His verses have not come down to us through a manuscript tradition-generations of scribes copying an author's collected works, such as delivered intact into the modern age four entire books of Pindar's odes-but haphazardly, in quotes from ancient scholars and commentators whose own works have chanced to survive, and in the tattered remnants of papyri uncovered from an ancient rubbish pile at Oxyrhynchus and other locations in Egypt: sources that modern scholars have studied and correlated exhaustively, adding little by little to the world's store of poetic fragments.

Gershom Sholem observed that the manuscript " contains not ancient legends but modern fiction ".

In historical archaeology, the ancient literature of the Iron Age includes the earliest texts preserved in manuscript tradition.

Because manuscript transmission was done by hand-copying, typically by monastic scribes, almost all ancient texts have been subject to both accidental and deliberate alterations, emendations ( called interpolation ) or elisions.

In India the Palm leaf manuscript, with a distinctive long rectangular shape, was used from ancient times until the 19th century.

Despite this, the manuscript tradition of Plautus is poorer than that of any other ancient dramatist, something not helped by the failure of scholia on Plautus to survive.

The only extant Greek parent manuscript of the letter, the Codex Mediceus Laurentius, says, " Those who had walked in ancient practices attained unto newness of hope, no longer observing Sabbath, but living according to the Lord's life ..." ( kata kyriaken zoen zontes ).

Although the manuscript tradition broke off, some of Sappho's poetry has been discovered in Egyptian papyri fragments from an earlier period, such as those found in the ancient rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus, where a major find brought many new but tattered verses to light, providing a major new source.

# He cites an ancient manuscript that refers to a book Sod Gadol that seems to in fact be the Zohar.

Negative numbers are used in the Bakhshali manuscript of ancient India, but its exact date of compilation is unknown.

The Sumerian King List is an ancient manuscript originally recorded in the Sumerian language, listing kings of Sumer ( ancient southern Iraq ) from Sumerian and neighboring dynasties, their supposed reign lengths, and the locations of " official " kingship.

This recast of the Visigothic code has been preserved in a manuscript known as the “ Codex Utinensis ”, which was formerly kept in the archives of the Udine Cathedral, but is now lost ; and it was published in the 18th century for the first time by Paolo Canciani in his collection of ancient laws entitled Barbarorum Leges Antiquae.

It is missing only one fact: The ranking order of the original Knights Templar, plus one discovered in an ancient Xanadu manuscript.

Though the Metamorphoses did not suffer the ignominious fate of the Medea, no ancient scholia on the poem survive ( although they did exist in antiquity ), and the earliest manuscript is very late, dating from the 11th century.

Joseph Smith claims to have been led by an angel to a large hill in upstate New York, where he was shown an ancient manuscript engraved on plates of gold metal.

F. Núñez de la Vega, bishop of Chiapa, says, in the preface to his Synodal Constitutions, that in the visit which he made to his diocese towards the end of the last century the late 1600s, he found many ancient calendars of the Chiapanese, and an old manuscript in the language of that country, made by the Indians themselves, in which it was said, according to their ancient tradition, that a certain person named Votan was present at that great building, which was made by order of his uncle, in order to mount up to heaven ; that then every people was given its language, and that Votan himself was charged by God to make the division of the lands of Anahuac.

Some stories from the Popol Vuh continued to be told by modern Maya as folk legends ; some stories recorded by anthropologists in the 20th century may preserve portions of the ancient tales in greater detail than the Ximénez manuscript.

The printer Joseph ben Samuel claimed the work was copied by a scribe named Jacob the son of Atyah from an ancient manuscript whose letters could hardly be made out.

Chariton of Aphrodisias () was the author of an ancient Greek novel probably titled Callirhoe ( based on the subscription in the sole surviving manuscript ), though it is regularly referred to as Chaereas and Callirhoe ( which more closely aligns with the title given at the head of the manuscript ).

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a palimpsest ( ancient overwritten manuscript ) on parchment in the form of a codex ( hand-written bound book, as opposed to a scroll ).

From this action sprang the idea of somehow uniting Greek and Shakespearean drama into a new total form, capable of restoring to life the ancient moral and poetic responses.

When the idea of a modern Olympics became a reality at the end of the 19th century, the initiators and organizers were looking for a great popularizing event, recalling the ancient glory of Greece.

The idea of an artifact made conscious is an ancient theme of mythology, appearing for example in the Greek myth of Pygmalion, who carved a statue that was magically brought to life, and in medieval Jewish stories of the Golem, a magically animated homunculus built of clay.

The idea recurred in Classicist Michael Grant's 1977 review of the evidence for Jesus, who compared modern scepticism about an historical Jesus to the ancient docetic idea that Jesus only seemed to come into the world " in the flesh ".

The idea of dharma as duty or propriety derives from an idea found in India's ancient legal and religious texts that there is a divinely instituted natural order of things ( rta ) and justice, social harmony and human happiness require that human beings discern and live in a manner appropriate to the requirements of that order.

The concept of divine right incorporates, but exaggerates, the ancient Christian concept of " royal God-given rights ", which teach that " the right to rule is anointed by God ", although this idea is found in many other cultures, including Aryan and Egyptian traditions.

The ancient Roman Catholic tradition overcame this idea with the doctrine of the " Two Swords " and so achieved, for the very first time, a balanced constitution for states.

Similarly, the ancient metaphysical and unfalsifiable idea of the existence of atoms has led to corresponding falsifiable modern theories.

In ancient times, the idea of subterranean realms seemed arguable, and became intertwined with the concept of " places " such as the Greek Hades, the Nordic svartalfheim, the Christian Hell, and the Jewish Sheol ( with details describing inner Earth in Kabalistic literature, such as the Zohar and Hesed L ' Avraham ).

The idea of a subterranean realm is also mentioned in the Vedic texts such as the Puranas, according to one story in the Puranas there is an ancient city called Shamballa which is located inside the earth, the belief in Shamballa as a city inside the earth is also found in Tibetan Buddhism.

The best known is Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, which, like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, is based on the idea that the real Grail is not a cup but the womb and later the earthly remains of Mary Magdalene ( again cast as Jesus ' wife ), plus a set of ancient documents claimed to tell the true story of Jesus, his teachings and descendants.

Although learning about the construction of ancient eyes through fossil evidence is problematic due to the soft tissues leaving no imprint or remains, genetic and comparative anatomical evidence has increasingly supported the idea of a common ancestry for all eyes.

He speculated that myths arose due to the lack of abstract nouns and neuter gender in ancient languages: anthropomorphic figures of speech, necessary in such languages, were eventually taken literally, leading to the idea that natural phenomena were conscious beings, gods.

Several ancient philosophers expressed the idea that nature produces a huge variety of creatures, randomly, and that only those creatures that manage to provide for themselves and reproduce successfully survive ; well-known examples include Empedocles

The ancient Egyptian numeral system was of this type, and the Roman numeral system was a modification of this idea.

Although the concept of offering hospitality to the traveler dates back to early cultures ( notably ancient Greece: xenia and Viking Age Scandinavia ), the idea of applying it specifically to Esperanto speakers began in 1966 in Argentina when Ruben Feldman-Gonzalez started the Programo Pasporto.

But while Coubertin was certainly a romantic, and while his idealised vision of ancient Greece would lead him later to the idea of reviving the Olympic Games, his advocacy for physical education was based on practical concerns as well.

The failure of this endeavour, however, was closely followed by the development of a new idea, the revival of the ancient Olympic Games, the creation of a festival of international athleticism.

In 1584 Giordano Bruno suggested that the stars were like the Sun, and may have other planets, possibly even Earth-like, in orbit around them, an idea that had been suggested earlier by the ancient Greek philosophers, Democritus and Epicurus, and by medieval Islamic cosmologists such as Fakhr al-Din al-Razi.

This idea of a superficial contrast between characters ' individual linguistic style, tone and sphere of interest, leading to an understanding of the deeper unity between the ancient and modern, is a recurring theme in The Hobbit.

In related stories, the creation idea is caused by a single entity emanating or producing something by him-or herself, as in the Tibetan Buddhism concept of Adi-Buddha, the ancient Greek story of Gaia ( Mother Earth ), the Aztec goddess Coatlicue myth, the ancient Egyptian god Atum story, or the Genesis creation narrative.

The germ of the idea is to be found in ancient writers who used sundials and Ptolemaic epicycles to illustrate the divine order of the world.