Lost work


A lost work is a document, literary work, or piece of multimedia produced some time in the past, of which no surviving copies are known to exist. This term most commonly applies to works from the classical world, although it is increasingly used in relation to modern works. A work may be lost to history through the destruction of an original manuscript and all later copies. In contrast to lost or "extinct" works, surviving copies may be referred to as "extant".
Works—or, commonly, small fragments of works—have survived by being found by archaeologists during investigations, or accidentally by anybody, for example, the Nag Hammadi library scrolls. Works also survived when they were reused as bookbinding materials, quoted or included in other works, or as palimpsests, where an original document is imperfectly erased so the substrate on which it was written can be reused. The discovery, in 1822, of Cicero's De re publica was one of the first major recoveries of a lost ancient text from a palimpsest. Another famous example is the discovery of the Archimedes palimpsest, which was used to make a prayer book almost 300 years after the original work was written. A work may be recovered in a library, as a lost or mislabeled codex, or as a part of another book or codex.
Well known, but not recovered, works are described by that did survive. For example, the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder or the De Architectura of Vitruvius. Sometimes authors will destroy their own works. On other occasions, authors instruct others to destroy their work after their deaths. This should have happened with several pieces, but did not. For example, Virgil's Aeneid, which was saved by Augustus, and Kafka's novels, which were saved by Max Brod. Handwritten copies of manuscripts existed in limited numbers before the era of printing. The destruction of ancient libraries, including the multiple attempts on that of Alexandria, resulted in the loss of numerous works. Works to which no one has subsequently referred remain unknown.
Deliberate destruction of works may be termed literary crime or literary vandalism.

Lost works

Classical world

Specific titles

The Middle-Persian literature had contained diverse subjects that only a small collection mostly on religious subjects survive by Zoroastrian minorities. Post-Sasanian texts reports the names of hundreds of works which were translated into Arabic. Their original as well as their translations mostly lost and only mentions in other works survive.

Manichaean texts