These Survive

These Survive is intended to become a bibliographic database on published writings that were written before the year AD 1000, and that are over some minimum length: writings that survive, rather than the elusive fragments of what doesn't survive, on which so much attention is instead fixed.

I've been compiling data for five years, but it's still difficult to predict when this project will even approach completeness. However, this year substantial milestones have been reached, including, today, successful installation of the software I intend to use for the database. The program that'll link that software to this website is not yet installed, nor have I yet put any of the database structure in place; but by summer I hope you'll find at this site an alpha version of the database, with limited data but Web-accessible.

In the meantime, I intend to make available some of what I've written to date about the project, by way of explaining its goals in more detail. Most of this writing has already appeared on Usenet, and should be available from Google.

Some hint of the material I intend to put on this website describing resources for individual languages is already available, through the relevant sections of Half of Asia, for a Thousand Years. Specifically, the section of the "Main Guide" concerned with languages is essentially analogous to that aspect of These Survive. (The "Main Guide" itself is over 200K, which is why I don't link directly to it from here; look at the page I'm linking to and decide whether you want to go further.)

If you would like to offer help with this project, please write to me. I would prefer to compile the actual bibliography by myself as much as possible, but it is already clear that there will be limits to that. Suggestions as to resources for compiling it, methods, etc., are welcome. The one thing most needed, other than my own research time, alas, is someone who is willing and able to undertake the huge task of applying the criteria of the project to surviving writings in Chinese. (While I'm fluent in no language written before AD 1000, the languages I do read are sufficient to catalogue the writings in many others. Some promise to be more difficult - Arabic and Armenian are prominent among these. It's already obvious that no-one who cannot read both Chinese and Japanese can do a decent job of cataloguing ancient Chinese writings.)

(That last paragraph is the only one surviving from this page's initial version, but no offers of help have yet arrived. I realise this is because this project continues to look like it will never produce any results; why throw good effort after bad? However, on the off chance that anyone reading this can offer help in the Chinese language or other areas, please don't assume that anyone else has beaten you to it; write to me!)

Joe Bernstein

these-survive.net was also my personal domain, and gradually and haphazardly accumulated various resources that used to live at <http://www.tezcat.com/~josephb/> (Tezcat, alas, is no more!) or were meant to live there but never happened. Those available to date include:

The news.groups Survival Guide, by me and Rebecca G. McQuitty. Note that this is a profoundly outdated version, essentially of 1997 vintage and thus of largely historical interest; I'm thinking of taking it off the Web. As I write in late 2001, there appears to be little interest in pulling together and completing the revisions attempted, mostly by me, in 2000 and 2001, but those revisions are fully documented, again at Google; the last full drafts are in two parts, Part 1 and Part 2a. There were suggestions when I posted those drafts that I intended to incorporate, so it may be worth your while to read the threads that resulted; but note please that any comments by "jc" or "librarian" (two names for the same person) are relatively unlikely to be interesting and relatively likely to be offensive, and read at your own risk.
"Half of Asia, for a Thousand Years". This is chapter 2 of the book I'm working on, a book which, in turn, is the motivating force behind These Survive itself. In this context, however, it is in its own right meant to be a bibliographic guide to the history between 475 BC and AD 525 of a set of regions whose history, in that period, is widely neglected.
The language, polity, and region databases. These are collections of documents, not true databases (see above for part of the explanation) representing my attempts to grapple with some of the difficulties of researching ancient literatures and history. They are, in effect, between them, the third leg of my research effort, beyond These Survive and the book itself. They cover the period up to AD 700, from the beginning of documentation; at this time I don't know whether I'll bring that date forward to AD 1000 to match These Survive's boundaries, although neither project will be carried past that date. You'll probably find that the regions directory is the most full of these three; I always felt less interested in the polity database and less qualified to work on the language one, and my interest in regional history intensified strongly while researching the chapter 2 that is webbed as "Half of Asia". Among the few documents already available, that on Morocco is probably the best single starting point for the anglophone interested in that area's ancient history; the rest offer much less and, by and large, need updates which I hope to give them during 2002 and 2003.
The beginnings of a charter archive for the Usenet humanities.* hierarchy. I've long been interested in a charter archive for those groups in general whose creation is discussed in the Survival Guide, and humanities.* was one of a succession of starting points over the years; I don't know whether any of the ones done by other people are still webbed. You'll find what little is available by starting from here. If I resume this project, it'll probably be as a database, using the methods I'll learn by doing These Survive.
I've begun a project on the history of Usenet newsgroups, or anyway their chronology. An archive of data and results is available; by and large, my results only extend to 1987, and the data available in that archive are also incomplete.
The next thing I'm supposed to do, besides the heaps of work the regions (etc.) databases need, is revive my John Crowley website, but be aware that whenever I end up doing this it will, in any event, be only subsidiary to a much better site now being prepared by someone else.

Please note that at this time I have limited home net access. Thus my ability to answer e-mail, update web pages, etc., often depends on the kindness of libraries and friends, and the availability of connections for hire. Please don't expect rapid replies to e-mail, and please be patient about updates to this admittedly pathetic website.

This site is generously hosted by Postilion, also known as my brother Nic Bernstein, writer of Postilion, a mail user agent for Unix systems.