20 Lost Books We Only Know Through Other Writers

Aristarchus of Samos was a Greek astronomer who correctly hypothesized that the Sun does not move, but Earth orbits it, circa 270 BCE, almost 1,800 years before Copernicus was awarded that honor. His original book on the topic is lost to time, and we only know about it because a mathematician named Archimedes described and quoted it in his surviving work, The Sand Reckoner.

In 1613, the King’s Men, the leading troupe in London, performed the play Cardenio, written by William Shakespeare and his frequent co-author John Fletcher. The script was paid for out of the Royal Treasury, but after that initial performance, it disappeared. A publishing registry later attributed it to Fletcher and Shakespeare. In 1727, an editor named Lewis Theobald published a play called Double Falshood, which he claimed came from three manuscripts of the lost play. Those manuscripts were never produced, and scholars remain unsure how much of Shakespeare’s work, if any, remains in Double Falshood.

The Ur-Hamlet is the name given to a revenge tragedy, which was performed in London sometime in the 1580s or 1590s and which used the tale of Amleth, a prince from Scandinavia, from which Shakespeare drew his play, Hamlet. The play itself has been lost. In 1589, the writer Thomas Nashe parodied its bombastic nature in print. Most scholars believe that the author was Thomas Kyd, a fact alluded to in Nashe’s satirical passage, while others believe that it may have been a rough draft by Shakespeare himself.

Manetho of Sebennytos, an Egyptian priest, was commissioned by Ptolemy II, the Greek king of Egypt, about 280 BCE, to translate the sacred books of the temples into Greek. He sorted the ancient pharaohs of many centuries into 30 dynasties. His great book, the Aegyptiaca, has been lost, but it exists as fragments that were reproduced by later writers such as the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus or the Christian historian Eusebius. This division is still used in modern Egyptology.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote a book called Poetics about tragedy, which originally included a second volume about comedy that talked about what makes jokes funny. That volume is lost, but we know it was written because he mentions it in another surviving book of his called Rhetoric. Historians believe it went missing in late antiquity or the Byzantine era, not through fire. It’s only in Umberto Eco’s 1980 book The Name of the Rose that we see the dramatic image of a monastery fire destroying the last copy.

Before Claudius ascended to become emperor of Rome, he was a trained scholar who spoke Etruscan, a language that was already dying out in his lifetime. Between approximately 20 CE and 40 CE, he wrote a 20-book history of Etruscan civilization called the Tyrrhenika, which he researched directly from Etruscan priests and temple records and wrote in Greek, not Latin. All copies of the Tyrrhenika eventually perished, and we know of its existence only because it was mentioned by ancient writers such as Suetonius and Tacitus. It has been described as the greatest loss to the study of Etruscan history.

While crossing the Alps between provinces in 54 BCE, heading north from Cisalpine Gaul back to join his forces, Julius Caesar composed De Analogia, a work of Latin grammar. Written in two books, this book espoused a strict adherence to standard grammatical rules and encouraged authors to avoid newfangled words “like a reef.” Though the manuscript has long since vanished, we have preserved quotes from it in the works of the Roman historian Suetonius, the politician Cicero, and the writer Aulus Gellius.

In 1598, cleric Francis Meres cited Love’s Labour’s Won among six of William Shakespeare’s comedies in his literary survey. For hundreds of years, scholars thought that Love’s Labour’s Won was an alternate title for a play we still have today. In 1953, the book dealer Solomon Pottesman discovered that a 1603 bookseller’s inventory included copies of Love’s Labour’s Won for sale next to copies of Love’s Labour’s Lost. This showed that the play was real, but no one has ever found a copy of it.

The Roman poet Quintus Ennius, around 180 BCE, wrote the Annales, an epic in 18 books covering Roman history from the fall of Troy to his own time. It became the national epic of Rome for almost 200 years until the Aeneid was published under Augustus. After that, scribes no longer copied Ennius’s poem, and the text was lost, although about 600 lines still survive thanks to citations by other authors such as Cicero and Aulus Gellius, including one celebrated line that praised the actions of the general Fabius Cunctator.

Around 280 BCE, the Babylonian priest Berossus translated the cuneiform texts from the temple archives into Greek and produced a book called the Babyloniaka that included a creation myth, a flood hero named Xisuthros, and a list of kings. The original book was lost. Today we know of Berossus only through a chain of borrowed quotations, starting with a writer named Alexander Polyhistor quoting Berossus, who was then quoted by the historian Flavius Josephus and the bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, both centuries later.

Sometime around 325 BCE, the Greek mariner Pytheas of Massalia set out across the Atlantic, charting the course of the British Isles and venturing far enough north to observe polar ice. He described an island six days further north, which he called Thule, located somewhere between Norway, Iceland, and Shetland. We know of Pytheas’s journey only because the later geographers Strabo and Polybius ridiculed him for claiming to have seen the freezing waters beyond the sub-Arctic. Pytheas’s own book, On the Ocean, was lost long ago.

Heraclitus, a philosopher from Ephesus who lived around 500 BCE, left his book On Nature in the Temple of Artemis, insisting that all things were subject to perpetual change according to a governing principle that he termed logos. His original volume has been lost, but roughly 130 fragments remain because subsequent philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, quoted from Heraclitus’s aphorisms like “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” Even the oft-cited summation “everything flows” was not actually written by Heraclitus. It was coined by a later philosopher named Simplicius.

Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Emperor Nero and wife of Emperor Claudius, wrote a series of personal memoirs about her family’s role in political history and the scandals of the imperial court, as she saw them. Those texts have not survived the ravages of time. However, we know what they were about because the historian Tacitus quotes from them directly in his Annals, specifically in his biography of Agrippina’s own mother. He mentions that she put her family’s tale on paper to share with future readers.

Although they have a very old-fashioned title, the Chaldean Oracles were written around 170 CE, under the rule of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, traditionally credited to a certain Julian the Theurgist. They were written in Greek verse and mixed Greek philosophy with the religious notions of the Near East, in which the soul could ascend to heaven through ritual magic. The entire work was lost after antiquity, but we still have more than 200 fragments that were quoted by later Neoplatonist philosophers such as Proclus and Damascius.

In about 1360, an Oxford monk arrived in the North Atlantic and reported his adventures to King Edward III in a book called the Inventio Fortunata. The book was lost, as was a later summary by a Flemish writer, Jacobus Cnoyen. But both were known to the 16th-century cartographer Gerardus Mercator, who wrote about them in a 1577 letter to John Dee, the English mathematician and adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. Mercator said that Cnoyen had described a magnetic rock at the North Pole, where the sea spun around in a vortex. Mercator had already used this description years earlier to chart his famous 1569 map of the world.

Cassiodorus, a Roman senator, wrote a 12-book history of the Goths from around 526 to 533 CE with the express purpose of legitimizing their rule in Italy. Following the reconquest of Italy by the Byzantines, it was lost, except for one historian, Jordanes, who in 551 CE read the book and wrote a much shorter version, called the Getica, based on the material he was able to digest over three days.

The royal clerks in Samaria, the capital city of the northern kingdom of Israel, compiled an ongoing set of state records known as the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel from around 930 to 722 BCE. They chronicled royal succession, palace coups, and building works among other things. That archive was lost when the Assyrians sacked Samaria in 722 BCE. The sole evidence for its existence comes from the biblical books of Kings, which cite these records by name in 17 different passages throughout the narrative, always inviting the reader to turn back to a civic archive now long gone.

The first prose history of Rome was written by the Roman senator Quintus Fabius Pictor around 200 BCE. Pictor’s work was written in Greek for a Mediterranean audience, not for a Roman one, and focused on events beginning with the legendary Trojan hero Aeneas and ending with the conclusion of the Second Punic War. Although his history has been lost, we have fragments of it quoted by the Greek historian Polybius, who explicitly noted to his readers that Fabius was writing from a strongly pro-Roman perspective.

One brief snippet of poetry found in the Book of Numbers in the Bible contains the only known passage from a lost Hebrew anthology known as the Book of the Wars of the Lord, which was a collection of songs about military victories. The two lines are: “Waheb in Suphah, and the ravines of the Arnon.” The complete book never survived the centuries.

The Book of Jasher was a collection of Hebrew songs that celebrated the exploits of the nation’s heroes and its military victories. It vanished before the completion of the compilation of the Hebrew Bible and only survives by virtue of two citations in Scripture. The first quote appears in the Book of Joshua during the Battle of Gibeon (“Sun, stand still over Gibeon”), and the second is from the dirge David, the future king of Israel, sang when King Saul and his son Jonathan died. Later printed works bearing this title are not the authentic book, which has never been found.

This content was created with the help of AI.