Classical heritages

[Richard Gombrich]

Dear colleagues,  I remember that the late Prof. David Pingree once  
said to me in conversation that there were about 30,000 surviving mss  
of ancient Greek, a smaller number of Latin, and several million of  
Sanskrit.  The trouble is, of course, that one is never comparing like  
with like.  Almost all the surviving Sanskrit mss have been produced  
within the last millennium; the vast majority, indeed, within the last  
half millennium.  The production of mss in Latin and Greek was coming  
to an end 500 years ago, and I believe that virtually no texts  
physically survive from classical antiquity.  Inscriptions of course  
are negligible in physical quantity compared to the kind of texts I  
mean.

If we are talking of surviving texts rather than physical survivals,  
Julius Caesar, by burning the library of Alexandria, deprived us of a  
large part of our potential classical heritage.  Even so, I fancy that  
the bulk of surviving Sanskrit texts would be far larger than the bulk  
of Latin and Greek texts combined, including those we know to be  
lost.  True, much depends on the cutoff date you choose for Sanskrit.   
However, Vedic and Epic literature alone, before we even get to what  
we normally think of as Sanskrit classical literature, are of  
formidable size.

Richard Gombrich

On 19 Mar 2009, at 15:17, Brendan Gillon wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> I am hoping that someone might be able to direct me to a source  
> which might give me a rough idea of the comparison of the classical  
> heritage of India versus the classical heritage of Europe from  
> Greece and Rome. What I have in mind is something like a first order  
> approximation of the relative sizes of the literature, the  
> manuscripts and their cataloging. Clearly, this must be done for  
> some arbitrarily chosen cut off date.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Brendan Gillon
>
>
> -- 
>
> Brendan S. Gillon                       email:  
> brendan.gillon at mcgill.ca
> Department of Linguistics
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>
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