![]() “Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars.” The sixth, on music, may have disappeared in the 3rd-century-B.C. We still have the “Five Classics” traditionally ascribed to the Chinese philosopher, covering poetry, rhetoric, ancient rites, history and divination. The last complete manuscripts may have burned when Alexander the Great conquered Persepolis in 330 B.C. The holy book of ancient Persia’s quasi-monotheistic creed survives as a sprawling collection of fragments-an estimated one-quarter of the original text. A Hebrew translation was the basis for a popular version in medieval Europe. This collection of beloved Indian animal fables, written as early as 100 B.C., is known to us from early translations in Pahlavi (now lost), Syriac and Arabic-the original Sanskrit source vanished. The rest were burned by conquistadors and Catholic monks in the 16th century. Out of perhaps thousands of bark-cloth books recording Mayan history, culture and religion-written in hieroglyphics as early as the 9th century-fewer than five texts survive. An estimated total of more than 80 of his works are lost to history. 525-456 B.C.) tragic trilogy is thought to have reframed the Trojan War as a reckoning with contemporary Athenian democracy. But those have made Lesbos’ most famous daughter (as classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has called her) a revered lyric poet of erotic love. she composed 10,000 lines of poetry, filling nine volumes. ![]() Their replacements were allegedly destroyed by a 5th-century Roman general who feared that invading Visigoths would use them. Roman leaders consulted these oracular sayings during political crises for perhaps 900 years. From Rome’s holiest texts to a Chinese manuscript that wouldn’t have fit inside a shipping container, here’s our top ten list of the most important ancient documents that no longer exist:
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