The loss of which ancient texts you regret the most?

Skallagrim

Skallagrim

Banned
The lost works of Aristotle. What we have left is mostly a bunch of summaries and lecture notes. I actually like the concise and to-the-point writing style, and it would not surprise me if Cicero's designation as "a river of gold" for Aristotle's writing actually referred to what we have (since I agree, and would also describe his ideas that way)... but it would be very nice to have Aristotle's complete, unabridged works. His dialogues, of which only fragments survive, would be fascinating.

But what I'd like to read most, perhaps, is the extensive correspondence between Aristotle and Hephaistion. Unlike Alexander, Hephaistion kept in touch with Aristotle for the rest of his life, and the two wrote to each other all across the empire while the armies moved east. They sent letters between Greece and the Indus valley, exchanging insights and knowledge. The insight into both men, and into their world(views), would be invaluable. But this entire correspondence has been lost, and it's a tragedy.
 
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Anaxagoras

Banned
Agreeing with everything that's been said up to this point. I'll add that I read Livy and Plutarch quite a bit, so I deeply regret the fact that three-quarters of Livy's history of Rome has been lost and that Plutarch's lives of Scipio Africanus, Hercules, Augustus, Epaminondas and others have been lost.

Plutarch in particular is something that should be read by absolutely everybody.
 
Indicus

Indicus

RogueTraderEnthusiast said:
Now that could be an epic timeline. A Charvakan Hinduist India. Assuming no detriment to social cohesion and stability, it could have an incredible impact on India. No Caste system, empiricism.

I'd read that timeline in an instant.
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Well, not Hinduist. According to the Charvaka, there was no karma, no gods, no heaven or hell, and the priests were a bunch of conmen. In that way, they go against every Hindu teaching.

And most interesting of all, from what little we know of them, they were hedonistic!

The enjoyment of heaven lies in eating delicious food, keeping company of young women, using fine clothes, perfumes, garlands, sandal paste... while moksha is death which is cessation of life-breath... the wise therefore ought not to take pains on account of moksha.

A fool wears himself out by penances and fasts. Chastity and other such ordinances are laid down by clever weaklings.
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Arkenfolm

There are a hell of a lot of things which over the ages which were lost. As a general thought, I'm thinking of a bunch of sources on Antiquity which are mostly lost or known only through summaries. There's plenty of historians from Ancient Rome you can check and any source will note "many works are lost" and such. Isn't there

The worst cases are the ones which almost made it to the modern world but were destroyed because of human error. This includes some of the Library of Ashurbanipal and parts of the Nag Hammadi library which were burnt soon after discovery.

Then there's the cases where almost all of the known works produced got destroyed, like with Mesoamerica. I can't imagine what our knowledge on the history of that region might be if we had even 25% more sources available. Since Mesoamerica is completely alien to the development trends of the Old World, that's truly a huge loss. I'm not sure how many indigenous sources Ancient Carthage produced, but surely such a wealthy civilisation might've produced more sources than we have, so that most all of our sources on it wouldn't be coming from their rivals and enemies in the Greeks and Romans.

Outside of historical/religious sources, literature and culture lost out big time when the Epic Cycle was lost. Even though some of them are almost certainly inferior and almost the Antiquity version of fanfic (no doubt good fanfic, but fanfic regardless), there would've been works in it which would've influenced Western culture for all of history. And along with those works is lost whatever influence they might've had.

123456789blaaa said:
The holy texts of the Manicheans. Besides being a really fascinating "syncretic" religion in general, Mani reportedly deliberately wrote down his writings as a selling point. His idea was that the writings of other prophets like Jesus, Buddha, and Zoroaster had been corrupted because their followers had written down their teachings. Therefore, he would write down everything directly. Mani and the followers of his religion were also renowned for their gorgeous artworks they used to proselytize.

I'd also love to see the complete works of the Late Antique Platonists. People like Porphyry and Iamblichus produced enormous amounts of works that didn't survive (Christianity played a large part). For example, Porphyry's "Against the Christians" was 15 books long and only survives now is scattered fragments "refuting" his arguments. I've been researching them in order to make my case for "paganism" being able to beat Christianity and thrive in the Roman Empire. It's fascinating to see how strange and different their works are compared to what we traditionally think of as "roman paganism" even with how little we have of their thought.
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Yes, so many of the Gnostics and neo-Platonists lost a ton of their works. In the case of the Manicheans, they lost a ton of their scriptures, which is a real shame considering the size of their faith and the widespread appeal it had from Europe to China into the Early Modern Period.
 

Lucius Verus

Banned
Port registers in general, you can tell so much about how people lived, organized, and fought from how much goods the brought at what price
 
Timaeus

Timaeus

Everything lost in Alexander's sack of Persepolis. That was perhaps the most grievous wound Greece inflicted on Persian culture, such that all the historical sources we have of Persia are from Greece alone.
 
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Fabius Maximus

Sappho: she was widely admired for her poetry in ancient times, and it would be great to have her work in more than fragments.

Ennius: seen as the Roman equivalent of Homer (Cicero calls him noster Ennius, "our Ennius") until Virgil came along and supplanted him. Still, it would be fascinating to read his Annales.

Sallust's Histories, both because I love his style and because we don't know much about the 70s and 60s BC, so this would definitely fill a hole in our knowledge. Also the remainder of Tacitus' Annals and Histories, for similar reasons.

Also, Aristeas' Arimaspea, which from Herodotus' account sounds delightfully weird (IIRC Aristeas claimed to have been spirited away to Scythia by Apollo, where he heard various weird accounts of the peoples to the north, including a story about one-eyed men called Arimaspians who steal gold from gryphons).

Dathi THorfinnsson said:
Q (the source used by Luke and Matthew that wasn't Mark)
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To be fair, we have no direct evidence for Q, and it might not have actually existed in the first place.
 

Citizen Samuel

Two immediately spring to mind: Plutarch's Parallel Lives of Epaminondas and Scipio Africanus, arguably the two greatest generals of the classical world; and the elegies of Gallus, a poet apparently the equal of Virgil, and of whose works Ovid says (something like) "they will be read from sunrise to sunset for the rest of time".

And yeah, Q and other early Gospels, but that goes without saying.
 

Jared

Fabius Maximus said:
To be fair, we have no direct evidence for Q, and it might not have actually existed in the first place.
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Q as conventionally described may not have existed, but Luke explicitly said that he'd consulted a number of existing sources when writing his gospel. I'd love to have copies of the sources he used.
 

Fiver

Claudius' history of Carthage, history of the Etruscans, and history of Augustus' reign.

The rest of Livy's history of Rome.

The rest of Diodorus Siculus' history.

Arrian's history of the Diadochi.
 

alaric

1.The vedas written in originality( if they were even written)
2.library of Nalanda with its priceless manuscripts( destroyed by islamic invaders).
3.Indica by Megasthenes( commentaries exist only)
 

Gortian

Pyrrhus of Epirus' lost work on Strategy.

The library of Pergamon (which was given to Cleopatra by Mark Anthony as a wedding gift and amalgamated into Alexandria) and Alexandria.

The House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

Meso-american histories. Reading the first part of the Popol Vuh is depressing. The writers desperately want their culture and myths to be remembered and despair over everything they lost. Diego de Landa and fanatics like him have a lot to answer for.

A bit more writings from Carthage than what remains of the only book Rome did not burn, Magos, On Agriculture.

The rest of the Oxyricnchus History. What we have is considered far more reliable than Xenophon on the late Peloponnesian Wars.
 

General Tirpitz

Although Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, written in the early 8th century, are the oldest surviving Japanese texts, there likely were even older documents than these two. It is written in Kojiki itself that there were many differing accounts of historical events and the book is meant to clear up “falsehoods” about Japanese history circling around. We know that there existed at least three texts before Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, and possibly two additional texts. Kokki and Tennôki were both written in the early 7th century, though Kokki got destroyed later while Tennôki disappeared at some point. Iki no Hakatoko no Sho was written in the late 7th century and described diplomat Iki no Hakatoko's travels in China. During the late 7th century, we also get Teiki and Kyûji, whose existence is slightly questionable however. It is quite likely that there were even more documents than these, and it is possible that there existed even competing historical accounts written by other (eventually) non-imperial clans.

Obviously, besides these larger works, there probably existed things like letters and diaries and others which were lost at some point.
 
Crying

Crying

I'm gonna have to agree with @Timaeus on this one and say that I want all the Persian literature lost because of Alexander. Hell, I want the Persian literature lost for other reasons too. Give me Persian literature god damnit!
 
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