[telotortium]

I feel that the possibility of tracing academic lineage back to antiquity in the West is very dim, for the same reason that tracing descent from antiquity[0] in Europe has proven impossible - too few records survived. Even in the Catholic Church, the longest unbroken chain (i.e., for which records survive) of apostolic succession (i.e., which bishop consecrated each bishop) goes only back to the 1400s with Guillaume d'Estouteville, even though France in the 1400s was long after the Dark Ages and many records survive from the High Middle Ages onward.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillaume_d%27Estouteville

[kragen]

A thing I was thinking was that, though almost surely the line was broken in the West, it might not have been broken altogether. We know, for example, that the Pauliṣa Siddhānta in India contains Hellenistic astronomy; and we know that as far back as Classical Athens, Greek philosophers reported visiting India and studying with "gymnosophists", an ascetic tradition (called Digambara in Sanskrit) which either survives there today or has been coincidentally reinvented in the same subcontinent at least a thousand years ago. Surely it is conceivable that, during the period when Rome was laying waste to the Hellenistic world, some philosophers might have fled to India and trained their successors there?

But it does seem very unlikely that we could trace it, given how little written material survives from that period in India.

[dctoedt]

> Even in the Catholic Church, the longest unbroken chain (i.e., for which records survive) of apostolic succession (i.e., which bishop consecrated each bishop) goes only back to the 1400s

Our (Episcopal) parish used to have a small framed "genealogy" that purported to trace our diocesan bishop's consecration lineage back to St. Peter. I was always a bit skeptical.

Tangent: Some Roman Catholics would flatly deny the validity of any Anglican ordinations post-Henry VIII ....

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

[throwoutway]

I’ve always wondered what things we’ve lost from library fires, hall burnings, church burnings etc. perhaps this is one such example

[lmpdev]

It boggles the mind

The likelihood of a text surviving tends towards zero given enough time

Before antiquity we often only have quoted fragments to look at

The early episodes of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps is a pretty good introduction to how little we know about pre-socratic thinkers especially

Surviving corpora can often be only hundreds of characters long

[dan-robertson]

I mostly try to be amazed at what has survived (and the unlikely ways it did).

One thing to note is that there seems to be a compounding difficulty of preserving records. Eg we don’t have much science or mathematics from anything like late antiquity but somehow the Hagia Sophia was built in 537. If you look at the evidence that people were still capable of the kind of analysis required to build that structure it seems plausible that much mathematics or science was still happening (in the eastern Roman Empire) but not being recorded. Perhaps if you are copying books you’re more likely to be copying the important ancient foundational texts rather than more advanced narrower more recent things. There’s like 7-800 years between Apollonius and the construction of that church. I do wonder what mathematics was done in that time but not recorded. But it also may be that the culture around mathematics was somehow limited with no (evidence of anything like) algebra or calculus or coordinate systems which are pretty important to the developments in the last few hundred years of mathematics.

Early western Christianity was pretty bad for preserving ancient texts (a silly and likely exaggerated way to phrase the attitude is something like ‘if it’s compatible with the bible it is unnecessary and if it disagrees with the bible it’s heresy and should be destroyed’ though it also seems the New Testament is somewhat Aristotelian) but the eastern empire kept many of them going (in their original Greek), and the Muslims ended up with Arabic translations and Western Europe then got copies or contemporary Arabic works through what is now Spain and translated them into Latin (this could be somewhat tricky for mathematics but worse for anything more philosophical which would have likely been changed first to be compatible with Islam and second to be compatible with Roman Catholicism).[1] Eventually scholars in the west also got access to the Greek texts from the Byzantine empire and the attitudes towards censorship had changed (I guess it was less necessary for things that were not in the vernacular) and it was perhaps lucky that this happened before the fall of Constantinople.

[1] apart from destruction there are also things that are lost due to there being a lot of texts and not that many people looking at them. Eg I think there’s a big library associated with the bishop of toledo (maybe a cathedral or seminary library; maybe in a bishops palace) which is full of Arabic texts from before the rechristianization of Spain. There may be texts there which are unknown to modern scholars.

[kragen]

Agreed.