Lost books

No, not your 1994 library fine for losing Pet Sematary.

I’m talking about books lost completely, to everyone. Books we know existed but for which we now have no more hard or digital copies.

Books lost to time.

Some of these are mentioned in the Bible. One of these is The Chronicles of the Kings of Israel/Judah. It keeps getting mentioned in Kings, like this: ‘Hey and if you want to know all the details, go check out the Chronicles!’ Mate, we’d love to but we can’t.

If this book ever shows up in a Gazan bomb crater or something, it will likely explain more about how monotheistic Yahweh worship displaced Baal worship and other pagan practices. It also might clarify who exactly was living in the Holy Land when, where they came from, and where they went. I’d be interested to know more about exactly how the Jews are related to the Canaanites.

No doubt that would solve all the disagreements going on over there.

Also mentioned in Kings is the Acts of Solomon, which would shed more light on his reign. Imagine if it had a diplomatic exchange between the man himself and Egypt, for example. Or more detailed and formally recorded legal cases that he adjudicated. And what really happened with the Queen of Sheba? We want the dirt! And then there’s his descent into idolatry later in life… What happened there?

The Dead Sea Scrolls contain fragments of The Book of Giants, which was apparently a detailed account of the Nephilim (giants who were the children of fallen angels and human women). That part was always confusing to me and I’d like to read more detail about it. Sounds very cool.

^Source

The Greek plays are quite interesting if you can get hold of good translation (or read them in the Greek, you nerd). Heaps of them have been lost.

I think these would be some of the best things we could find because a lot of our modern storytelling is based on these works. Maybe they had innovative approaches that went missing and have never been reinvented.

If I had to choose one author, I’d like to rediscover the lost plays of Aristophanes (of 40-odd works, 11 extant). He’s the one who wrote The Assemblywomen, where the ladies take over the government and hilarity ensues. I wonder what else he wrote in that vein.

One of his plays, Babylonians, attacked Athenian imperialism for enslaving ‘allies’ and apparently got him into a lot of trouble. I like that sort of thing. It deserves to survive. Imagine if 1984 went missing – future people would never really understand our time and thinking without it. More on that later.

Another regrettably lost book is the Phoenician History by Sanchuniathon. Today we only know the Phonecians/Canaanites through Greek and Hebrew accounts, and then the Romans, and those guys were not their friends.

What was the Phoenicians’ own view of themselves? How did they see Baal? Did they really do the things they were accused of?

Further afield, most of the Maya Codices are now gone because the Spanish burned them in case they harmed the cause of conversion. Some accounts report that these contained histories of what’s now Latin America going back 800 years. Who knows. All we’ve got now is jungle-covered step pyramids where they cut out hearts, which is a bit unfair because I’m sure they had other stuff going on. Imagine if we only knew the Romans by the circuses.

When I was a kid, I found a beautifully bound and illustrated hardback edition of Thousand and One Nights from the 1940s. I wonder where that thing got to. Probably an op shop. No doubt it was moderated for an all-ages audience, but apparently there was once a much longer version of the book that may have had more pre-Islamic Persian stories and so on. I’d read the shit out of that.

In 213 B.C., then Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the burning of a bunch of books that related to Confucianism and history. Some really cool philosophy may have been lost, which might have put China on a different path than the one it ended up on. Maybe also lost was proof that the first emperor’s real name was Haven Monahan.

When the Mongols sacked Bagdad in 1258, many books went missing forever. Among these were Al-Kindi’s works that likely included pioneering work in clinical trials, a merging of Greek philosophy with Islam, and astronomical theories that were likely on the money.

Another author whose work was lost was Alhazen, who wrote about optics and may have been working towards primitive cameras, refraction and the wave theory of light.

If even a quarter of this speculation is accurate, it could have sped up scientific and technological progress dramatically and changed history.

One of the most tantalizing things about the past is that various group were really close to inventing world-changing things like gears, lenses and so on, but things fell apart right before they had a chance. This may have been one of those times. Look at poor old Bagdad today.

There are many more of these missing works: lost Irish sagas, additional books by Chaucer, Descartes’ Treatise on the Universe.

Those are some of the books we know are lost because they’re mentioned in other books, or because fragments remain.

There are also no doubt important lost books that we never even heard of. Perhaps physics or mathematics was discovered then lost and forgotten for centuries. Insights into extinct cultures we never knew about.

Want to really blow your mind? It’s theoretically possible that civilizations existed before the last glaciation (or earlier) and no trace of them remains today. Imagine what stuff they might have come up with, if they existed.

To grasp of how valuable lost books could be if rediscovered, consider the importance of non-lost books. Here are a few from my post, The Western Canon:

The Bible

The Koran

Remaining Greek plays and philosophy

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Paradise Lost

Anything by Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Kipling, or Nietzsche. Even H.L. Menken.

If these are lost, there will be huge, unfillable gaps in the knowledge and culture of future generations.

And those books might disappear.

I’ve lost pretty much all my photos from 2006 on because a computer breaks, I lose a flash drive, can’t regain access to Dropbox, or whatever. I lost heaps when I quit Facebook years ago and realized I didn’t have those posted photos backed up anywhere.

For the time being, hard copies still seem the safest.

Of all the formats we’ve tried so far, clay tablets appear to be the most durable of all.

We tend to think history started in Mesopotamia but that might just be because they had plenty of clay lying around. It’s quite possible other civilizations invented stuff first but used parchment or something else fragile and so they are forgotten.

There are online digital libraries attempting to preserve all books, but who’s working on inscribing Eat Pray Love on clay tablets?

Future people will never even know it existed.