Enheduanna

[1]

Homer

Margites

The Catalogue of Women (sometime between 750 and 650 BC)[6]

Hesiodic

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

's Gothic History, which survives only in a much shorter abridgement, the Getica of Jordanes

Cassiodorus

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

, play by William Shakespeare.[46]

Love's Labour's Won

The Ocean’s Love to . A poem by Sir Walter Raleigh of which only fragments are known.[47]

Cynthia

's philosophic work The Parnasum of Luís Vaz is lost.[48]

Luís de Camões

(1597), a play by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson.[49]

The Isle of Dogs

, a play by Thomas Dekker, mentioned in Philip Henslowe's diary, 1597.[50]

Phaethon

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

, a fragmentary Coptic codex rediscovered and translated, 2006.[102][103]

Gospel of Judas

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 a Doctor Who episode that explains the fate of Love's Labour's Won.

The Shakespeare Code

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

. Musaeum Clausum or Bibliotheca Abscondita (published posthumously in 1683)

Browne, Thomas

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)

Kelly, Stuart. The Book of Lost Books (Viking, 2005)  0-670-91499-1

ISBN

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)

article category section on The Lost Media Wiki

List of Lost Literature

Discoveries of Lost Classical Literature

Longing for Great Lost Works

Lost works of Tertullian

Lost Works of Berosus

Lost Works of W.A. Mozart

Weighing Words Over Last Wishes

Fragmentary Tragedies of Sophocles Project

In Search of a Lost JG Ballard Novel

Hi-tech imaging could reveal lost texts

The Suppression of Lesbian and Gay History