Transmission and The Manuscript Tradition
Although the earliest Greek language texts on mathematics that have been found were written after the Hellenistic period, many of these are considered to be copies of works written during and before the Hellenistic period. The two major sources are
- Byzantine codices written some 500 to 1500 years after their originals
- Syriac or Arabic translations of Greek works and Latin translations of the Arabic versions.
Nevertheless, despite the lack of original manuscripts, the dates of Greek mathematics are more certain than the dates of surviving Baylonian or Egyptian sources because a large number of overlapping chronologies exist. Even so, many dates are uncertain; but the doubt is a matter of decades rather than centuries.
Read more about this topic: Ancient Greek Mathematicians
Famous quotes containing the words manuscript and/or tradition:
“The manuscript lay like a dust-rag on his desk, and Eitel found, as he had found before, that the difficulty of art was that it forced a man back on his life, and each time the task was more difficult and distasteful.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Barnards greatest war service ... was the continuance of full-scale instruction in the liberal arts ... It was Barnards responsibility to keep alive in the minds of young people the great liberal tradition of the past and the study of philosophy, of history, of Greek.”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (18771965)