The Book of Lost Books Read Free

leave behind extant works, and the reader can choose, for the most part, between numerous editions: Penguin Classics, the World’s Classics, Everyman, the Modern Library. Lost books is a practically infinite subject; and there are many—Acacius’
Life of Eusebius,
Eusebius’
Life of Pamphilus,
works by Anna Boškovic and Denis Fonvizin—that, through reasons of space, obscurity, or indolence, did not make it into this book. The curious reader will no doubt find many more, and may find many more interesting. He or she may even find a book hitherto thought lost: the Scottish poet John Man-son recently discovered, among various papers and ephemera in the National Library of Scotland, an almost complete text of the Modernist poet Hugh MacDiarmid’s “lost” magnum opus,
Mature Art.
    According to the Latin poet Horace, the function of writing was to instruct and delight. If
The Book of Lost Books
manages to whet and divert readers sufficiently that they begin their own peregrinations among the plenitude of books that remain, it will have done everything I hoped.

Anonymous
    {
c.
75,000 B.C.E.—
c.
2800 B.C.E.}
    THE VERY ORIGINS of literature are lost.
    An oblong piece of ocher, found in the Blombos Caves on the southern coast of present-day South Africa, is crosshatched with a regular pattern of diamonds and triangles. It is 77,000 years old. Whether these geometric designs are supposed to be symbolic, whether they are supposed to mean anything at all, they present us with one irrefutable fact. A precursor of modern humanity deliberately engraved marks onto a medium. It was a long way yet to the word processor and text messages, but a first step of sorts had been taken.
    The period around 45,000 to 35,000 years ago in humanity’s evolution has been called the Upper Paleolithic Revolution or, more catchily, the Creative Explosion. More complex tools were fashioned, from fishhooks to buttons to needles. Moreover, they are decorated, not only with schemata of lines and dots: a lamp contains an ibex, a spear tip transforms into a bison. There are also statuettes with no immediately discernible use: squat figurines of dumpy women. Is it possible to have slings but not songs, arrows but not stories?
    Looking at the cave paintings from Lascaux, Altamira, and Chavette, created some 18,000 years ago, it is overwhelmingly tempting to try and read them. Do these images record successful hunts, or are they imagined desires and hopes? Is this “Yesterday we killed an aurochs” or “Once upon a time there was an aurochs”? What do the squiggles and zigzags, the claviforms and tectiforms over the animal images signify? Occasionally, looming out from an inconceivably distant time, a human hand-print appears, outlined in pigment. A signature, on a work we cannot interpret.
    Where did writing come from? Every early culture has a deity who invents it: Nabu in Assyria, Thoth in Egypt, Tenjin in Japan, Oghma in Ireland, Hermes in Greece. The actual explanation may be far less glamorous—accountants in Mesopotamia. All the earliest writing documents, in the blunt, wedge-shaped cuneiform style, are records of transactions, stock-keeping, and inventories. Before cursives and uncials, gothic scripts and runic alphabets, hieroglyphics and ideograms, we had tally marks.
    But, by the first few centuries of the second millennium B.C.E., we know that literature has begun, has begun to be recorded, and has begun to spread. It was not until 1872 that the first fragments of
The Epic of Gilgamesh
resurfaced in the public domain after four millennia. The excavation of ancient Nineveh had been undertaken by Austen Henry Layard in 1839. Nearly twenty-five thousand broken clay tablets were sent back to the British Museum, and the painstaking work of deciphering the cuneiform markings commenced in earnest. The Nineveh inscriptions were incomplete, and dated from the seventh century B.C.E., when King