ErostrateDiscovering the world's cultures, one work at a time
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How the works were chosen

By date

Period · 500–1450

Manuscripts and copies

works
121

For a thousand years a book is an object copied by hand, expensive, rare, kept in a monastery, a mosque, a temple or a court. That decides what is handed down: religious texts, dynastic chronicles, court poetry, epics loved enough for copyists to begin them again. The catalogue holds a hundred and fifteen of them, very unevenly spread, and that unevenness is itself a historical fact: where writing served mainly administration or worship, literature travelled by voice, and it would wait until the nineteenth century to be fixed.

Europe 53

Fifty works, twenty-three of them Icelandic, eddic poems and sagas: Iceland copied and kept what the rest of northern Europe lost. Elsewhere the catalogue holds the chansons de geste, the romances of Tristan and of Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, Chaucer. Almost everything passes through the monasteries, the only places with parchment, copyists and libraries, which explains the fate of the texts that did not interest them.

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The Arab, Turkish and Persian worlds 22

Nineteen works for the age in which Arabic and Persian are the learned languages of a space running from Córdoba to Samarkand. The pre-Islamic Mu'allaqat, Ferdowsi's Book of Kings, Khayyam, Hafez, the travels of Ibn Battuta, the first compilations of the Thousand and One Nights. Paper, learned from the Chinese in the eighth century, circulates here four hundred years before Europe, and with it a manuscript publishing of unequalled scale.

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Caucasus and Central Asia 9

Nine works, with one shared trait: almost all belong to court literatures, written in languages that have just acquired an alphabet or adapted one. Grigor Narekatsi's Book of Lamentations in Armenian, Rustaveli's Knight in the Panther's Skin in Georgian, the Qutadgu bilig in Karakhanid Turkic, the divans of Nizami. A region crossed by the silk roads, where three alphabets are used at once.

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East Asia 15

Fifteen works, and the only place in the world already printing: China cuts wooden blocks from the ninth century, Korea casts movable metal type in 1377, seventy years before Gutenberg. The catalogue holds Li Bai and Du Fu, the Tale of Genji written by a lady of the court around 1008, the Pillow Book, the Secret History of the Mongols. Here, court literature is partly written by women.

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South and Southeast Asia 20

Twenty works, seven of them from Sri Lanka: the island kept continuous monastic chronicles from the fifth century, which few countries can claim. The rest comes from Bengal, Burma, Vietnam and Siam, on palm leaves or paper, with one constant: Buddhism supplies at once the scriptoria, the copyists and the subjects, and secular texts survive only if they pass through them.

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Sub-Saharan Africa 2

Only two works, and they say the essential. The Ethiopian Kebra Nagast, written in Ge'ez around 1320, belongs to the only Christian manuscript tradition of the continent south of Egypt. Sunjata, the Mande epic, is dated here to the fourteenth century by the period it recounts, but it was recited by griots for six hundred years before being transcribed, in 1960.

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The Americas 0

Nothing yet. Mesoamerican societies do write in this period, on books folded like screens and made of beaten bark, and the Andes keep their accounts and perhaps their narratives on knotted cords, the quipus, which nobody can now read. Almost all these objects vanished in the sixteenth century, so that the catalogue meets the Americas only after the conquest.

Oceania 0

Nothing, although these centuries are those of the longest voyages ever undertaken: between 900 and 1300 the Polynesians reach New Zealand, Hawaii and Easter Island, under sail and without instruments. Those voyages produced narratives, songs and very exact genealogies, but entrusted to memory; they will enter the catalogue through the transcriptions of the nineteenth century.