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What are important historical books lost to time?
Not just books from the 1800s or 1900s, but even older. 1400s, 800s, 100s, books from BCE, etc. It can be fiction or non-fiction.
If a small blurb about the book could be provided and its significance that would be great.
Additionally, if you could help direct me or provide guidance on where I can get a hold of the book (digitally or physically), that’d be appreciated.
In case you haven't seen it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_literary_works
Aristotle's book on comedy... the things I would do to get my hands on that sacred text...
Cool question, though a bit hard to answer. My first thought was to Classical documents, like ancient Greece and Rome. I know there are a ton of works there that we know about but haven't discovered (like there'll be books 1, 2, 3, ... 7, 8, 9 in a series, so you can probably infer that there were books 4, 5, and 6 as well, even if they haven't been discovered yet).
Another thought that I had, that you might be interested in reading about are the Herculaneum scrolls. TL;DR when Mt Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it covered not just Pompeii but some surrounding villages as well. One villa in Herculaneum had a ton of scrolls/documents that were carbonized by the heat and ash. So they're basically these super-delicate pieces of charcoal that used to be writings, and thanks to
magicthe hard work and ingenuity of various researchers, we can now scan them and read through their contents without ever opening them (opening them is basically impossible without destroying them... which is not great). This is pretty novel stuff, so a few news articles have been posted to tildes in the last couple years about this project.The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan was for a long time considered a major part of the canon and was widely read, but is much less well known today. It isn't forgotten by any means, but it is no longer one you will see often recommended outside of religious circles.
Edit: here is summary from gutenberg:
This book is mentioned a LOT in Little Women.
Some lost works I find incredibly interesting:
Any of these turning up would be a bombshell in biblical literature studies.
On a related note, the Bible itself includes many references to other texts, many of which have since been lost.
I came here to mentioned the aramaic scrolls. People don't appreciate how lucky the dead sea scrolls and the nag hammadi library were.
Just for clarification are you looking for books that are totally lost or books that are unappreciated today? I thought the first but then you asked where to find a copy!
Either! If it's available or if it's completely lost, I'd like to look into it either way :)
Cool thanks!
The missing works of the 'Epic Cycle'. Only the Iliad and Odyssey have survived but we know others existed:
Imagine what we could learn from these books about the ancient greek world, the 2 surviving texts alone are some of the greatest treasures we have.
The story of Prometheus was just the first part of a trilogy. We have a lot of reviews from other authors at the time talking about how amazing the sequels were, but we don't have the plays themselves. Apparently, after he was freed by Hercules, he went on a lot of other adventures, and even traveled to the underworld.
There are many missing mathematical texts from the classical period that have been lost to which we only have knowledge about due to reference by other texts.
For example, in Archimedes‘ Sand Reckoner he references a text by Aristarchus of Samos, which suggests a heliocentric model of the solar system. I find it quite funny that our only knowledge of this work is by a text disagreeing with it yet still using it as an upper bound.
I remember that there our some others which show the greeks had a much better scientific understanding than we typically believe, though I can’t bring the names to thought atm. I may look into it tomorrow