered in temple basements and private collections.

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by ncmncm on Sunday September 26, 2021 @06:37PM (#28665310)

The whole of modern linguistic theory, including the regular, context-free, and unrestricted grammars, were fully worked out in still-preserved Sanskrit.

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by EarlKing on Sunday September 26, 2021 @11:15PM (#28666721)

I suppose I could mention the city-states of Mesopotamia such as Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon. They left behind a rather rich literature which survived to this day (thanks to having been written on clay tablets instead of papyrus), though much of it remained inaccessible until the Cunieform script was deciphered in the 1800s. As with Romans and Greeks you'll find a wide variety of texts from the religious and scientific, to legal treatises, to contracts and shopping lists.

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by iammisc on Monday September 27, 2021 @12:01AM (#28666969)

The indian civilizations were extremely complex. Several philosophies written about in ancient Sanskrit. Things like the arthashastra or the vedas even. Very interesting work. Even more interesting in their distinctive 'easternness' while still essentially just being another branch of the ancient indo European philosophies (and thus somewhat closely related to the Greek and Roman)

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by asdff on Monday September 27, 2021 @01:42AM (#28667434)

Mesoamerican literature is rich

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_literature

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by nextaccountic on Sunday September 26, 2021 @05:17PM (#28664757)

Try posting this question on https://reddit.com/r/askhistorians maybe? They often have in-depth, comprehensive answers, that go into the evidence we have available

edit: anyway this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28663948 has some pointers

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Re:Are there more surviving ancient writings in Greek or Latin? by nerfhammer on Sunday September 26, 2021 @10:37PM (#28666546)

The article mentions Punic (Carthage)

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