Enheduanna
[1]
Homer
Margites
Epic Cycle
Thespis
[8]
Thales
Anaximander
[9]
Hellespontine Sibyl
Pherecydes of Syros
Ctesias
Indica
Aeschylus
[10]
Anaxagoras
Xenocles
[11]
Sophocles
[12]
Protagoras
Gorgias
Pherecydes of Leros
Leros
Euripides
Alcmaeon in Corinth
Socrates
Aesop's Fables
Pherecydes of Athens
Prodicus
Agathon
Anthos
Aristophanes
[16]
Speusippus
Aristotle
Poetics
Eudemus
Ptolemy I Soter
[18]
Callisthenes
Alexander
Cleitarchus
History of Alexander
Pytheas
Aristarchus of Samos
heliocentrism
Manetho
Berossus
Babyloniaca
Euclid
conic sections
Archimedes
On Sphere-Making
Ctesibius
Eratosthenes
Cleomedes
Cato the Elder
Nicander
Aetolia
Agatharchides
Apollodorus of Athens
Sulla
Plutarch
Varro
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Hortensius
Quintus Tullius Cicero
Diodorus Siculus
extant
Alexander Polyhistor
Successions of Philosophers
Gaius Julius Caesar
Gaius Asinius Pollio
Gaius Maecenas
Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus
Strabo
Augustus
Livy
Ab Urbe Condita
Verrius Flaccus
Cato the Elder
Helvius Cinna
Myrrha
Ovid
Tiberius
Suetonius
Claudius
De arte aleae
Seneca the Younger
Memnon of Heraclea
Heraclea Pontica
Pamphilus of Alexandria
Agrippina the Younger
Pliny the Elder
Tacitus
Quintilian
Lucan
Adlocutio
Frontinus
Trajan
Dacica
Philo of Byblos
Phoenician
Suetonius
Septimius Severus
Callinicus
Zenobia
Zoticus
Porphyry
Longinus
Porphyry
Zenobia
Historia Augusta
Gaius Asinius Quadratus
Sulpicius Alexander
Nigramansir. A Moral Interlude and a Pithy. by . Printed 1504. A copy seen in 1759 in Chichester has since vanished.
John Skelton
. An earlier version of the William Shakespeare play Hamlet. Some scholars believe it to be a lost work written by Thomas Kyd, while others attribute it to Shakespeare, identifying the Ur-Hamlet with the first quarto text.[45]
Ur-Hamlet
a play by Henry Chettle, Henry Porter and Ben Jonson; mentioned in Philip Henslowe's diary, August 1598.[51]
Hot Anger Soon Cold
, a play by Henry Chettle and Thomas Dekker; mentioned in Philip Henslowe's diary, August 1599.[52]
The Stepmother's Tragedy
Black Bateman of the North, Part II, a play by and Robert Wilson; mentioned in Henslowe's diary in April 1598.[53]
Henry Chettle
Only four survived the Spanish conquest; most were destroyed by conquistadors, the Roman Catholic Church or the Aztecs.
Maya codices
Chinese emperor (3rd century BCE) had most previously existing books burned when he consolidated his power. See Burning of books and burying of scholars.
Qin Shi Huang
The , the largest library in existence during antiquity, was destroyed at some point in time between the Roman and Muslim conquests of Alexandria.
Library of Alexandria
Aztec emperor (ruled 1427/8–1440) ordered the burning of all historical Aztec codices in an effort to develop a state-sanctioned Aztec history and mythology.
Itzcoatl
During the , many monastic libraries were destroyed. Worcester Abbey had 600 books at the time of the dissolution. Only six of them have survived intact to the present day. At the abbey of the Augustinian Friars at York, a library of 646 volumes was destroyed, leaving only three surviving books. Some books were destroyed for their precious bindings, others were sold off by the cartload, including irreplaceable early English works. It is believed that many of the earliest Anglo-Saxon manuscripts were lost at this time.
Dissolution of the Monasteries
and Antonio Salieri are known to have composed together a cantata for voice and piano called Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia which was celebrating the return to stage of the singer Nancy Storace, and which has been lost, although it had been printed by Artaria in 1785.[104] The music had been considered lost until November 2015, when German musicologist and composer Timo Jouko Herrmann identified the score while searching for music by one of Salieri's ostensible pupils, Antonio Casimir Cartellieri, in the archives of the Czech Museum of Music in Prague.[105]
W. A. Mozart
, written by the Marquis de Sade in the Bastille prison in 1785, was considered lost by its author (and was much lamented by him) after the storming and looting of 1789. It was rediscovered in the walls of his cell and published in 1904.[106]
The 120 Days of Sodom
composed his Symphony No. 1 in 1865. It was subsequently lost, which the composer believed to be final and irreversible. It was only found again in 1923, twenty years after Dvořák's death, and performed for the first time in 1936.[107]
Antonín Dvořák
by Beatrix Potter, the handwritten manuscripts for this story were found in school notebooks, including a few illustrations. She intended to finish the book, but was interrupted by wars and marriage and farming. It was found nearly 100 years later and published for the first time in September 2016.[108]
A Tale of Kitty in Boots
Lesbian Love, by , had only 150 copies published "for private circulation only" in 1925. Historian Jonathan Ned Katz searched and found the only known copy, owned by Nina Alvarez, who had found the book in the lobby of her apartment building in 1998 in Albany, New York. Records show that another copy was held in the Sterling Library at Yale University, but it has not been located.[109]
Eva Kotchever
's prize-winning submission for the 1889 celestial mechanics contest of king Oscar II was thought to be lost. While this version was being printed, Poincaré himself discovered a serious error. The existing version was recalled and then replaced by a heavily modified and corrected version, now regarded as the seminal description of chaos theory. The original erroneous submission was thought to be lost, but it was found in 2011.[110]
Henri Poincaré
Umberto Eco's features a murder mystery whose solution hinges on the contents of Aristotle's lost second book of Poetics (dealing with comedy).
The Name of the Rose
Dan Brown's builds its central theme around a fictional account of the apocryphal and partially lost Gnostic Gospels.
The Da Vinci Code
's science fiction novel The Hemingway Hoax centers on a suitcase with writings by Ernest Hemingway which was stolen in 1922 at the Gare de Lyon in Paris.
Joe Haldeman
is presented as a series of images ostensibly created by one Harris Burdick, who had intended to use them for his children's books before he mysteriously disappeared. Each image is accompanied by a title and a single line of text, which encourage readers to create their own stories.
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick
wrote that all the original Arabic copies of The Necronomicon (Al Azif) have been destroyed, as well as the Arabic to Greek translations. Only five Greek to Latin translations are held by libraries, though copies may exist in private collections.[111]
H. P. Lovecraft
Deuel, Leo. Testaments of Time: The Search for Lost Manuscripts and Records (New York: Knopf, 1965)
Dudbridge, Glen. Lost Books of Medieval China (London: The British Library, 2000)
Peter, Hermann. (2 vols., B.G. Teubner, Leipzig, 1870, 2nd ed. 1914–16)
Historicorum Romanorum reliquiae
Wilson. R. M. The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London: Methuen, 1952)
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