Academic English Writing 1: Assignment 1

In the field of ancient history, as opposed to later periods of history, the greatest obstacle is the lack of sources. An example where lack of sources is clearly shown is in roman drama. There are no complete comedies after 160 BC1 and the earliest surviving tragedy is from the first century AD2. No works of Roman drama from the period in between have survived at all. 
A lack of sources troubles the reconstruction of historical periods as well. For certain periods there is only one surviving author, which complicates the verification of his account. But even when there are two or three authors whose texts have survived it is important to try and deduce who their sources might have been. For if a second author used a first author as a main source then his text loses its reliability as a source for verifying the text of the first author. 
 Looking at Mesopotamia it can be seen that we have a vast collection of cuneiform tablets that are as of yet still untranslated and there is good hope of finding more. The same cannot be said about the classical world. While most of the cultures who lived in Mesopotamia wrote on clay tablets, Greeks and Romans wrote on papyrus and paper. And where clay tablets preserve well, paper scrolls and codices do not and must be replaced every fifty to a hundred years or so, depending on the circumstances they are kept, and they rarely survive a fire.
It is by painstakingly copying them by hand that it might be said that a fair amount of sources have been preserved over the ages by the diligence of the medieval monks. This, however, leads to its own problem. Since it is only natural that mistakes have set in after copying texts for a period of two millennia and because sometimes texts have been actively censored, it is important to verify their accuracy by comparing two or preferably more of the same texts.