AskHistorians

1062 readers

13 users here now

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

karmabot@lemmy.world

Are there any "text caches" that we still are not sure what's inside? (en.wikipedia.org)

submitted 2 months ago by INeedMana@lemmy.world to c/askhistorians@lemmy.world

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In 1345 he personally discovered a collection of Cicero's letters not previously known to have existed, the collection Epistulae ad Atticum, in the Chapter Library (Biblioteca Capitolare) of Verona Cathedral

So basically a guy goes into a library, rummages for a while, and finds ~1400 years old text no one knew was there

Do we still have places that store texts (like libraries, but doesn't have to strictly be a library) where we don't have everything catalogued and we don't know what might be inside?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ah, in that case, yes, but not so much European libraries. Most European collections are pretty well-categorized and catalogued at this point, including private collections. However, some places, like Mali, still have massive archives that we can read (or rather, at least specialists can read), and have access to, but much of the material is unknown and uncatalogued simply because of decentralized storage and a lack of scrutiny until relatively recently.

[–] INeedMana@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

A-ha! That's what I've been looking for :) Thank you

Do we know about other such chronicles? (Do we have an index of such chronicles? ;D )

[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

I don't know of any list or index of such resources, unfortunately. I do know that there are similar caches of texts in Ethiopia, especially Ethiopian monasteries, and, though less expansive, also on the Swahili Coast.