The Ongoing Uphill Battle Against Nonsense

The other day I was in an online discussion which had been started by someone who said that we had no primary sources for 7th-century European history. This amounted to asserting that nothing written in Europe during the 7th century has survived to our day -- or, if one were inclined to be especially generous to them, one could understand them as having said that no historical writing had survived from the 7th century.

The assertion was completely wrong either way, of course. They replied to me by moving the goalposts and saying that we had very few primary sources for the 7th century, and that any given century during the Roman Empire was better-known to us today. I replied that I wasn't sure that the 3rd century wasn't even more poorly attested than the 7th. As an example, I mentioned the Augustan Histories, a purported collection of biographies of Emperors by six different authors, focusing mainly on the 3rd century, upon which both Gibbon and Burckhardt had relied heavily for the period, although both of them were utterly exasperated by its many inaccuracies. There simply wasn't much more writing to be consulted for the 3rd century -- and there still isn't, I added, although today almost all scholars agree that the Augustan histories are the work of one author, not six, and a growing number are coming to suspect that the work is not really history at all, but something more like a parody of historical writing. 

 

At this point someone else said that Gibbon and Burckhardt were very antiquated, and that we today had access to many more sources of 3rd century history than they did.

All fake innocence, I replied that I was fascinated to hear this, and asked them to list some of these sources. I was partly convinced that they were talking out of their butt, and partly curious about whether they actually knew of some 3rd-century sources I hadn't yet heard of. 

They did not. Their reply listed a few Latin authors, all of whom are cited by both Gibbon and Burckhardt, and some of whom are much later than 3rd century and therefore not primary sources. They added that we had Greek sources as well! Not to mention an enormous amount of Roman legal writing and court cases.

Gibbon and Burckhardt were both quite fluent in Greek and cited Greek authors very frequently in their works, and Gibbon, at least, consulted sources in still other ancient languages. Whether he read these untranslated, or had someone translate them for him, I'm not certain. Gibbon greatly advanced the practice of adhering to primary sources, and  Burckhardt was a Musterbeispiel of it. 

And the amount of Roman legal writing we have is not enormous. We have the Corpus Juris Civilis, a summary compiled by Justinian in the 6th century in the 6th century, and a few more items. Romans did not preserve records of every single court case that way we do.

And in any case, Gibbon and Burckhardt had access to these legal writings. 

Other than inscriptions and coins (some classify coins as inscriptions, some don't) which have been discovered and catalogued since their time, and the mostly Greek papyri discovered mostly at Oxyrhynchus, there is in fact very little writing about the Roman Empire which we have and Gibbon and Burckhardt didn't.

And this guy didn't know it. They were saying they "couldn't remember at the moment" all the details of Gibbon and Burckhardt, while making it pretty clear to those have have read Gibbon and Burckhardt, that they haven't.

So what? Happens all the time, somebody talking out of their butt on the Internet. What was different about this time?

This time it made me sad. And also a little ashamed, because this person reminded me a little bit of me: half-bright enough to get away with some of his BS.  I try to talk nonsense less than I used to, but I don't know that I've actually stopped yet. It's hard to stop a train.

Of course, BS doesn't fool everybody. Most of the people who know you're full of it just stop talking to you. 

But not all of them. Over the past couple of years another person on the Internet has corrected me over and over on points of Latin and subjects related in one way or another to Latin literature. It's a new experience for me, and very annoying. I don't know whether they're too young to realize how annoying the corrections are, or too autistic, or what.

Annoying or not, I realize that the corrections are good for me. They help me learn -- you know? So I thank them, and do my best to hide my annoyance.

The Stele of the Lapis Niger

The Romans and the Greeks began using the alphabet at about the same time, in the seventh or eighth century BC, the Greeks first and the Roman shortly thereafter. But while the Greeks very soon began writing poetry and philosophy and drama, the Romans had very little, if anything, which could be called literature, until the mid-third century AD, when they began to copy some of the Greek literary genres. But they had been using writing for other things besides literature, as we can see from inscriptions: writing upon hard surfaces such as stone or metal. Moreover, in the case of Latin literature, we don't have any manuscripts (writing upon soft surfaces such as papyrus, parchment or paper) until the early 1st century AD. Livius Andronicus and Plautus wrote Latin literature in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, but our oldest copies of their work are on manuscripts made much later. We don't know how much the writers of the manuscripts changed what the authors wrote. The scribe who copied a manuscript of a text centuries after its author had died may have thought he was "correcting" the text when he made it more closely resemble the Latin of his own time, whereas, from the point of view of a 21st-century scholar interested in the language of the original author, the scribe was destroying something precious by not simply copying the text exactly. It all depends upon your point of view. The oldest Latin inscriptions, on the other hand, were made as early as the 7th century BC, and they preserve exactly what the language was like in the time when they were created, and therefore, they show us how the language changed.

One of the very oldest Latin inscriptions is on the stele of the Lapis Niger. A stele is a piece of stone taller than it is wide which serves as a monument. "Lapis niger" is Latin for "black stone." In 1899, the archaeologist Giacomo Boni discovered this stele under a pavement of black marble in the Roman forum.

Sometimes people mistakenly refer to the stele itself as the Lapis Niger, but it is light brown, not black. The name Lapis Niger refers to the black marble which was used to cover the shrine containing the stele, some time after it was made.

And when was it made? Estimates have varied widely, from not long before 450 BC to not long after 600 BC. But any of those estimates would make the stele one of the oldest-known objects with Latin writing on them.

And what is written on this stele? What sort of a place, exactly, is this shrine? Again, the experts disagree. Some say it is the place thought by some ancient Romans to have been the tomb of Romulus. (Other ancient Romans believed that Romulus never had a tomb because he flew up to Heaven at the end of his life.) Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, and Festus all mention the shrine, and they themselves seem uncertain about what exactly it is. Although the Latin of the inscription is very different from the classical Latin of Cicero, Caesar and Vergil, and is written vertically, and boustrophedon -- that is, the letters in each line go in the opposite direction of the preceding line -- and the individual letters resemble Greeks letters much more closely than later Latin letters do, the main difficulty is, first, that only pieces of the stele, and therefore only fragments of each line, are preserved; and second, that the letters are in such bad shape that experts' transcriptions of what is left vary quite a bit. One line, for example, may refer to a king, or to a priest; another may refer to justice, or to Jupiter. We can generally say that the inscription is a warning that the place is sacred, and describes how those who disrespect it will be punished, although not enough text remains to know for sure just what this punishment would be.

Oldest-Known (To Me) Examples Of This and That Sort Of Writing

A story about the oldest-known, recently-discovered Jewish prayer book (9th century) got me thinking about the oldest manuscripts and inscriptions of various types. Manuscripts, writing made with a pen or similar instrument on something like papyrus or parchment or paper, interest me much more than inscriptions, except that inscriptions are much more durable, and provide us with our oldest evidence of writing. The oldest known complete scrolls of the Torah are several centuries newer than this prayer book. It used to be customary to bury such scrolls when they became worn. Very few have survived from before the 15th century.

As far as any Hebrew writing is concerned, the oldest-known example -- please keep in mind that "oldest known" always means "oldest known to me." I'm not being particularly modest here, just particularly careful to be clear and accurate. Keep in mind when anyone talks about the oldest-known this or that that it always means "oldest known to them." Also keep in mind that all of us are estimating about these dates and that bias sometimes is involved in dating. More about that below -- is the Tel Zayit abecedary, a rock upon which the Hebrew alphabet was scratched in the 10th century BC. Tel Zayit, the rock's location, was over 30 miles away from Jerusalem in the 10th century BC, way out in the sticks in those days. This suggests that literacy in Hebrew may have been rather widespread by the 10th century BC.

The oldest hard copy of whole Hebrew words was found on a tiny silver scroll dating from the 7th century BC, upon which was inscribed the Priestly Benediction: "May the LORD bless you and keep you[...]" etc. Then there are the oldest of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are as old as the 2nd century BC, and some of them alleged by some to be much older, but I suspect unscientific bias in those earlier datings, but I don't really know.

Examples of Greek from the 8th century BC and of Latin from the 7th century have been found. The earliest Greek texts which are still widely read today are those of Hesiod and Homer. Hesiod was writing around 700 BC -- well, it's not certain that he actually wrote. Many of the earliest renowned ancient Greek authors are known to us not by anything they wrote, but by things which others wrote about what they said. Hesiod may well have personally written down much of the writing associated with him. (On the other hand, some of the writing associated with him was clearly added to the corpus of his works centuries after he lived.)

Of course, in the case of Homer, on the other hand, the question of whether or not he actually even existed is quite controversial. Hesiod helps us out here by inserting many references to his life and his surroundings into his writings. Homer doesn't say anything about himself. Whether Homer existed, or whether the songs of the Iliad and the Odyssey were attributed to a blind singer who never was, is extremely controversial. It's generally agreed that if Homer did exist and did come up with those famous tales, he sand them rather than wrote them. When they were first written down is extremely controversial. Probably in the 6th century BC or earlier. There are many linguistic characteristics in the Iliad and the Odyssey which come from long before the 6th century, but the preservation of these archaic details can be explained by singers carefully copying earlier singers as well as by the poems having been written down before the 6th century.

The earliest hard copies we have of any texts by Homer date to the 3rd century BC, and the earliest copies of Hesiod from the 1st century BC, and there are quite a few copies of both authors from those times up until the 6th century AD, but these are fragments, mostly rather tiny fragments of a few words each, found by archaeologists in the Middle East since the 19th century. One welcome exception to the generally fragmentary nature of these old manuscripts is the Bankes Papyrus, made in the 2nd century AD and containing most of the 24th and final book of the Iliad (18 pages in Richmond Lattimore's translation).

Although the oldest traces of any writing in Latin are almost as old as those in Greek, it's later before we encounter any Latin literature which is actually interesting for its own sake as literature, as opposed to very sketchy specimens interesting only to historians and paeleographers. There's a collection of laws from the 5th century, the Twelce Tables, meh. Yes, extremely interesting for the sake of the history of early Rome, and extremely revered by ancient Romans, but as actual reading material, meh. A Roman literature worthy of the name doesn't get underway until the 3rd century BC with Livius Andronicus, who, like the other two great early Roman writers, Plautus and Terence, was actually a Greek writing in his adopted 2nd language of Latin.

Less interesting to me personally than Graeco-Roman literature and much more interesting to the public at large are the questions of when the earliest parts of the New Testament were written, and how old the oldest copies we have are. As with Homer and Hesiod, so with the Bible (and with a lot of other ancient literature) : our oldest copies are recently-discovered papyrus scraps. Experts seem to agree that the scrap known as p52, containing a part of the Gospel of John, dates from the 2nd century AD and is the oldest New Testament papyrus whose date is well-established.

However, is there a 1st-century fragment of Luke set to knock p52 off its position as king of the hill age-wise? Daniel Wallace, who found it, thinks so. Mark Roberts, who wrote this article about it, thinks that Wallace is correct with this 1st-century date. But here we come to considerations of bias: Roberts, whose article mentions a recent debate between Wallace and Bart Ehrman, refers to Ehrman as an "extreme skeptic." That already makes me somewhat skeptical about Roberts' objectivity. As regular readers of this blog know, I've had my disagreements with Ehrman, but I would never call him an extremist. Wallace, whom Roberts praises and refers to as an eminently reliable scholar, has written books with titles like Who’s Afraid of the Holy Spirit? An Investigation into the Ministry of the Spirit of God Today and Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ. Before I've cracked either one of those books, their titles have already made me suspicious of Wallace's judgment and his agenda. And Roberts has authored tomes with titles like Jesus Revealed: Know Him Better to Love Him Better and No Holds Barred: Wrestling with God in Prayer, which brings us up to about 6 or 7 strikes against this claim of a 1st-century manuscript of Luke. But I have to keep an open mind here. Just because Wallace and Roberts are clearly crazy in some areas, and more than just a little eager to establish a paper trail right back to Jeebus Hisself, doesn't necessarily mean that they don't know squat about ancient manuscripts.

But still.