What are the oldest manuscripts we have for Herodotus,and othe famous historians of the old world.?

Question

sorry others.

Answer 1

Herodotus (5th century BC) is best known for "The Histories." Despite his reputation as the "Father of History" we do not have copies of his works that date before AD 900, a lag of some 1300 years. The earliest is in the Laurentian Library in Florence. There are four other manuscripts of a similar age. No-one knows how much these copies of copies varied from Herodotus' originals. We do know, however, that The Histories was restructured many years later by an Alexandrian scholar.

There was a similar lag for another important ancient Greek historian, Thucydides. We have a 10th century miniscule of his History of the Peleponnesian War.

This is not surprising, all things considered. Manuscripts before the onset of printing and of paper were fragile things that could degenerate over time. Moreover, readers might not appreciate the importance of a work at the time, casting aside manuscripts or not making copies at all. Also, in times of strife (and there were many over the years) many manuscripts disappeared.

This means that there are many manuscripts that historians have heard about in other works for which we have no copies at all (including most of the corpus of the historian Polybius). Those that did survive also followed a circuitous route westwards, via the Romans, the Byzantines and even the Arabs, potentially being changed in the interim.

Answer 2

I believe they have found fragmentary papyrus and stone engravings that are near contemporary (within several hundred years) but that the only complete works come from the middle ages. Probably copied over from Arabic like the other classics.