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)
“The tradition I cherish is the ideal this country was built upon, the concept of religious pluralism, of a plethora of opinions, of tolerance and not the jihad. Religious war, pooh. The war is between those who trust us to think and those who believe we must merely be led.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)