One Thousand and One Conjectures

Classical Athens ran one of the most productive commissioning systems in musical history. At the City Dionysia alone, ten tribes each fielded a men's and a boys' dithyrambic chorus: twenty new large-scale choral works premiered annually, over two centuries - thousands of…

Greek literature and Greek music came down by different roads, and the difference is countable inside one edition. Greek texts survive overwhelmingly because medieval scriptoria kept recopying them; papyrus finds are the supplement. Greek music inverts this. Of the sixty-one items in…

Rome was loud, and documented its loudness everywhere except in notes. Roman comedy was substantially sung: the transmitted production notices of Terence's six plays name the tibia-player and specify which pipes accompanied each play. Horace's Carmen Saeculare was performed by a trained…

Greek lyric poetry is music - melos means song, and Sappho, Pindar, and Alcaeus composed melodies inseparable from their words. The papyrus record of these poets is substantial: the Leuven Database of Ancient Books registers on the order of two hundred witnesses…

Aristoxenus of Tarentum was antiquity's supreme musical scientist - Aristotle's student, the man whose interval-and-scale framework underlies every later Greek theorist and, through Boethius' Latin digest, the medieval discipline. The Suda's entry sizes his output at 453 books, spanning harmonics, rhythmics, organology,…

The pseudo-Plutarchan De musica is antiquity's surviving history of music - a dialogue digesting the lost musicological literature (Glaucus of Rhegium, Heraclides) into a roll-call of the tradition: Terpander and the kitharodic nomoi; Olympus and the auletic; Clonas, Polymnestus, Thaletas; Sacadas, whose…

The tool that lets moderns read ancient Greek music at all is the Eisagoge of Alypius, a late-antique handbook transmitting complete correspondence tables between notation signs and pitches: paired vocal and instrumental sign-columns for each of the fifteen tonoi across the genera…

Archaeology returns ancient music in the wrong order: hardware first, by centuries or millennia, and software mostly never. The lyres of Ur - Woolley's Royal Cemetery excavations, republished in de Schauensee's Penn Museum study - are playable-class stringed instruments from about 2500…

For Byzantine chant before about 1100 we possess the manuscripts and have lost the ability to read them - a decipherment loss, distinct from physical loss and exactly countable. The early notations are of two kinds. Ekphonetic signs, ruling the solemn reading…

Romanos the Melodist is the summit of Byzantine hymnography: under Justinian he composed kontakia - verse sermons of many strophes sung to through-composed melodies - and the medieval tradition transmitted fifty-nine genuine ones (Maas-Trypanis, Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica, 1963). Every one is…

The Masoretes of Tiberias finished, by the tenth century, one of history's most exact notation systems: the te'amim, cantillation accents fixed sign by sign in the great codices (Aleppo, c. 930; Leningrad, 1008/9) and copied since with checksum discipline. But the te'amim…

Genevieve von Petzinger's survey of the geometric (non-figurative) marks in Ice Age Europe - the core of her University of Victoria thesis and the popular distillation The First Signs (2016) - reduced the whole engraved and painted repertoire of the Upper Palaeolithic…

In 2023 Bennett Bacon and colleagues (Cambridge Archaeological Journal 33/3) argued that the dots, lines and a 'Y' mark placed beside Upper Palaeolithic animal images are a phenological notation: the count of marks in a sequence records the month, reckoned from the…

Alexander Marshack's The Roots of Civilization (1972) read the engraved marks on Aurignacian and later bones and plaques - the Abri Blanchard bone, the Grotte du Tai plaque - as lunar notations, sequences of observations accumulated over months. Francesco d'Errico's microscopic and…

Dean Snow's 2013 study (American Antiquity 78/4) applied a sexual-dimorphism discriminant - relative finger lengths, chiefly the index-to-ring and index-to-little ratios - to Upper Palaeolithic hand stencils at Gargas, Pech Merle and other caves, and concluded that a clear majority, about three-quarters,…

Many hand stencils at Gargas in the Pyrenees, and a set at the now-drowned Cosquer Cave near Marseille, show fingers apparently shortened or missing above a joint. Three families of explanation compete: ritual or punitive amputation, cold- or disease-caused loss (frostbite, Raynaud's,…

The oldest uncontested symbolic objects from our species are durable by accident: the cross-hatched ochre plaques from the Middle Stone Age levels of Blombos Cave (roughly 73,000-100,000 years old) and the geometrically engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments from Diepkloof Rock Shelter (around 60,000 years).…

Iegor Reznikoff and Michel Dauvois proposed in 1988 that Palaeolithic painters placed images where caves resonate - that the density of red marks in Arcy-sur-Cure and Le Portel tracks points of strong echo and low-frequency resonance, as if sound and image were…

The canonical origin of music is a place and a moment: the bird-bone and mammoth-ivory flutes of the Swabian Jura - Hohle Fels, Geissenkloesterle, Vogelherd, published by Nicholas Conard and colleagues (Nature, 2009) and dated to roughly 42,000-43,000 years - joined by…

Across Eurasia and the Americas the same story attaches to the stars of Ursa Major: a great animal is pursued by hunters, wounded, and its blood or the seasons turn with the chase. Julien d'Huy, working from Yuri Berezkin's Analytical Catalogue of…

The Pleiades are named as seven almost everywhere, yet only six are easily seen; and across Greece, Aboriginal Australia and Native North America the cluster is told as seven sisters of whom one is lost, hidden, faint, or fled. Ray and Barnaby…

Patrick Nunn and Nicholas Reid assembled twenty-one Aboriginal Australian traditions, from around the continent's edge, that describe coastlines, islands and features now underwater - land that was dry before postglacial seas rose (Australian Geographer, 2016). Each story, if it truly remembers the…

If oral traditions can encode datable geological events - a volcano's birth, a coast's drowning, a meteor fall - then the record of such 'geomyths' contains a hidden quantity: the maximum age of a factual memory that transmission can actually carry. Individual…

Alexander Thom, surveying hundreds of British and Breton stone circles and rows, argued that their dimensions are built on a single unit, the 'megalithic yard' of about 2.72 feet, used with remarkable consistency across the islands - a claimed prehistoric metrology, and…

The clay figurines, spindle-whorls and plaques of the Vinca culture of the sixth-and-fifth-millennium-BCE Balkans carry incised marks - chevrons, crosses, combs, the famous 'Tartaria tablets' - that Marija Gimbutas called an 'Old European script' and that Shan Winn catalogued into an inventory…

Three African bones anchor the story of the world's oldest 'mathematics': the Lebombo bone, a baboon fibula with 29 notches from Border Cave in the Lebombo mountains, around 43,000 years old; the Ishango bone from the shores of Lake Edward in the…

For a century the earliest figurative art was European by default. Then uranium-series dating of the calcite crusts growing over cave paintings in the Maros-Pangkep karst of Sulawesi and in Borneo (Aubert and colleagues, Nature, 2014 and 2018; Brumm and colleagues, Science…

In 856, revising the count in his last years, Hunayn ibn Ishaq wrote Ali ibn Yahya a letter that is the pre-print world's finest census of a translation movement: the Risala, cataloguing 129 works of Galen one by one - whether he…

The Risala records a fact modern readers keep forgetting: Hunayn's principal product was Syriac, not Arabic. He made Syriac versions of Galen for the Christian physicians of Baghdad - Yuhanna ibn Masawayh, Salmawayh ibn Bunan, the Bakhtishu line - while the Arabic…

Three of antiquity's great technical works break off in Greek at a cliff - and in each case the Arabic translation keeps going past it, because ninth-century Baghdad translated from exemplars upstream of the Byzantine bottleneck. Apollonius' Conics: eight books; Greek transmits…

Ptolemy's Planetary Hypotheses is the book where mathematical astronomy becomes a physical cosmos - and Greek preserves only the opening stretch of Book I (Heiberg's text in the Opera astronomica minora, 1907). The rest of Book I, with the nesting-spheres computation that…

Hero of Alexandria's Mechanics - the ancient world's systematic treatise on moving heavy loads, gears, screws, cranes and the five simple powers - has no Greek manuscript tradition at all. It survives complete in Arabic, translated by Qusta ibn Luqa in ninth-century…

The most quoted entry in Hunayn's Risala is an obituary he did not know he was writing. Of Galen's On Demonstration - the fifteen-book logic and epistemology of science that the Baghdad philosophers wanted more than any other Galenic work - he…

Metaphysics Lambda is Aristotle's theology - the unmoved mover, thought thinking itself - and the Greek world lost both of its great late-antique commentaries on precisely that book. Alexander of Aphrodisias' commentary on the Metaphysics survives in Greek only for books Alpha…

Ibn al-Nadim's Fihrist credits al-Kindi, the first philosopher of the Arabs, with a bibliography running to some two hundred and forty titles. What survives in Arabic is a sliver, and it hangs overwhelmingly on one book: the Istanbul codex Aya Sofya 4832,…

Ptolemy's Optics is a double orphan: the Greek original is lost, the Arabic translation made from it is lost, and the work survives solely in the Latin that the amiratus Eugene of Palermo made FROM the Arabic in Norman Sicily around the…

Archimedes reached the Middle Ages in three Byzantine books. Codices A and B stood in the papal library at Viterbo, where William of Moerbeke translated from both in 1269 - his working autograph survives as Vat. Ottob. lat. 1850; codex C, the…

Proclus' Commentary on the Parmenides - late Neoplatonism's masterwork on the One - survives in Greek in a tradition with a single wound: every Greek manuscript breaks off at the same point in book VII, before the conclusion of the first hypothesis.…

For a Greek theologian, formal condemnation decided not whether his works survived but in WHICH LANGUAGE. The empire could burn books inside its jurisdiction - Theodosius II ordered Nestorius' writings destroyed in 435, Justinian criminalized possessing Severus of Antioch in 536, the…

Nestorius wrote his own defense in exile - the book known as the Bazaar of Heracleides - and the Greek original is gone as completely as the empire intended: Theodosius II's edict of 435 had ordered his writings burned. What survives is…

Irenaeus of Lyon is the control case that proves condemnation unnecessary for exile-survival: the most orthodox author of his century, and his Greek is gone anyway. The five books Against Heresies survive complete only in the ancient Latin version, so literal it…

Eusebius built his Chronicle in two books: the Chronographia, a critical dossier quoting his pagan sources at length - Berossus on Babylon, Abydenus, Manetho's dynasties, Alexander Polyhistor, Castor - and the Canons, the synchronized tables of world chronology. The Greek original of…

Severus of Antioch is the largest Greek corpus the empire ever tried to delete - Justinian's edict of 536 made owning his books criminal and ordered them burned - and the completest demonstration that translation defeats jurisdiction. The 125 Cathedral Homilies survive…

First Enoch ran a three-language relay - composed in Aramaic in the last centuries BCE, translated into Greek, translated from Greek into Geez for the Aksumite church - and the attrition ran BACKWARD along the chain: the original language did worst, the…