How Do We Know Ancient Texts Are Really Ancient?

There seems to be a lot of people who think that, because we do not have the original manuscripts of ancient texts, that is somehow deeply suspicious. While it is certainly true that there are some places in some texts where we are not completely sure what the original text said, in the vast majority of cases, it is possible to reconstruct exactly or at least almost exactly what the original text said. Even when the exact original wording of a text is unclear, we usually have a pretty good idea of what the original author wrote.

Examples of the misunderstanding

I got into an argument with another person on Quora in June 2019 who declared in his initial comment under one of my answers: “…with ancient Greek literature, we have no f**king clue how much has been changed over time and if the work itself even originated from the author and time we attribute it to.”

He went on to insist in that same comment and in subsequent comments that classicists “unanimously agree” that all ancient Greek and Roman texts are “sketchy as f**k,” that that any text we have is “at best… a paraphrasing of the original,” and that using classical sources as historical evidence is “no different than explaining what the Middle East used to be like using the King James Bible as indisputable source material.”

If I thought this person was an isolated case, I would not have bothered to publish this article. As it is, however, there seem to be a lot of other people who share the same opinion. I have encountered many questions on Quora that seem to make similar incorrect assumptions about the nature of the transmission of ancient texts. For instance, over the course of my time on Quora, I have encountered questions such as the following:

• “Why do most scholars use Greek sources (like Homer and Herodotus) when studying ancient history, even though not a single manuscript has been found that was actually written by them?“
• “Is the so-called “The Histories” by Herodotus just a collection of myth and legends cooked up by 13th-century monks?“

I do not think this is just a phenomenon on Quora, though. I think a lot of people genuinely believe that most ancient texts that have been passed down through the medieval manuscript tradition are either outright forgeries or have been at least seriously tampered with by Christian monks for nefarious ends.

Not an unusual case

The fact is, though, we have almost no surviving original, autograph manuscripts from antiquity from any culture in any language. Nearly all of the surviving manuscripts we have are copies of copies of copies, because that is how texts were transmitted in ancient times. I’ve written about this fact in many previous articles, but I especially deal with it in this article from December 2019.

There is absolutely nothing suspicious or unusual whatsoever about the fact that we do not have, say, an original copy of Herodotos’s Histories in his own handwriting; on the contrary, that is exactly what we would expect. If we did have a copy of Herodotos’s Histories in his own handwriting, that would be shocking and unusual.

Now, you may be wondering, if we do not have an original copy of Herodotos’s Histories, then how do we know he wrote it? How do we know The Histories was not just written as a forgery by some anonymous Christian scribe in the Middle Ages? Well, there are basically three different kinds of evidence we can look for.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a second-century AD bust of the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos, probably based on an earlier Greek original of the fourth century BC

Internal evidence

The first kind of evidence is internal evidence from the text itself. I will use Herodotos’s Histories as an example. Historians agree that Herodotos wrote the Histories in around the late 430s BC or thereabouts. To determine whether this date is accurate, we can examine the text and ask, “Is this something that a Greek man from Halikarnassos writing in around the 430s BC would write?”

We can look at Herodotos’s language and compare it to other examples of Greek writing from different time periods. Herodotos’s Histories is written in the Ionic dialect of the fifth century BC. Chances are, though, if a text was written as a forgery during the Middle Ages, then the language is probably going to bear a much closer resemblance to the Greek language as it existed during the Middle Ages, rather than the Ionic dialect of the fifth century BC.

Even if the forger is good at imitating the Ionic dialect generally, they are bound to make some mistakes; they are going to slip up and use words in ways they were used during the Middle Ages, medieval forms of words, etc. In other words, the language of the forgery is going to include some inconsistencies. Those kinds of mistakes are going to be noticeable to modern scholars. Because the Ionic dialect used in Herodotos’s Histories is consistent, this is an indication that the text is most likely authentic.

Likewise, we can look at the content of the text and determine whether the content is consistent with what we know about Greece from the fifth century BC from other texts dated to that time period and from archaeology. People during the Middle Ages did not have access to all the information we have access to today and if a text was written as a forgery during the Middle Ages, it is bound to contain some anachronisms. For instance, if a text mentions Jesus, churches, or Christians, then it is obviously post-Christian.

ABOVE: Photograph of a thirteenth-century Greek codex from the Dionysiou Monastery containing selections from Herodotos’s Histories and other ancient Greek historical writings

Evidence from other texts

Internal evidence is not the only kind of evidence we can look for. We can also look for evidence from other sources that mention the text we are trying to date. If the text we are trying to date is quoted or alluded to in another surviving work, then we know that the work that is referenced must have been written before the work referencing it.

For instance, Herodotos’s Histories is plausibly alluded to in the comedy The Acharnians, which was written by the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes (lived c. 446 – c. 386 BC) and first performed at the Lenaia festival in Athens in 425 BC. His Histories is definitely alluded to in Aristophanes’s later comedy The Birds, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in Athens in 414 BC.

This means that, at the very least, Herodotos’s Histories must have been written before Aristophanes’s Birds. Therefore, either both works were really written in the late fifth century BC or they were both forged at a later date.

As you find more and more texts that reference a certain work, though, the case becomes more compelling that the work must have really been written when it purports to have been written. The Histories is also definitely alluded to in the tragedy Elektra by Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BC), which was probably first performed at some point between c. 416 and 413 BC.

Meanwhile, Euripides’s tragedy Helene, which was first performed at the City Dionysia in 412 BC, is often thought to show some influence from an incident recounted in Herodotos’s Histories 2.112-120. Herodotos’s Histories is also alluded to by the Athenian historian Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c.  400 BC) in Book One of his Histories of the Peloponnesian War.

We have so many surviving texts that are traditionally thought to date to the late fifth century BC that seemingly allude to Herodotos’s Histories that the conclusion that Herodotos’s Histories was really written in the fifth century BC becomes inescapable. No one could have possibly forged so many texts so successfully so as to make the conclusion that The Histories is a medieval forgery reasonable.

ABOVE: Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 16, a first-century AD papyrus fragment containing a portion of Book Four of Thoukydides’s Histories of the Peloponnesian War. Thoukydides alludes to Herodotos in Book One.

Evidence from archaeology

We can also look to archaeology for evidence. Archaeologists occasionally uncover portions of ancient manuscripts of ancient texts. In almost no cases are these texts the original document; they are virtually always copies. Nonetheless, if we can date a surviving papyrus fragment of a copy of a certain work to a certain time period, then we can know that the work we are discussing must have been written before that time period.

For instance, below is a photograph of Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2099, which contains a portion of Book Eight of Herodotos’s Histories. This fragment is dated to around the second century AD. Therefore, based on this fragment, we can be sure that Herodotos’s Histories was written before the second century AD. This means that, if The Histories were a forgery, then it must have been an ancient forgery.

But wait, how do we know the text as we have it hasn’t been altered?

Using these three different kinds of evidence, we can establish with a high degree of certainty that Herodotos’s Histories was really written in the late fifth century BC. This does not mean that the text as we have it is exactly how Herodotos wrote it, though. In fact, we have good reason to believe that the text of The Histories, like all ancient texts, has been changed in some places.

To establish where the text has been changed, we can examine different surviving manuscripts of The Histories and see where they are the same and where they are different. If two texts differ, then obviously at least one of them must have been changed at some point.

Most of the differences that we see between manuscripts are extremely minor. We often find obvious scribal errors where a scribe has clearly accidentally skipped a word, skipped a line, copied the same word twice, copied the same line twice, mistaken one letter for another and miscopied it, etc. These are basically the ancient equivalents of typos. They are usually easy to spot and are relatively easily corrected.

ABOVE: Photograph of portions of a fifteenth-century Greek manuscript of Herodotos’s Histories with marginalia (i.e. notes written in the margins)

Sometimes, though, we encounter places where manuscripts have been altered deliberately. These kinds of changes can sometimes be more difficult to sort out because it can be more difficult to tell which parts of the text are genuine and which parts are later additions or interpolations.

Ultimately, though, we can sort it out. Just because some texts have been altered in some places does not mean we should categorically reject all surviving ancient historical sources; it just means we should examine these sources critically. There is an entire field of scholarly inquiry devoted exclusively to the study and correction of ancient texts. This field is known as “textual criticism.”

(By the way, for more information about Herodotos, I highly recommend reading this article I published on 9 September 2019 titled “A Life of Herodotos,” in which I dig into the historical records and discuss about what we know about Herodotos’s life historically.)

Forged ancient texts that have been identified as such

Scholars have actually identified some texts that were once thought to be ancient as forgeries. The most famous example of this is the Donation of Constantine, a text that was actually written in around the eighth century AD that purports to have been written by the emperor Constantine I (lived c. 272 – 337 AD). This document claimed to give control of the entire western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I (served as Pope 314 – 335 AD) in gratitude for the Pope having cured the emperor of leprosy.

Throughout the Late Middle Ages, there were many scholars who suspected that the Donation of Constantine was not really ancient and, in 1440, the Italian humanist scholar and Catholic priest Lorenzo Valla (lived c. 1407 – 1457 AD) wrote a treatise titled De Falso Credita et Ementita Constantini Donatione Declamatio in which he conclusively demonstrated using philological evidence that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery.

Valla pointed out that, aside from the Donation of Constantine, there was absolutely no contemporary evidence that the Pope took over administration of the western Roman Empire during the reign of Constantine. He further noted that the document contained anachronisms, such as the use of the word fief. He also noticed that the quality of the Latin was generally poor and the text contained many vernacularisms, which would be totally unexpected for an authentic official document of the fourth century AD.

Valla argued that the Donation of Constantine was not only a forgery, but such an obvious one that it was impossible that the Pope could even seriously think that it was authentic. He argued that the only reason why the Pope presented the document as authentic was because it could be used to bolster papal authority. This is a great example of how scholars were able to recognize a forged text that claimed to be ancient.

ABOVE: Portrait of the Italian scholar Lorenzo Valla, who conclusively identified the Donation of Constantine as a medieval forgery

Why do people think we have no idea what any ancient texts originally said?

Now that I have debunked the misconception that we have no way of knowing what any ancient text originally said and that we have no way of telling whether or not supposedly ancient texts even really ancient, I think it is necessarily to ask the question, “Why on Earth do some people even think this?”

The general public is not known for its skepticism; as I mentioned in this article I published in March 2019 about Atlantis, a poll conducted by Chapman University in 2018 found that roughly 57% of people in the United States agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “ancient, advanced civilizations, such as Atlantis, once existed.” The same poll also found that roughly 41% of Americans agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “aliens have visited Earth in our ancient past.”

Clearly, unwarranted hyperskepticism is not a trait that is commonly found among members of the general public. It seems clear to me, therefore, that most of the people who claim that we have no idea what ancient texts originally said or that ancient texts may not even really be ancient are skeptics who have seen the general lack of skepticism in the public at large and therefore grown skeptical of anything that is widely accepted. They have, in effect, taken their own skepticism too far.

The person I got into the argument with back in June seems to have read (or, more likely, skimmed) a few academic papers about the manuscript tradition and somehow misinterpreted those papers to mean far more extreme things than they really said. He attempted to cite the paper “The History of the Text of Aristophanes” by Alan H. Sommerstein as saying that we have no idea what Aristophanes originally wrote or if any of the plays attributed to him were really written by him, but that is not at all what the paper actually says.

Mythicism and hyperskepticism about ancient history

I think that the impression some people have that we do not really know what any classical texts originally said may also be influenced by promoters of the Christ myth theory, a fringe theory which claims that there was no historical Jesus of Nazareth of any sort. Proponents of this fringe theory often try to explain away mentions of Jesus in classical texts as later forgeries by Christian scribes.

As a result of this, many people who read works written by promoters of the Christ myth theory have gotten the false impression that it was normal for Christian scribes to completely change the texts they were copying and that professional scholars are incapable of telling the difference between an authentic ancient text and a later interpolation.

In reality, though, the promoters of the Christ myth theory are just desperate to explain away the evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus and most of the time they are just dismissing passages as interpolations without any good evidence because it suits their agenda. Mythicists are trying to undermine religion, but they are so extreme in their skepticism that they often end up inadvertently undermining the idea that we can know anything about ancient history at all.