[jeffreyrogers]

Maybe someone on HN knows the answer to this question, which I've wondered for a while. Are there other civilizations of similar cultural sophistication to the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese whose writings have just not been passed down and so we aren't as familiar with them? Or are the ones whose work survived roughly it, even if much of their works are lost. E.g. there doesn't seem to be much surviving Persian literature, but I'm not sure if this is because it wasn't preserved well or if it's because there wasn't much of it to begin with.

[prox]

Sanskrit in the Indian subcontinent has a long history, and not many are familiar with them. Lots of other scripts and languages in East Asia are relatively unknown (for example from Indonesia)

[wizard-beta]

Even though people are not so familiar with classical Indian civilization, they were very highly literate and the extant corpus is enormous. It easily rivals or exceeds classical Greek and Latin. I have heard that the Mahabharata is 10 times longer than the Iliad/Odyssey.

[prox]

On that line of thought, probably it’s Tibetan and buddhism that must have an extensive library. Most of these works have survived for a very long time.

[dr_dshiv]

There are thousands of lost palm leaf books, in Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, rotting away.

There is simply no money to support the scholarship that would preserve these works. It's incredibly sad.

[prox]

Do you know any libraries that need financial support for archiving this body of work?

[dr_dshiv]

I know of research institutes, yes.

Sanskrit is widely taught in younger years. Funding needs to go to bright PhD students to make the field again. It's extremely conservative and territorial after so many years of hardship.

[Goety]

I hope they get digitized before they all fall apart. Maybe they should contact google.

[dr_dshiv]

They have to be found first. They are mostly scattered in temple basements and private collections.

[ncmncm]

The whole of modern linguistic theory, including the regular, context-free, and unrestricted grammars, were fully worked out in still-preserved Sanskrit.

[EarlKing]

I suppose I could mention the city-states of Mesopotamia such as Sumer, Akkad, and Babylon. They left behind a rather rich literature which survived to this day (thanks to having been written on clay tablets instead of papyrus), though much of it remained inaccessible until the Cunieform script was deciphered in the 1800s. As with Romans and Greeks you'll find a wide variety of texts from the religious and scientific, to legal treatises, to contracts and shopping lists.

[iammisc]

The indian civilizations were extremely complex. Several philosophies written about in ancient Sanskrit. Things like the arthashastra or the vedas even. Very interesting work. Even more interesting in their distinctive 'easternness' while still essentially just being another branch of the ancient indo European philosophies (and thus somewhat closely related to the Greek and Roman)

[asdff]

Mesoamerican literature is rich

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_literature

[nextaccountic]

Try posting this question on https://reddit.com/r/askhistorians maybe? They often have in-depth, comprehensive answers, that go into the evidence we have available

edit: anyway this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28663948 has some pointers

[nerfhammer]

The article mentions Punic (Carthage)