We've looked at a different use of the term in 2021's "Neuroscience: Doomscrolling Twitter and Facebook": Monkey study highlights brain biology behind 'doomscrolling'
Here's Works in Progress, August 30 on actual scrolls:
We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.
We used to play this game in graduate school: find one, lose one. Find one referred to finding a lost ancient text, something that we know existed at one time because other ancient sources talk about it, but which has been lost to the ages. What if someone was digging somewhere in Egypt and found an ancient Greco-Roman trash dump with a complete copy of a precious text – which one would we wish into survival? Lose one referred to some ancient text we have, but we would give up in some Faustian bargain to resurrect the former text from the dead. Of course there is a bit of the butterfly effect; that’s what made it fun. As budding classicists, we grew up in an academic world where we didn’t have A, but did have B. How different would classical scholarship be if that switched? If we had had A all along, but never had B? For me, the text I always chose to find was a little-known pamphlet circulated in the late fourth century by a deposed Spartan king named Pausanias. It’s one of the few texts about Sparta written by a Spartan while Sparta was still hegemonic. I always lost the Gospel of Matthew. It’s basically a copy of Mark, right down to the grammar and syntax. Do we really need two?
What would you choose? Consider that Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are only two of the poems that make up the eight-part Epic Cycle. Or that Aristotle wrote a lost treatise on comedy, not to mention his own Socratic dialogues that Cicero described as a ‘river of gold’. Or that only eight of Aeschylus’s estimated 70 plays survive. Even the Hebrew Old Testament refers to 20 ancient texts that no longer exist. There are literally lost texts that, if we had them, would in all likelihood have made it into the biblical canon.
The problem is more complex than the fact that many texts were lost to the annals of history. Most people just see the most recent translation of the Iliad or works of Cicero on the shelf at a bookstore, and assume that these texts have been handed down in a fairly predictable way generation after generation: scribes faithfully made copies from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and eventually, with the advent of the printing press, reliable versions of these texts were made available in the vernacular of the time and place to everyone who wanted them. Onward and upward goes the intellectual arc of history! That’s what I thought, too.
But the fact is, many of even the most famous works we have from antiquity have a long and complicated history. Almost no text is decoded easily; the process of bringing readable translations of ancient texts into the hands of modern readers requires the cooperation of scholars across numerous disciplines. This means hours of hard work by those who find the texts, those who preserve the texts, and those who translate them, to name a few. Even with this commitment, many texts were lost – the usual estimate is 99 percent – so we have no copies of most of the works from antiquity. Despite this sobering statistic, every once in a while, something new is discovered. That promise, that some prominent text from the ancient world might be just under the next sand dune, is what has preserved scholars’ passion to keep searching in the hope of finding new sources that solve mysteries of the past.
And scholars’ suffering paid off! Consider the Villa of the Papyri, where in the eighteenth century hundreds, if not thousands, of scrolls were discovered carbonized in the wreckage of the Mount Vesuvius eruption (79 AD), in a town called Herculaneum near Pompeii. For over a century, scholars have hoped that future science might help them read these scrolls. Just in the last few months – through advances in computer imaging and digital unwrapping – we have read the first lines. This was due, in large part, to the hard work of Dr. Brent Seales, the support of the Vesuvius Challenge, and scholars who answered the call. We are now poised to read thousands of new ancient texts over the coming years.
But first, a bit of background on the provenance of ancient texts. We don’t have original copies of anything, not of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or Herodotus, or the Bible. Instead of originals, we find ourselves dealing with copies. These were first written on scrolls but later in books – the Romans called books codexes – starting in the first century AD.
Did I say copies? That’s actually not correct either. We don’t have first copies of anything. What we do have is copies of copies, most of which date hundreds of years after the original was penned. Even many of our copies are not complete copies. Take, for example, the earliest surviving piece of the New Testament: a fragment from the Gospel of John known as P52. Far from a complete copy of the book, this fragment is about the size of a credit card and dates to, in the earliest estimation, 125 AD. That is over 100 years after Christ was crucified. The fragment is without a doubt at least a copy of a copy because its dating is too late to be either an original or a first copy. It was also found in Egypt, far from both Judea or Syria, where John is thought to have originated. Finding a complete copy of a text – let alone an early Christian Bible – is a home run. We have only found two such Bibles, the Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, both dating to the mid-fourth century.
More often than finding such complete copies, scholars instead compile the various fragments of copies and try to reconstruct the original work. Once scholars agree on what the original text should be, and in some cases they never reach agreement, the text is ready for publication in the original language. Where there are still variants in the text, scholars will include an apparatus criticus citing the manuscript from which the text is published and listing manuscripts with variant readings. The last step is to add a translation in the vernacular, and there are bilingual and even polyglot editions. These could range from the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, a magnificent, six-volume work printed in Madrid in 1519 giving the scriptural text in no less than four languages – Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Aramaic – to the popular Loeb editions printed with both the ancient text and an English translation, for those with some limited knowledge of the ancient languages....
....MUCH MORE