Key facts, kept honest

Short, checkable statements about the texts in this library — corpus numbers computed from our own editions, historical claims restricted to uncontroversial mainstream scholarship, and a standing list of famous misconceptions corrected. Cite freely; every fact links to its source.

This library

• Open Scriptorium hosts 24 volumes of ancient literature — about 6.0 million words of English — all newly machine-translated directly from the original languages and free to read, download, and cite. → source
• Every translation on openscriptorium.com is made from the original Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Akkadian, Ugaritic, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, or French source text, never from an earlier English translation. → source
• Open Scriptorium's audiobook library exceeds 470 hours of narrated audio, free to stream and download. → source
• Open Scriptorium publishes its accuracy audits: a 500-passage source-paired audit found roughly 97% of sampled passages clean, and every verified error was corrected. → source
• The Dead Sea Scrolls, Baal Cycle, Gilgamesh, and Bible-adjacent volumes on Open Scriptorium are permanently free and never sold, per their source licenses. → source

Plutarch

• Plutarch's Parallel Lives pairs a famous Greek with a famous Roman; 46 paired Lives and 18 surviving formal Comparisons come to about 651,000 words in English. → source
• Plutarch wrote in Greek around 100 CE while serving as a priest at Delphi. → source
• Plutarch's Moralia is a separate collection of 71 essays and dialogues on ethics, religion, and table talk — distinct from the Parallel Lives. → source

Dead Sea Scrolls

• The first Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947 in caves near Qumran by the Dead Sea. → source
• The five major sectarian scrolls — Community Rule, War Scroll, Thanksgiving Hymns, Habakkuk Pesher, and Damascus Document — total 107 readable columns and about 2,200 lines of Hebrew. → source
• The Dead Sea Scrolls contain no New Testament texts; they are Jewish works in Hebrew and Aramaic, most copied between roughly 150 BCE and 70 CE. → source
• The Damascus Document was known from Cairo Genizah copies published in 1910, decades before the Qumran discoveries confirmed its antiquity. → source

Ugarit & the Baal Cycle

• The Baal Cycle survives on six clay tablets (KTU 1.1–1.6) from Ugarit in modern Syria, written down around the 13th century BCE by a scribe who signs himself Ilimilku. → source
• The Baal Cycle's sea-monster Litan — 'the fleeing serpent... the twisting serpent' — is the direct Canaanite forerunner of the biblical Leviathan of Isaiah 27:1, in nearly identical wording a millennium earlier. → source
• Ugaritic is written in a cuneiform alphabet of about 30 signs, unrelated to Mesopotamian syllabic cuneiform. → source

Early Christianity

• Irenaeus of Lyons wrote Against Heresies around 180 CE; the full work survives only in an ancient Latin translation, with Greek fragments preserved by later quoters. → source
• Tertullian of Carthage (fl. 197–220 CE) is the first major Christian author to write in Latin; words like 'trinitas' enter Christian Latin with him. → source
• Clement of Alexandria's trilogy — Exhortation, Instructor, Miscellanies — quotes pagan poets and philosophers hundreds of times, preserving fragments otherwise lost. → source
• Origen's Against Celsus (~248 CE) quotes its pagan opponent so extensively that Celsus's lost attack on Christianity (~178 CE) can be largely reconstructed from the rebuttal. → source
• Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho (mid-2nd century) is the earliest surviving extended Christian-Jewish debate. → source

Greek & Latin classics

• Herodotus's Histories (5th century BCE) is conventionally counted the first work of history; its nine-book division was imposed by later Alexandrian editors. → source
• Lucretius's On the Nature of Things expounds Epicurean atomism in about 7,400 lines of Latin hexameter and breaks off, apparently unfinished, during the plague of Athens. → source
• Seneca's Letters to Lucilius comprise 124 letters written in the early 60s CE, in the last years before his forced suicide under Nero. → source
• The Epic of Gilgamesh predates the Iliad by well over a millennium; its Standard Babylonian version was compiled around 1100 BCE from older Sumerian and Akkadian material. → source

Commonly claimed vs. the record

• Commonly claimed: Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The record: the violin did not exist in 64 CE, and Tacitus places Nero at Antium when the fire began (Annals 15.39). → source
• Commonly claimed: Roman gladiators always said 'Those about to die salute you.' The record: the phrase is attested once in ancient literature, spoken by condemned naval combatants to Claudius (Suetonius, Claudius 21), not by gladiators generally. → source
• Commonly claimed: Epicurus taught luxurious indulgence. The record: his surviving letters commend plain living; 'epicure' as glutton is a later distortion. → source
• Commonly claimed: the Romans sowed Carthage with salt in 146 BCE. The record: no ancient source says so; the detail first appears in modern historiography. → source
• Commonly claimed: 'a sound mind in a sound body' is a proverb of unknown ancient origin. The record: it is Juvenal, Satire 10 — 'orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano' — a prayer recommendation, not a fitness slogan. → source
• Commonly claimed: the Dead Sea Scrolls mention Jesus or early Christians. The record: no scroll names Jesus or any New Testament figure; the sectarian texts concern a Jewish community and its 'Teacher of Righteousness.' → source

Maintained by Open Scriptorium. Corrections welcome: [email protected]