Doom scrolling - Works in Progress

We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia. Their contents may reshape how we understand the Ancient World.

We used to play this game in graduate school: find one, lose one. Find one referred to finding a lost ancient text, something that we know existed at one time because other ancient sources talk about it, but which has been lost to the ages. What if someone was digging somewhere in Egypt and found an ancient Greco-Roman trash dump with a complete copy of a precious text – which one would we wish into survival? Lose one referred to some ancient text we have, but we would give up in some Faustian bargain to resurrect the former text from the dead. Of course there is a bit of the butterfly effect;

saved by

• Charelle Jazmin
• Chirag Khairnar

related reading

• Works in Progress Magazineworksinprogress.co
• Our Knowledge of History Decays Over Timepalladiummag.com
• The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantictheatlantic.com
• Text is king - by Adam Mastroianni - Experimental Historyexperimental-history.com
• The End of Reading Is Here - The Atlantictheatlantic.com
• Lost knowledgejzhao.xyz
• Works in Progress Magazineworksinprogress.co
• Searching for Lost Knowledge in the Age of Intelligent Machines - The Atlantictheatlantic.com
• This is what peak culture looks like - Works in Progress Magazineworksinprogress.co
• History is Written by the Losers – The Scholar's Stagescholars-stage.org
• The gossip traperikhoel.substack.com
• Text is king - by Adam Mastroianni - Experimental Historyexperimental-history.com