Hello!
I am an undergrad History student currently on leave and I have some familiarity with the ancient world however I am a terrible ignoramus when it comes to manuscript transmission. One thing that fascinates me is the assortment of 'lost works' from the ancient and medieval periods which we know of via references or fragments but which are not preserved extant or in any significant form. All the lost works of Suetonius and Porphyry are eye-watering to consider in terms of source material if they could be re-discovered or reconstructed. I'd like to find out about how these works became 'lost' and what the odds are of recovering any of them? Any authors or periods will do for examples - I know getting hold of classical Greek texts is highly unlikely but are there chances of some later works being found buried out in the wilderness like Nag Hammadi or the Dead Sea Scrolls?
To what extent is the medieval Church to be held responsible for the present situation? It's often claimed that Christianity kept civilisation alive during the Dark Ages and that manuscript transmission by monks preserved ancient learning. However, I'm aware of the preservation of much Greek wisdom by Arabic and Persian libraries and I've read accusations of deliberate destruction or neglect of manuscripts containing heretical teachings, 'pagan learning' deemed unworthy of preservation or anything that put the Church in a bad light. And of course Eusebius forever ruining our understanding of Josephus, among other things. Did the Church destroy many ancient texts deliberately? How much was lost as a result of the prioritization of Scripture transmission and the discarding of pagan texts?
Thank you for any help!
As spectacular as the mass destruction of libraries is, in many ways they're less important for lost works than the simple act of not copying the works. It's often forgotten in our present-day age of easily reproduced text that books are fragile and that handwritten books in particular are expensive and laborious to write. Papyrus rolls and wax tablets (the usual support of ancient books until the rise of the parchment codex in late antiquity) are particularly notable for being extremely fragile and needing to be recopied often to survive; parchment is less fragile but also correspondingly much more expensive and labor-intensive to produce. Hence, virtually any social disruption such as deurbaniztion or even change in fashion is liable to interrupt the transmission of texts and cause them to be "lost", or at least lost enough that they are likely to survive only in isolated repositories whether at Nag Hammadi, Oxhyrinchus, Turfan, or Deir es-Suryani.
I know getting hold of classical Greek texts is highly unlikely but are there chances of some later works being found buried out in the wilderness like Nag Hammadi or the Dead Sea Scrolls?
It's possible; we know of sites where exceptional environmental conditions permit abnormally large numbers of texts to survive and it's quite possible that further archaeological research will find others. Central Asia and Bactria for instance are quite understudied archaeologically, as are significant parts of the Horn of Africa and I would not be extra-ordinarily surprised if there are exceptional manuscript caches floating around. In addition, it's eminently possible that further research in known libraries will produce copies of currently unknown or understudied texts, which in a way is rather more exciting than finding lost copies of texts we already knew existed.
To what extent is the medieval Church to be held responsible for the present situation?
Not very, I'm afraid. While Arabs and Persians rightfully get a great deal of credit for preserving and transmitting literary texts from classical and late antiquity, we often forget that the Byzantine Empire played as big a role in the transmission of Greek texts thanks to monasteries in the Imperial capital like the Studion Monastery. In addition, much classical learning was transmitted in Arabic and Persian not just thanks to Byzantine Greeks who remained in the early Caliphate but also to Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic scholars. One of our most important witnesses to the Classical historian Berossus, for example, is preserved in Armenian translation. We also have to remember when discussing Latin texts that the Western Empire became substantially more deurbanized than the Eastern half of the Empire, and as the Western half was the main region where Latin remained important this would have a serious effect on Latin text survival quite irrespective of religion.