Scholarship in antiquity

[swan_tower]

I know I have at least a few people reading this journal who know a bit about this topic. 🙂

Scholars in the ancient world: what exactly did they do? What sorts of things did they write? “Commentaries,” according to the references in the things I’ve read, but what exactly was the content and purpose of those things? What other kinds of works did they produce?

What sparked this question was thinking about the Library of Alexandria and the scholars who used it, but I’m also interested in answers from other parts of the world (since the purpose to which I’d be putting this is not historical fiction). Ancient Confucian scholarship, ancient Vedic scholarship, those and more would all be interesting to know about, too.

Comments

[karanguni]

How ancient are we talking here?

[swan_tower]

Flexible. Like I said, my starting point for this idea was the Library of Alexandria, which at least gives a range of time, but I'm not actually writing about that place and time. Where European examples are concerned, I just want to stay out of the medieval/monastic tradition and its successors; where non-European examples are concerned, I don't know intellectual history well enough to place a boundary on it.

[karanguni]

I might dig around a bit in Japan to get back to you - there's a long history of studying the Chinese classics as scholarship and a mark of literary merit, and certainly a whole bit of Classical Japanese dedicated to that sort of reading. Backwards Chinese, written in forward Chinese!

[swan_tower]

I've been thinking some about Confucian scholarship, yeah -- I want there to be some kind of examination system here, probably built along similar lines to the Chinese model, but the story isn't primarily going to focus on the careers of civil servants; the actual heart of it is this library: the people who maintain it, the people who use it, etc.

[marycatelli]

That might make a big difference. It may be a selection bias, but my own impression was that Chinese intellectuals were much less likely to be polymaths than Greek ones.

Not a Scholar

[dialecticdreamer]

but I describe myself as ten pounds of curiosity in a five pound bag, so, here's how I'd tackle the question:

Look to the Talmud, and the commentaries and annotations from the era you're looking at- BCE, probably, but how far BCE is a guess. Look at surviving manuscripts in monasteries: what tended to happen is some scholar with a TINY hand, would write in the margins, or between lines of text, making comparisons or jotting one-word agreement/disagreement, just the way students mark up modern textbooks.

The reason I'd look at the Talmud, is because it's been collated, organized, and curated for centuries. It's another kind of scholarly record, and I've used it as the model for several key elements of an alien culture.

Re: Not a Scholar

[swan_tower]

ten pounds of curiosity in a five pound bag

That is an apt description of much of my job. ^_^

The Talmud is definitely one of the things I've been thinking about, but I don't want to limit myself only to religious scholarship -- not that I'm trying to exclude it either, especially since in many cases religion is hardly separable from other kinds of intellectual activity, but I feel (possibly erroneously?) like there's a difference between scholarship that arises specifically from and around a religious text, and scholarship that starts from and pursues less religiously-bound topics.

Re: Not a Scholar

[dialecticdreamer]

Scholarship, in general, has held a special place in Jewish culture and history, but again, I was looking at it as a gentile, and as a working model of how things interconnected in an era where a letter could take months to get from one city to another. YMMV, of course. I'd love to know what you find!

Re: Not a Scholar

[swan_tower]

No, that's entirely fair -- certainly the problems of communication and copying texts are very pertinent to what feeling the intellectual community is going to have.

[ursula]

A lot of scholarship in Alexandria specifically was focused on identifying the ideal, correct text of classic works of literature and philosophy (philosophy here includes natural philosophy, math, etc.) Commentaries include explanations of what an author meant, but also critiques of past commentaries, alternative constructions, etc. It would probably be easier to get specific if you had an idea of what kind of scholarly topics you were interested in?

[swan_tower]

What I'm interested in is writing a story about a library kind of like the one in Alexandria in a society that maybe has something like the Chinese imperial examination system. My focus is not a specific scholarly topic, but rather a general sense of what the community around such a library would look like and be doing: obviously a lot of copying of texts, but the story becomes a lot more flavorful if I know what kinds of texts they're holding, what people who are able to gain access to the library would be coming there for (other than generically "to copy stuff for their own libraries"), what sorts of disputes might arise between scholars, etc. And I'm trying to get a firm enough sense of that to prevent my imagination from auto-inserting material from my own grad school experience, which I'm sure is anachronistic in a hundred ways.

I do remember reading that there was a fair bit of concern over forgeries or corrupt copies of texts -- how did they go about identifying or correcting those?

[ursula]

Hmmm, are you more interested in the Greco-Roman scholarly tradition, or in libraries in medieval China? For the latter, the Dunhuang cache is particularly famous, but I could send you some other articles that might be of use. For the former, I would look at the careers of famous grammarians.

[swan_tower]

I'm defaulting to Greco-Roman because my jumping-off point is Alexandria, and also it's going to be easier to find sources on that in English. But I'd be delighted to read any articles you might recommend! Whether or not they wind up going into this story, my brain is a magpie and my response to "would you like to know more about X?" is almost always "yes, please!" :-)

[ursula]

I should note here that in addition to all of the "comparing different versions of texts and picking the best reading" activities that seem obvious when you think about scholars producing editions, the grammarians invented a lot of the ways we organize and understand texts (things like accent marks, the division of the Iliad and Odyssey into distinct books, etc.)

[sovay]

Scholars in the ancient world: what exactly did they do?

Do you mind if I just drop this book on you? [edit] This one, too, with the bonus that I can personally recommend the author.

(A lot of classical scholarship is scholia and commentaries. The latter is what happens when the former, instead of being a couple of glosses on a text, instead turns into a project of comprehensive annotation or criticism intended to be read in parallel with the original. Ancient examples include Servius on Vergil or Boethius on Cicero. A modern example would be Samuel R. Delany's The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch—"Angouleme" (1978).)

[swan_tower]

The day I mind somebody pointing me at good books on interesting topics is the day you know I've been replaced by a shapeshifter. :-)

[mindstalk]

I can't answer the question, but a library-related plotbunny:

- Gilgamesh comes up with the idea of a Great Library, and it thrives and survives, fireproof given its shelves of fired clay tablets.

- It actually starts not as an archive of scholarship but as a record of lives; if he can't be immortal, he'll go for the next best thing.

- And because this Gilgamesh overlaps with the Fate version, greedy beyond bounds, he opens it to everyone. What's an immortal king without immortal subjects, or memories thereof? He'll steal all of humanity from the gods of death, if he can.

- 5000 years later, in a time of TV and rockets, annals and biographies are still being entered into the Eternal Library. Clay cuneiform records the moon landing...

[swan_tower]

Heh, that's an idea . . .

[mindstalk]

I keep wanting to throw into an RPG setting, because coolness, but then I think that giving your PCs a handy History Oracle is a terrible idea if you'd rather not have to come up with a detailed history...

[shark_hat]

Could you throw some things from the formation of the European universities in the 11-1200s into the pot? Not ancient, obviously, but the way hand-copied texts were collected and interacted with may not have been that different? A couple of possibly-interesting links
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/medieval/treatises.html
http://online.sfsu.edu/fielden/oxcam/oxford3.doc
Ohh, or the Renaissance, an influx of Arabic works being translated and also lost Greek and Roman things that had been preserved in Muslim countries, there might be "incorporating foreign acquisitions into the canon" specialists in the library...

[swan_tower]

I'm mostly trying to stay away from Christian-era scholarship, both for reasons of religion and also the growing prevalence of codices instead of scrolls. Not to say that none of it would be relevant, of course, but I don't want to veer over too far into that version of things. Thanks for the links, though!