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Indian literature

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• Internet Archive - A History Of Indian Literature,vol.1
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Indian literature , writings of the Indian subcontinent , produced there in a variety of vernacular languages, including Sanskrit , Prakrit , Pali , Bengali , Bihari , Gujarati , Hindi , Kannada , Kashmiri , Malayalam , Oriya , Punjabi , Rajasthani , Tamil , Telugu , Urdu , Lahnda , Siraiki , and Sindhi , among others, as well as in English . The term Indian literature is used here to refer to literature produced across the Indian subcontinent prior to the creation of the Republic of India in 1947 and within the Republic of India after 1947.

A brief treatment of Indian literature follows. For a fuller treatment, see South Asian arts: Literature . See also Islamic arts: Islamic literatures , India: The arts , Pakistan: The arts , and Bangladesh: The arts .

The earliest Indian literature took the form of the canonical Hindu sacred writings, known as the Veda , which were written in Sanskrit. To the Veda were added prose commentaries such as the Brahmanas and the Upanishads . The production of Sanskrit literature extended from about 1500 bce to about 1000 ce and reached its height of development in the 1st to 7th centuries ce . In addition to sacred and philosophical writings, such genres as erotic and devotional lyrics, court poetry , plays, and narrative folktales emerged.

Because Sanskrit was identified with the Brahminical religion of the Vedas, Buddhism and Jainism adopted other literary languages (Pali and Ardhamagadhi, respectively). From these and other related languages emerged the modern languages of northern India. The literature of those languages depended largely on the ancient Indian background, which includes two Sanskrit epic poems, the Mahabharata and Ramayana , as well as the Bhagavata-purana and the other Puranas . In addition, the Sanskrit philosophies were the source of philosophical writing in the later literatures, and the Sanskrit schools of rhetoric were of great importance for the development of court poetry in many of the modern literatures. The South Indian language of Tamil is an exception to this pattern of Sanskrit influence because it had a classical tradition of its own. Urdu and Sindhi are other exceptions.

Beginning in the 19th century, particularly during the height of British control over the subcontinent, Western literary models had an impact on Indian literature, the most striking result being the introduction of the use of vernacular prose on a major scale . Such forms as the novel and short story began to be adopted by Indian writers, as did realism and an interest in social questions and psychological description. A tradition of literature in English was also established in the subcontinent.

Articles on individual literatures of the Indian subcontinent not specified above include Pali literature , Bengali literature , Gujarati literature , Hindi literature , Kannada literature , Punjabi literature , Tamil literature , Telugu literature , Urdu literature , and Sindhi literature .

Literature of Mesopotamia

The literature of Mesopotamia dates from c. 2600 BCE when scribes began composing original works in the region of Sumer . The Sumerians invented writing c. 3500 BCE, but it was then mostly used for record-keeping. The literature of ancient Mesopotamia influenced the works of other civilizations including Egypt , Greece , and Rome .

The pieces in this collection represent only a very small fraction of the body of Mesopotamian literature which included hymns, wisdom literature, historical fiction, history, poetry, mythology , legends, incantations, prayers, proverbs, didactic literature, and the epic tale, which was first established in the world through The Epic of Gilgamesh . The literature of ancient Mesopotamia is also distinguished by the first author in the world known by name, the Akkadian poet Enheduanna (l. 2285-2250 BCE), daughter of Sargon of Akkad .

Articles & Definitions

Mesopotamian Literature

The Instructions of Shuruppag

Kesh Temple Hymn

Eridu Genesis

Inanna's Descent: A Sumerian Tale of Injustice

Matter of Aratta

The world's oldest love poem.

Ludlul-Bel-Nemeqi

Enuma Elish - The Babylonian Epic of Creation - Full Text

The Marduk Prophecy

Ashurbanipal's Collection of Sumerian and Babylonian Proverbs

External links, questions & answers, how old is mesopotamian literature, what is the oldest piece of mesopotamian literature, who wrote mesopotamian literature, what is the most famous work from mesopotamian literature, about the author.

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Irene Peirano Garrison teaches “Doing Things with Latin: Syntax and Stylistics.”

Photos by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

Finding modern issues in study of ancient world

Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite

Harvard Staff Writer

Professor’s research while developing Latin course turns up surprising insights into political, gender, racial, religious identity

In 1888, the process of awarding the prestigious Bowdoin Prize began routinely: Harvard students anonymously submitted their best essays in English or translated into Greek or Latin in hopes of receiving the honor and impressive sum of as much as $100. Contest judges also assessed essays submitted by female students at the University’s “Annex” (later Radcliffe College), but the winners didn’t receive University recognition or funds — an outside donor supplied an award of $30.

By accident or subversion (the events were disputed in The Crimson ), the men’s and women’s papers were submitted together that year, and a classics essay called “The Roman Senate Under the Empire” by E.B. Pearson received top prize. It was quickly discovered that Pearson was actually Miss E.B. Pearson. The faculty swiftly ruled out her piece for contention, and the runner-up (a man) received $75 in her stead. Pearson received the $30 Annex prize, “thus paying $70 outright for the privilege of being a woman,” according to a Boston Post newspaper article from the time.

The incident was one of many surprising and thought-provoking discoveries in Harvard’s history of classics education for Irene Peirano Garrison while she developed the new Latin prose composition course, “Doing Things with Latin: Syntax and Stylistics.”

“Students at Harvard have learned to write in Latin since the founding of the University in 1636, and in planning the course I began by looking at the history of how, why, and to whom the Latin language, and specifically Latin composition, was taught at Harvard,” said Peirano Garrison, Pope Professor of the Latin Language and director of graduate studies in the classics.

Peirano Garrison wanted to include stories like that of Pearson and the gendered restrictions of the Bowdoin Prize along with more traditional aspects of classics pedagogy in the class, because “I realized that one could tell the history of the University, and even arguably of higher education, through the lens of how Latin was taught at Harvard.”

When she joined the Classics Department last January, Peirano Garrison learned that plans were underway to replace longstanding Latin composition courses “Latin H” and “Latin K,” which had been in place since 1948 and had a reputation for being difficult and technical. She saw an opportunity to build a composition syllabus that was “process-oriented, rather than outcome-oriented.”

“I had thought of Latin prose composition as a very old-fashioned exercise, but what I discovered is a complex and fascinating political history and one in which Latin instruction is deeply entangled with political, gender, racial, and religious identity,” she said. “It was important to me to give students opportunities to learn from writing in Latin as much as to learn Latin itself,” she said.

Like in a traditional composition class, students read and translated passages from authors including Cicero and Caesar. Unlike a traditional course, they kept personal journals of their thoughts on what they were learning. They also analyzed the style, syntax, and grammar of original works of antiquity and their English translations to see how texts upheld certain assumptions about identity and behavior.

“I had thought of Latin prose composition as a very old-fashioned exercise, but what I discovered is a complex and fascinating political history.” Irene Peirano Garrison, Pope Professor of the Latin Language

Peirano Garrison noted that many texts used phrasing and syntax that linked masculinity with strength, femininity with beauty, and enslavement with docility.

“Again and again, we saw how very technical and matter-of fact topics of grammar can be politically charged because of assumptions about the learner or the outcome of education,” she said.

That holistic learning focus took the class out of the classroom throughout the semester. Students visited the Old Burying Ground to read tombstone epitaphs for former Harvard presidents and composed an epitaph for the presidents’ wives, many of whom were not given honorary epigraph in Latin. Another trip took them to Sanders Theatre and Memorial Hall to read inscriptions engraved on the walls honoring Harvard students who died fighting in the Union Army during the Civil War. Those inscriptions served as a foundation for an assignment to write an inscription honoring lives lost to COVID-19. A trip to the Institute of Contemporary Art prompted students to write commentary on fashion designer Virgil Abloh’s style and Cicero and Quintilian’s writing on style in the visual and literary arts.

Students refer to Latin texts at Houghton Library. “I could not have done this class without the archivists and librarians,” said Peirano Garrison, pictured leading class.

Students also visited the Houghton, Gutman, and Schlesinger Libraries, and Harvard Archives to read Latin textbooks, student workbooks, Commencement addresses, and other materials from the last four centuries.

“I could not have done this class without the archivists and librarians,” said Peirano Garrison. “They showed me how this could be done and helped us gain access to amazing materials.”

In those settings, the class studied Latin translations written by W.E.B. Du Bois, analyzed classics research papers by feminist poet and Radcliffe student Adrienne Rich ’51, and read historical student works that debated the value of Latin education over the centuries.

“Doing Things with Latin” gave Dante Minutillo ’24, a classics concentrator, a new appreciation for the complexities of the history of education and Latin’s place in the Harvard experience.

“It’s easy to say that everyone at Harvard was really good at Latin in the past, and part of that was because they had a lot more practice. Or you could say that back then everyone respected Latin, and now everyone is criticizing it,” said Minutillo. “But if you actually look at it, there were debates even years ago as to whether Latin should even be taught. So it’s interesting to see how that’s more continuous than it sometimes seems.”

“It was really important to talk about practices of resistance and contestation that can be gleaned from and through the record of Latin education at Harvard,” said Peirano Garrison. “So many of the historical student works in Latin that we read touched on the very topic of education and its purposes. Those students then used the Latin class to question what they saw around them, as did some educators. I wanted my students to see how that happened so they can be attuned to the politics of their own classroom spaces.”

Peirano Garrison’s course is one of many offered in the Classics Department that engages with both ancient and contemporary questions, said David Elmer, Eliot Professor of Greek Literature and department chair.

“Although classics, as a field, is obviously rooted in the past, it speaks to the present in countless ways,” Elmer said. “Our course offerings are heavily shaped by the latest research of our faculty members, and every year we canvass our students to identify emerging areas of interest.”

Some of those avenues of interest are seen in the department’s spring offerings, including Elmer’s course “Classics, Race, and Power,” which covers race and oppression in the Greco-Roman world, and the Gen Ed class “Tragedy Today,” which is taught by Naomi Weiss, Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of the Humanities, and uses ancient Greek tragedy as a lens to investigate current sociopolitical issues including race, conflict, and immigration.

Peirano Garrison said students should, and can, engage with the classics and understand their role in shaping the political, cultural, and academic spaces in which they spend their time.

“Latin is everywhere on campus: on buildings, student notebooks, commonplace books, letters, Commencement speeches and exercises and more,” she said. “Latin also formed the backbone of Western education for centuries, and it’s important to approach this record of cultural hegemony with a questioning spirit, and within that to engage with Latin pedagogy as a political phenomenon.”

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Pre-1920s Literature

Bibliographies, introduction and basic index: l'annee philologique.

The basic index for classical studies is L'Annee philologique. Good results may also be obtained with Social Sciences/Arts and Humanities Citation Indexes . There are many other indexes, some print and some electronic, which are more specialized and/or cover the earlier literature.

L'Annee philologique; bibliographie critique et analytique de l'antiquite greco-latine , 1924/26- .

Classified, annotated bibliography of world literature, including book reviews, on all aspects of classical studies, not just philology. Covers 2nd millennium B.C. to 500-800 A.D. Abbreviations from L'Annee Philologique

Continues: Marouzeau, Jules. Dix annees de bibliographie classique, bibliographie critiques et analytique de l'antiquite greco-latine pour la periode 1914-1924 . LOCATION: Smyth Classical: Gen 1.13 Library has: 2 v. LOCATION: Widener: Class 509.27 Library has: 2 v. in 3

First volume includes studies and texts of individual authors. The 2nd volume covers works on other subjects, arranged in a subject classification. Includes book reviews with the book citation.

Bulletin analytique d'histoire romaine , 1962- . LOCATION: Widener: AH 7002.5

Diotima: Women and Gender in the Ancient World includes an online bibliography.

Dyabola includes:

• German Archaeological Institute in Rome catalog (1956-2004)
• Bibliography of Iberian Archaeology from the German Archaeological Institute in Madrid (1991-2002)
• Archaeology of Roman Provinces from RGK Frankfurt (1992-2004).
• Database of Attic Grave Reliefs
• Census of Antique Art and Architecture Known to the Renaissance
• Corpus of Antique Monuments Known to Winckelmann.

User manual (Important!)

Fasti Archaeologici Annual bulletin of classical archaeology , 1946-1997. LOCATION: Widener: Arc 6.2 --Abstracts of books, periodical articles, reports, etc., arranged by subject. Book reviews are included with the citation for the book reviewed. Fully indexed by authors ancient and modern, geographical names, subjects, lexicalia, and literary and epigraphical sources. Ran late: 1983-1986 was published in 1997.

Continued by: FastiOnline offers information on excavations and conservation initiatives in the Roman Empire region.

Gnomon Bibliographical Database, 1925- . LOCATION: Widener: Ask for CD-ROM at Reference Desk

Gnomon Online : A selection from the Gnomon CD-ROM 2005 with special consideration of the years since 2002.

Gnomen is an index to publications in Classical philology and history, with some archaeology. Includes from the journal Gnomon:

Book reviews, 1925- . Personalnachrichten (personal notes) and obituaries, 1925- . Quarterly Bibliographische Beilage (bibliographic appendix), 1990- . Augmented by:

• Indexing of numerous periodicals, some back to their inceptions, others only of recent volumes.
• Indexing of collective volumes, Festschrifts, conference proceedings.
• German dissertations, 1902-1995.

The number of entries for included periodicals is listed in the thesaurus.

Online manual

Augmented electronic version of

Gnomon: Kritische Zeitschrift für die gesamte klassische Altertumswissenschaft , 1925- . LOCATION: Andover-Harv. Theol: Period. 709.83 Current issues: R.R. (1962- ) LOCATION: Smyth Classical: Ordered--currently received (1986- ) LOCATION: Widener: Philol 168 (1932- ) Current Issues: Periodicals Reading Room

Largely a book review journal. Bibliographische Beilage lists new books, articles, and websites by author or editor. Gives contents of edited volumes. Includes a list by ancient authors as subject. In German.

JSTOR allows simultaneous or individual searching, full-text searching optional, of several classical journals from their inceptions to about 5 years ago.

Lustrum: Internationale Forschungsberichte aus dem bereich des klassischen altertums , 1956- . LOCATION: Widener: Philol 182 --Annotated bibliographies and bibliographical essays on classical topics, e.g., "Platon, 1985-1990", "Greek lyric poetry since 1920". Text in English, German, or French.

Nestor: Bibliography of Aegean Prehistory and Related areas (1957- ) is an international bibliography of Aegean, eastern Mediterranean and southeastern European prehistory, Homeric society, Indo-European linguistics, and related fields. The Aegean and neighboring areas, including Greece, Italy, Sicily, the Balkans, the Cyclades, Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt are covered. The chronological range is Paleolithic through the Early Iron Age.  It is searchable by the text in the titles of the books, articles, journals, author names, and by publication dates. There is a separate book review file.

Online Egyptological Bibliography is an online version and continuation of the Annual Egyptological Bibliography (1947-2001) and the Bibliographie Altägypten (1822-2002, partial coverage of 2003-2008).

Supplementum epigraphicum graecum (SEG), 1923- . LOCATION: Smyth Classical: Ordered--currently received LOCATION: Widener: Class 5009.23 LOCATION: Widener: Class 5009.23.2 Indexes --Indexes epigraphical literature, geographically arranged, with personal name, geographical name, Greek word, selected topic, etc., indexes.

TOCS-IN (1992- ) indexes the tables of contents of over 150 periodicals of interests to classicists, covering Classics, Archaeology, Religion, and Near Eastern Studies.

Bibliotheca philologica classica , 1874-1938. LOCATION: Widener: Class 508.74 --Unnannotated citations classed by subject with author index.

Engelmann, Wilhelm. Bibliotheca scriptorum classicorum . 8. Aufl., umfassend die Literatur von 1700 bis 1878, neu bearb. von E. Preuss. LOCATION: Smyth Classical: Corridor Gen 1.2 Library has: 2 Abth. LOCATION: Widener: Catal. Dept. Library has: 2 v. LOCATION: Widener: Class 508.31.12 Library has: 2 v.

Klussmann, Rudolf. Bibliotheca scriptorum classicorum et graecorum et latinorum. Die literatur von 1878 bis 1896 einschliesslich umfassend . LOCATION: Smyth Classical: Corridor Gen 1.9 Library has: 2 v. LOCATION: Widener: G 3.2 Library has: 2 v. LOCATION: Widener: Philol 170 vol.146, 151, 156, 165 Library has: 2 bde in 4 teile

Lambrino, Scarlat. Bibliographie de l'antiquite classique , 1896-1914. LOCATION: Smyth Classical: Gen 1.17 Library has: v. 1 LOCATION: Widener: Class 509.51 Library has: v. 1

To find bibliographies of books and articles in the HOLLIS Catalog, in Advanced Search do a variety of keyword searches (Keywords Anywhere) plus the standard term "bibliography" (Subject words). Notice the Subjects on pertinent records for terms for additional searches. Examples: <classical antiquities> and <bibliography>, <aeschylus and <bibliography>.

Bibliotheca Classica Selecta offers links to online bibliographies.

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• Published: 09 June 2023

Disentangling the cultural evolution of ancient China: a digital humanities perspective

• Siyu Duan 1 , 2 ,
• Jun Wang 1 , 2 , 3 ,
• Hao Yang 2 , 3 &
• Qi Su 2 , 3 , 4  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  10 , Article number:  310 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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• Anthropology
• Cultural and media studies
• Language and linguistics

Being recognized among the cradles of human civilization, ancient China nurtured the longest continuous academic traditions and humanistic spirits, which continue to impact today’s society. With an unprecedented large-scale corpus spanning 3000 years, this paper presents a quantitative analysis of cultural evolution in ancient China. Millions of intertextual associations are identified and modelled with a hierarchical framework via deep neural network and graph computation, thus allowing us to answer three progressive questions quantitatively: (1) What is the interaction between individual scholars and philosophical schools? (2) What are the vicissitudes of schools in ancient Chinese history? (3) How did ancient China develop a cross-cultural exchange with an externally introduced religion such as Buddhism? The results suggest that the proposed hierarchical framework for intertextuality modelling can provide sound suggestions for large-scale quantitative studies of ancient literature. An online platform is developed for custom data analysis within this corpus, which encourages researchers and enthusiasts to gain insight into this work. This interdisciplinary study inspires the re-understanding of ancient Chinese culture from a digital humanities perspective and prompts the collaboration between humanities and computer science.

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Introduction.

Although still in its infancy, digital humanities research supported by big data and deep learning has become a hot topic in recent years. Researchers began to use digital methods to study cultural issues quantitatively, such as examining cultural evolution (Lewens 2015 ) through the diachronic changes of n-gram frequency (Michel et al. 2011 ; Lansdall-Welfare et al. 2017 ; Alshaabi et al. 2021 ; Newberry and Plotkin 2022 ) and word-level semantics (Newberry et al. 2017 ; Garg et al. 2018 ; Kozlowski et al. 2019 ; Giulianelli et al. 2020 ). This trend also spread to the study of ancient civilizations. Scholars from different cultural backgrounds have investigated the culture of ancient Rome (Dexter et al. 2017 ), ancient Greece (Assael et al. 2022 ), and Natufian (Resler et al. 2021 ) with the assistance of computer technology. It is acknowledged that ancient China was one of the longest-standing civilizations in human history, with a culture that evolved over the past thousands of years. Various ancient literature has been handed down over time, providing extensive textual records of Chinese culture. With the digitized versions of these classics, we can gain a glimpse into the cultural evolution in ancient China.

Ancient Chinese classics are highly intertextual texts. Since the doctrine “A transmitter and not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients” proposed in Analects (Legge 1861 . VII.I), quoting previous texts became a convention of literary creation in ancient China. Chinese scholars have long studied this cultural phenomenon from different perspectives. For example, Pan-ma i-t’ung (published around AD 1200) demonstrated the character differences between two history books, Records of the Grand Historian (published around 91 BC) and Book of Han (published around AD 82). Since Qing Dynasty, scholars began to enumerate parallel intertextual associations between ancient classics (Chen 1989 ; He et al. 2004 ). However, intertextuality (Kristeva 1980 ) is not only the connections of words and phrases but also manifests at higher levels hierarchically (Riffaterre 1994 ; Alfaro 1996 ), such as document, author, and community. The traditional form of high-level intertextuality studies was the overall literary criticism by scholars. For example, Ming dynasty scholar Ling Zhilong compiled previous scholars’ literary criticism of the above two history books. Literary criticism was themed on the style, skill, and viewpoints of literature, which was seen as a formidable endeavour due to the complexity of Chinese culture. Both parallel enumeration and literary criticism are limited by the reading and memory of scholars, which restricts the discussion on the large-scale corpus. Assisted by computer technology and digital literature, scholars recently began to study intertextuality within large-scale data.

Various natural language processing (NLP) methods have been applied to the intertextuality modelling of ancient literature. The previous automatic detection methods of text-level intertextuality aimed to discover similar phrases or sequences by lexical matching approach (Lee 2007 ; Coffee et al. 2012a ; Coffee et al. 2012b ; Ganascia et al. 2014 ; Forstall et al. 2015 ), which are insufficient and rigid in semantic modelling. The non-literal feature like synonym (Büchler et al. 2014 ; Moritz et al. 2016 ) and rhythm (Neidorf et al. 2019 ) also implies intertextuality, yet it requires language-specific design. Topic modelling lends a hand to passage-level modelling (Scheirer et al. 2016 ), while its dependence on expert annotation limits its generalization on diverse corpora. Simple statistics on text-level results contribute to document-level modelling (Hartberg and Wilson 2017 ). However, it ignores their overall connections. Besides, graph structure seems to be an appropriate way for the community-level modelling of intertextuality (Romanello 2016 ; Rockmore et al. 2018 ). Intertextuality modelling on classical literature widely supports cultural studies, such as quantitative literary criticism and stylometry (Forstall et al. 2011 ; Burns et al. 2021 ). Existing related studies on Chinese literature were limited to the detection methods (Liang et al. 2021 ; Li et al. 2022 ; Yu et al. 2022 ) and shallow studies of intertextual texts on small corpora (Sturgeon 2018a ; Sturgeon 2018b ; Huang et al. 2021 ; Deng et al. 2022 ), short of macroanalysis (Jockers 2013 ) on Chinese culture.

In this paper, we conducted a macroanalysis of ancient Chinese culture on an unprecedented large-scale corpus spanning nearly 3000 years. Figure 1a presents a schematic of this corpus. This corpus consists of 30,880 articles from 201 ancient Chinese books (or anthologies). It covers various topics, such as philosophy, religion, and politics, including the famous works of major cultural groups (e.g., Analects of Confucianism; Tao Te Ching of Taoism). The history books (e.g., Book of Han) and comprehensive anthologies (e.g., Collected Works of Han) of each era are also involved.

a The dataset of ancient Chinese literature with an instance in each era. The names of the dynasties and the approximate AD years are marked on the timeline. For each period, it gives one instance book and indicates its subject. b Hierarchical framework with three modules for multilevel intertextuality modelling.

In this work, we modelled ancient Chinese literature with a hierarchical framework. The cultural thought of civilization is composed of multiple levels, such as doctrines, individuals, and communities. Moreover, cultural evolution manifests hierarchically with microevolution and macroevolution (Mesoudi 2017 ; Gray and Watts 2017 ). A comprehensive discussion of cultural evolution requires multilevel perspectives. Therefore, this framework models intertextual associations from the text level to the community level with three modules. A schematic of the framework is shown in Fig. 1b . The text-level detection module tracks intertextual sentences with deep-learning models. The book-level aggregation module gathers text-level clues and abstracts various books into an association graph. The community-level inference module applies topological propagation to explore intertextual associations in the cultural community. After the modelling, millions of intertextual sentence pairs and a book-level intertextual association graph are ready for cultural analysis.

In the experiment, we detected 2.6 million pairs of intertextual sentences and then built them into an association graph. For a specific text collection, its intertextual distribution refers to its quantitative intertextual associations with other texts. Based on the modelling results, we can study ancient Chinese culture through the intertextual distribution among ancient literature.

In the cultural analysis, we considered cultural evolution from the perspective of cultural groups and religions. Schools of thought and religions were part and parcel of ancient Chinese culture (Schwartz 1985 ). The Hundred Schools of Thought that originated in the axial age were the prototype of ancient Chinese philosophy (Graham 1989 ). They rose and fell over the millennia that followed. The introduction of foreign cultures, like Buddhism (Chen 1964 ), also influenced the evolution of native culture. In this paper, we disentangled the cultural evolution of ancient China on three levels: (1) The interaction between individual scholars and philosophical schools; (2) The rise and fall of schools in Chinese history and culture; (3) The cross-culture communication with Buddhism.

Specifically, we validated several acknowledged cultural phenomena: the evolutionary paths of Confucianism and Taoism, and the booms and declines of the Hundred Schools of Thought. We also provided quantitative suggestions for cultural problems that are yet to be definitely resolved, such as the school attribution of Lüshi Chunqiu , the authorship attribution of Collected Works of Tao Yuanming , and the influence of Confucianism and Taoism across different cultural domains. Furthermore, we quantitatively discussed the interaction between Buddhism and native culture, revealing how cultural integration has evolved over time.

In addition, we have developed an online platform to display this corpus, along with millions of intertextual associations detected in this work. The platform supports custom data analysis, which encourages researchers and enthusiasts to gain insight into this work.

Two datasets were built respectively, the classic dataset and the era-text dataset. We considered several factors when building the dataset: era balance, representativeness, and official-folk balance. Two datasets consist of 30,880 articles from 201 books (or anthologies).

Classic dataset

The classic dataset is composed of the most prominent and influential books that represent the core culture of ancient China. Before the Tang Dynasty (618–907), literature was copied manually. Due to the long history and the limitations of publishing technology, only time-tested classics have been handed down to this day. Therefore, we added all the collected pre-Tang literature to the classic dataset. In the Tang Dynasty, the invention of block printing led to the rapid development of the publishing industry, resulting in explosive growth in the amount of literature. Until the mid-18th century, China printed more books than the rest of the world combined (Gernet 1996 ). Considering that this study focuses on the evolution of early thought in ancient China, we selected several most famous classics after Tang Dynasty. The well-known digital library of ancient Chinese classics, CTEXT ( https://ctext.org/ ), also adopted similar rules to build a collection of core classics. We considered the literature samples of CTEXT and built the classic dataset.

Our research focuses on ideological evolution, so books in the classic dataset should reflect cultural thought with good data quality. Therefore, we further screened the classic dataset to filter out inappropriate books, including commentary books, mathematics books, dictionaries, excavated literature (e.g., Mawangdui Silk Texts), and lengthy novels.

Finally, the dataset of ancient Chinese classics contains 133 books, including 8984 articles. Table 1 shows the time-period statistics of this corpus. It covers various aspects of culture, such as philosophy, mythology, politics, and religion. In this dataset, the earliest book was created around 1000 BC (e.g., Book of Documents), while the latest book was published around AD 1750 (e.g., The Scholars).

Era-text dataset

We aim for the era-text dataset to reflect the contemporary culture of each period, encompassing both official and folk traditions. To achieve this, we set our sights on history books and anthologies. As ancient China had a tradition of producing history books for each dynasty, history books typically reflected official attitudes. We added the official history (Twenty-Four Histories), large-scale chronicle history books ( Zizhi Tongjian and Continued Zizhi Tongjian Changbian ), and 15 other influential history books to the era dataset. In addition, we included Quan shang gu san dai Qin Han San guo Liu chao wen , a series of large-scale anthologies organized by era. It collected a wide variety of works from numerous authors, including prose, essays, religious scriptures, inscriptions, etc. These anthologies comprehensively record the contemporary culture of ancient China. To further enrich the era-text dataset, we added 13 well-proofread anthologies.

We categorized these history books and anthologies by era. For history books (e.g., Zizhi Tongjian ) that cover multiple eras, we divided them into corresponding eras. Finally, we got 55 history books and 13 anthologies, containing 21,896 articles. Table 2 shows the time-period statistics of this corpus. These works chronicle Chinese history and culture from the legendary period (e.g., Bamboo Annals , from 2600 BC) to the Ming Dynasty (e.g., History of Ming , ending in AD 1644).

Data processing

Ancient Chinese characters may have multiple written forms, we use the open-source toolkit OpenCC ( https://github.com/BYVoid/OpenCC ) to map them to a unique root character before encoding them using deep learning models. The maximum sentence length was set to 50 characters. Sentences exceeding this length were divided into two sentences. This setting can cover more than 99% of sentences.

Intertextuality detection usually aims to discover meaningful textual connections. It is important to note that texts without actual meaning cannot indicate the ideological connection between texts. Therefore, we use additional computational rules to avoid inappropriate text pairs. First, we filtered out sentences (clauses) with less than three remaining characters after removing the stopwords (such as prepositions and pronouns). Then, with predefined rules, we filtered out meaningless sentences, such as tone, dates, lengths, quantities, and formats. After filtering, there are about 436,000 sentences with 840,000 clauses in the classic’s dataset, and 2,113,000 sentences with 4,526,000 clauses in the era-text dataset.

Challenge and limitation

The collection and processing of ancient Chinese literature present challenges and limitations. Although we used punctuated text in this work, the original ancient Chinese literature has no punctuation. When it comes to no-punctuation data, an automatic punctuation model should be applied beforehand. Moreover, ancient literature could have multiple versions. In our dataset, we opted to include only one widely circulated version of each book. It may restrict the applicability of the dataset for researchers interested in different versions.

Additionally, the selection of appropriate literature collections for cultural analysis from a vast pool of ancient literature requires expert knowledge. In our study, humanities scholars specializing in Chinese history and philosophy were consulted.

Modelling framework

Considering that intertextuality and cultural evolution can manifest at multiple levels, we developed a hierarchical framework to analyze ancient literature. This framework captures intertextuality at three levels, ranging from micro to macro. At the text level, similar sentence pairs shared between books are detected by deep neural networks. At the book level, books are abstracted into an intertextual association graph based on the text-level results. At the community level, information propagates through the topological structure of the book-level graph, thus exploring intertextuality in the cultural community. This hierarchical approach provides both micro-evidence and macro-quantification for intertextual associations and cultural evolution.

Text-level detection

The study of cultural evolution is concerned with the connections of thoughts. Each sentence often expresses a distinct thought, making it a suitable quantitative unit. Therefore, we traced the intertextuality at the sentence level. We considered that the more similar sentences the two books share, the more closely connected they are.

The dissemination of text is not static but mutates. The micro-evolution of texts has multiple patterns (Tamariz 2019 ), such as replication, expansion, and succession. Therefore, this module traced similar sentence pairs shared between books with three patterns: overall similarity, partial similarity, and paraphrased similarity. A sketch is given in Fig. 2a .

a Three patterns of similarity between sentences. Darker colour indicates more similar text. b The explicit intertextuality and implicit intertextuality between the three books.

Overall similarity

Two sentences explain the similar meaning with close language expressions.

Partial similarity

Two sentences share similar parts.

Paraphrased similarity

The similar meaning is explained by different language expressions. The text may be disrupted and reorganized.

Deep neural networks (Vaswani et al. 2017 ) and pre-train methods (Devlin et al. 2019 ) have shown excellent performance in text feature extraction. Contrastive learning (Chen et al. 2020 ) can help to obtain personal-defined text similarity models without supervision, which is suitable for text-level intertextuality detection. To get sentence representation for these three patterns, we introduced the RoBERTa base (Liu et al. 2019 ), a pre-trained language model that can be further fine-tuned for our task using different training strategies.

For the overall similarity pattern, it can be treated as the overall semantic similarity between sentences. To train the model 1 , we used SimCSE (Gao et al. 2021 ), a contrastive learning method for extracting sentence embeddings.

For the paraphrased similarity pattern, the sentence structure could be reconstructed. We trained another model 2 for this pattern, with its loss being a weighted sum of loss 1 and loss 2 . The loss 1 was calculated in the same way as for model 1 .

For loss 2 , we randomly dropped and shuffled the clauses and n-grams in the original sentence to obtain a new sentence. It serves as another positive sample of contrastive learning. Negative samples are other sentences in the batch. The final loss for the model 2 is:

r is a hyperparameter that modulates the emphasis between sentence structure and semantics.

For the partial similarity pattern, sentences are considered similar if they share similar clauses. We detected similarities at the clause level using both model 1 and model 2 .

In large-scale information retrieval, brute-force search is often impractical due to the time and resources required. Therefore, it usually follows a multi-step process for the balance of precision and efficiency.

The first step is to recall potential candidates. In our work, we identified K members that were most similar to each sentence embedding. Then, we selected appropriate candidates and calculated a threshold to further filter out similar candidates.

For each pattern, we used the following steps to detect:

1. Extract embeddings of all sentences using the RoBERTa model.

2. De-duplicate embeddings. For each embedding, find its Top K similar embeddings. Denote all embedding pairs obtained as P .

3. Calculate the Euclidean distance of embedding in P and find the t th percentile as the similarity threshold d thr .

4. Filter out sentence pairs whose embedding distance is closer than d thr .

We detected similar pairs with these three strategies separately and gathered their results. The detected similar sentence pairs give concrete evidence of text-level intertextuality.

Book-level aggregation

Text-level results can support textual research on microevolution. However, to analyze at the macro level, text-level results must be gathered and aggregated. In this module, we aggregated text-level intertextuality results and synthesized them into a book-level intertextual association graph g . In this graph, each node B i represents a book, and there are N books in total. The edges indicate the intertextual associations between books. Suppose there are two books B i and B j , they contain n i and n j distinct sentences, respectively, and s ij distinct similar sentence pairs were detected between them. The edge weight α ij between B i and B j is calculated as follows:

For node B i , it has a one-hot node feature \(x_i = [x_{i1},x_{i2} \ldots x_{iN}]\) , where \({x_{ii}} = {1}\) .

Community-level inference

Text-level intertextuality can be observed explicitly. However, some intertextual connections can be implicit, with no direct textual association. In this study, we treated these classics as a cultural community and explored the implicit intertextuality at the community level. A schematic is shown in Fig. 2b .

Explicit intertextuality

If two books share similar sentences, they are explicitly intertextual.

Implicit intertextuality

If Book 1 and Book 2 are explicitly intertextual, and Book 2 and Book 3 are explicitly intertextual, then it can be inferred that Book 1 and Book 3 are implicitly intertextual.

This module performs inference by propagating and aggregating information through the topology of the intertextual association graph:

The first operation gathers explicit intertextuality I ex to the node feature. The second operation infers and integrates the implicit intertextuality I im . r ′ is a custom weight that adjusts the emphasis of implicit intertextuality. After twice graph computations, the node feature of B i is \(y_i = [y_{i1},y_{i2} \ldots y_{iN}]\) , where y ij indicates the united intertextual score I ij between B i and B j .

The node feature reflects the distribution of intertextuality for each book within the community. Excessive aggregation of information on the graph can lead to over-smoothing, which is detrimental to node features. Therefore, we set the number of graph computations to twice. Sparsity is an issue that often plagues text-based cultural analysis. With this method, the sparsity of intertextuality detection results can be alleviated.

Settings and modelling results

In text-level detection, we trained the model on an Nvidia 1080ti GPU. The optimizer is Adam (Kingma and Ba 2015 ). We took the pre-trained ancient Chinese RoBERTa base model as a basis. For both model 1 and model 2 , we fine-tuned the base model 10 epochs at a learning rate of 1e-6. The batch size was 32. The r for the loss of model 2 was set to 0.2. For similarity detection, we set K to 100 and t to 1 based on our data scale and observations. The large-scale vector searching tool Faiss (Johnson et al. 2019 ) was applied to speed up vector retrieval.

In book-level aggregation, we found that diverse genres have variant punctuation styles, disturbing the total number of sentences. After observation, we found that in this dataset, the number of sentences with at least two clauses is relatively stable. Therefore, we set the number of sentences n i of the book B i to the number of sentences with at least two clauses.

In community-level inference, r ′ was set to a value that makes implicit intertextuality one-fifth of explicit intertextuality. \(x_i^\prime\) and I im were clipped with a ten-fold mean. In the modelling after adding era-text, the information propagation between era-text nodes was blocked to evaluate each era independently.

As a result, the detection module identified over 411,000 pairs of similar sentences between classics and 2,209,000 pairs between classics and era-text. An intertextual association graph was built from these pairs.

Manual evaluation of text-level detection

Note that in this corpus, each sentence has millions of intertextual candidates from books on diverse topics. As a result, the likelihood of any two sentences being intertextual is extremely low. Building a hand-labelled test set to evaluate the recall rate is nearly impossible. Therefore, we manually evaluated the accuracy rate with the same number of recalled sentences.

We invited three people with graduate degrees and research experience in Chinese classical literature to conduct the manual evaluation. The evaluators were asked to assess the intertextuality of each detected sentence pair. If the two sentences share a similar meaning, topic, or structural style, give 1 point. Otherwise, give 0 points. We took the single-pattern methods as baselines. We used the SIMCSE (Gao et al. 2021 ) model to detect the same number of pairs at the sentence and clause levels, respectively. One pair is randomly sampled from each book in the dataset of classics. There are three groups with 133 pairs each.

The results are shown in Table 3 . The average accuracy of our proposed multi-pattern detection model is 82.22% ( Pearson ’ s r  = 0.74), while the single-pattern baseline is 73.70% and 45.92%. It suggests that the multi-pattern design can improve intertextuality detection performance.

Ablation of community-level inference

We performed an ablation study on a specific book to validate the designed inference module. Figure 3 shows the intertextual connection between Analects and other classics. To compare the modules fairly, we adjusted the weights r ′ so that explicit and implicit intertextuality have equal status in united intertextuality.

They are mean-normalized, and their standard deviations are given respectively. a Number of similar sentence pairs s . b Explicit intertextual scores I ex . c Implicit intertextual scores I im . d United intertextual scores I .

The number of similar pairs varies widely due to the varying length of books. After aggregation, normalized explicit intertextual scores are obtained. However, some books do not share similar sentences, resulting in vacancies. Implicit intertextual scores are positively correlated with explicit intertextuality. It fills the gap of explicit intertextuality and alleviates sparsity. In addition, the introduction of implicit intertextuality brings smoothness, leading to more robust united intertextual scores ( std  = 0.81) than explicit intertextual scores ( std  = 1.07).

Indicator robustness

A metric that is susceptible to data variance is not ideal. Therefore, we examined these two concerns regarding the intertextual score I :

• Q 1 : Is the intertextual score affected evidently by data size?

• Q 2 : Does the intertextual score decrease noticeably due to language discrepancy in different eras?

For Q 1 , we calculated the correlation between data size and intertextuality with the classic dataset. The two variables used in the correlation calculation are as follows:

Data Size: the number of sentences involved in intertextuality detection for each book.

Intertextual Score: The average intertextual score of each book with all other books.

Our results show that there was no significant correlation between data size and intertextual score ( \(r = - 0.1427,\,P = 0.1025,\,n = 133\) ). Therefore, we considered that the decrease in the H index is not due to data size.

For Q 2 , let us examine some cases. Jin Si Lu of the Song Dynasty (published around 1175) and Chuan Xi Lu of the Ming Dynasty (published around 1472–1529) are two famous works of Neo-Confucianism, which emerged as a continuation of Confucianism thousands of years after its birth. Compared with previous books, is the intertextuality between these two books and Confucianism prominent?

To answer this question, we ranked the intertextual scores between all books and keystone works of Confucianism and observed where these two books are placed. We found that these two books rank highly (1/131, 2/131), even surpassing Confucian books that are more recent to the Axial period. Therefore, we consider that language differences across different eras do not have an obvious impact on the intertextual score.

Through these two examinations, we can conclude that the indicator, intertextual score I , is robust to data variance.

Study 1. Interaction between scholars and schools

At the first level, we discussed the interaction between scholars and schools. Schools can be remoulded by later generations of scholars during their thousands of years of evolution. Confucianism and Taoism were the most influential philosophical schools in ancient China. We examined their evolutionary paths by assessing the preference of their followers through intertextual distributions of literary works. Besides, some literature is controversial or ambiguous in the mists of antiquity. To clarify the true path of cultural evolution, we provided quantitative suggestions for the school attribution of Lüshi Chunqiu and the authorship attribution of the Collected Works of Tao Yuanming .

In the axial age, religion and philosophy transformed drastically in various civilizations. The Hundred Schools of Thought, which arose in the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (500 BC), were the prototype of Chinese philosophy. The enduring and pervasive influence of schools such as Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, Legalism, and Military make them essential to any discussion of ancient Chinese culture (Sima 1959 ; Ban 1962 ).

Scholars and schools are symbiotic. Scholars were inevitably exposed to mainstream schools of their periods, while the doctrines of schools needed to be passed down to subsequent scholars. In this section, we investigated the interaction between scholars and schools through the intertextual associations of their literature. We calculated the Tendency Index T between 125 ancient Chinese classics and the five schools mentioned above. This index shows the ideological tendency of a particular collection of texts toward each school. The schematic diagram of this index is shown in Fig. 4a , and the details of its design are as follows.

a Calculation of Tendency Index T . b Calculation of Historical Status Index H .

Based on the consensus of Chinese philosophy (Feng and Bodde 1948 ), we selected the keystone works as the benchmarks for each school. We first calculated the average intertextual score between a book and the keystone works of each school. The Tendency Index is defined as the ratio of the average intertextual score with a specific school to its means across all schools. Suppose there are books \(B = \{ B_1,B_2 \ldots B_m\}\) and schools \(S = \{ S_1,S_2 \ldots S_v\}\) . The intertextual score between any two books B i and B j is I ij , which can be obtained from the node features of the association graph. For the book B i and the school S k , the school S k has l keystone works, T ik is calculated as follows:

T ik reflects the tendency of book B i for school S k compared to other schools. When T ik  > 1, Book B i has an above-average preference for school S k .

We also examined the significance of text-level intertextuality. Specifically, we investigated whether sentences from a specific book have a significantly greater probability of being detected in the keystone works of a school than the average of other schools. Considering that these books typically contain a large number of sentences \(({\text{Median}} = 2739)\) , we employed a one-tailed Z -test statistic. This statistic was constructed from the similar sentence pairs detected. Suppose there are books B i and B j containing n i and n j sentences after data processing. There are s ij distinct similar sentence pairs detected between them. For book B i and school S k , the calculation of test statistic Z is as follows:

We set the significance level α to 0.05. With the Tendency Index and P-value , we developed quantitative discussions on the scholar-school linkages.

Evolutionary path of philosophical schools

The schools in ancient China were constantly evolving as scholars reshaped previous theories. As acknowledged in the history of Chinese philosophy (Feng and Bodde 1948 ), the original Taoist philosophy inspired the Taoist religion and Wei Jin metaphysics, while Neo-Confucianism inherited the theories of Confucianism. This section validates these evolutionary paths of Taoism and Confucianism quantitatively.

Taoism was a philosophical school that mainly advocated conformity to nature. Taoist religion evolved from Taoist philosophy, developing into the most prominent native religion until now (Raz 2012 ). The representatives of Taoist philosophy, Laozi and Zhuangzi, were revered as the founder and patriarch of the Taoist religion respectively. Figure 5a shows the Tendency Index of two Taoist religious classics, Cantongqi and Wen Shi Zhen Jing . They were significantly inclined towards Taoist philosophy ( Cantongqi , \(T = 2.48\) , \(P = 0.0142\) , \(n = 529\) ; Wen Shi Zhen Jing , \(T = 2.62\) , \(P = 0.0019\) , \(n = 879\) , for Taoism). It demonstrates the consistency between Taoist religion and Taoist philosophy in their evolution.

The dynasty of publication and the corresponding AD years of each book are shown below. The keystone works of each school are listed on the right, including the time of the publication. a Tendency Index of two Taoist classics, Cantongqi and Wen Shi Zhen Jing . And the Tendency Index of the collected works of two scholars, Ruan Ji and Ji Kang. b Tendency Index of two Neo-Confucianism classics, Jin Si Lu and Chuan Xi Lu . c Tendency Index of Lüshi Chunqiu . d Tendency Index of the Collected Works of Tao Yuanming . And the Tendency Index of its widely accepted and controversial parts.

Apart from the religious re-creation, Taoism inspired a new school of philosophy. Wei Jin metaphysics, a variant of Taoist philosophy, arose during the Three Kingdoms period (220–280) and flourished in the Jin Dynasty (266–420). Ruan Ji and Ji Kang were two representative scholars. Figure 5a shows the Tendency Index of their collected works. Compared with the other four schools, scholars of Wei Jin metaphysics were closer to the theories of Taoism ( Collected Works of Ruan Ji , \(n = 1590\) ; Collected Works of Ji Kang , \(P = 3.57e - 06\) , \(n = 2209\) , for Taoism).

This kind of transformation also occurred in Confucianism. Confucianism, which originated in 500 BC (Yao 2000 ), had an extensive impact on ancient Chinese culture and spread throughout East Asia. Over millennia, the philosophy evolved, and Neo-Confucianism became the new representative of Confucianism in the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) (Bol 2008 ). Jin Si Lu and Chuan Xi Lu , written by Zhu Xi, Lv Zuqian, and Wang Yanming, were two of the most famous classics. Their Tendency Index is shown in Fig. 5b . The significant intertextual connection between the two works and Confucianism confirms their inheritance ( Jin Si Lu , \(T = 2.84\) , \(P = 1.01e - 13\) , \(n = 2914\) ; Chuan Xi Lu , \(T = 3.36\) , \(P = 2.33e - 15\) , \(n = 2495\) , for Confucianism).

Controversial literature attribution

Because of its antiquity, the information of some classics has become vague over thousands of years of circulation. Attributing ancient literature to appropriate schools and original authors has been a long-discussed issue in Chinese cultural studies, and in recent times, scholars have embarked upon quantitative investigations in this regard (Zhu et al. 2021 ; Zhou et al. 2023 ). In this section, we provide quantitative suggestions for controversial literature based on its intertextual distributions among schools.

Appropriate school attribution could contribute to the study of the influence and evolution of cultural thought. For example, Lüshi Chunqiu , an encyclopedic classic from the Warring States Period, was compiled in 239 BC with the support of the politician Lü Buwei. It brought together doctrines from various schools. However, there is no conclusion about its predilection among them (e.g., Syncretism theory, Taoism theory, and Confucianism theory (Chen 2001 )).

In Fig. 5c , our quantitative modelling result shows that Lüshi Chunqiu is a syncretic work ( \(T = 0.78\sim 1.43\) ) led by Taoism ( \(T = 1.43\) , \(P = 0.0004\) , \(n = 6118\) , for Taoism). It indicates that the editors have done a syncretic compilation of the theories in that period, with a slight inclination toward Taoism.

The variation of intertextual distributions can also be applied to controversial authorship attribution. Some ancient books were published in the name of famous scholars, but the real authors maybe someone else. However, the creations by different people have their own styles. The thought divergence between the real celebrity and their impostor could be implied in the intertextual variation of their works.

For example, Tao Yuanming is widely recognized as a representative of Chinese individual liberalism (Swartz 2008 ). He refused to serve the government and pursued a pastoral life. His yearning for a free life was depicted in his poems, which is highly consistent with the claim of Taoism. He is considered to have a strong predilection for Taoism and was slightly affected by Confucianism. Therefore, it is puzzling to find that the Tendency Index shown in Fig. 5d indicates a significant predilection for Confucianism in the Collected Works of Tao Yuanming ( \(T = 2.41\) , \(P = 0.0007\) , \(n = 2119\) , for Confucianism).

Further investigation revealed that the authorship of some parts of the Collected Works of Tao Yuanming is controversial. The version compiled by Xiao Tong (501–531) did not contain Five Sets of Filial Piety Biographies and Book of Ministers , while the version of Yang Xiuzhi (509–582) added them. Yang Xiuzhi mentioned in the preface that Xiao Tong’s version was missing these two parts, so he added them to prevent them from being lost in future generations.

However, later scholars gradually became suspicious of these two parts. The most famous one is the assertion in Siku Quanshu (Ji 1997 ). For its “self-contradictory” and “meaningless”, Siku Quanshu declared that Five Sets of Filial Piety Biographies and Book of Ministers were counterfeit. This view remains popular today, owing to the authority of Siku Quanshu .

To find clues to this dispute, we compared the intertextual distributions of the widely accepted and controversial parts. We divided the Collected Works of Tao Yuanming into two parts: collection 1 included Five Sets of Filial Piety Biographies and Book of Ministers , while collection 2 contains the remaining works. The Tendency Index for the two collections is shown in Fig. 5d . The “Tao Yuanming” of collection 1 exhibited a significant preference for Confucianism ( \(T = 3.02\) , \(P = 0.0002\) , \(n = 436\) , for Confucianism), while the “Tao Yuanming” of collection 2 inclined towards Taoism ( \(T = 2.45\) , \(P = 0.0658\) , \(n=1683\) , for Taoism) and has an above-average preference for Confucianism ( \(T = 1.51\) , \(P = 0.1985\) , \(n = 1683\) , for Confucianism). The modelling result of collection 2 is consistent with the actual behaviours and mainstream cognition of Tao Yuanming.

The Tendency Index shows an antithesis between the controversial sections and other parts in terms of their intertextual connections to Confucianism and Taoism. Considering the life experience of Tao Yuanming, our finding lends further support to the speculation: Five Sets of Filial Piety Biographies and Book of Ministers were forged by others in the name of Tao Yuanming.

Nevertheless, it is also worth considering that these two books were intended as textbooks for family education. If we treat them as the original works of Tao Yuanming, the intertextual discrepancy in the results reveals the divergence between the personal pursuits of Tao Yuanming (Taoism) and his aim to educate future generations (Confucianism).

Study 2. Vicissitudes of schools

At the second level, we studied the rise and fall of schools in different eras and domains. Scholars have employed character co-occurrence (Yang and Song 2022 ), syntactic patterns (Lee et al. 2018 ), and topic analysis (Nichols et al. 2018 ) to quantitatively measure the grammatical and ideological connections in ancient Chinese literature, thus supporting research into cultural differences and thought evolution. In this section, we studied cultural phenomena through diachronic and field-specific intertextual distributions. We investigated quantitative evidence for the connections between historical events and school status. Besides, schools’ claims have their own focus, making them favoured by different aspects of culture. We quantitatively discussed the status of Confucianism and Taoism in various cultural domains.

To achieve this, we divided ancient China into 12 eras and built an era-text corpus from history books and anthologies. The era-text corpus is a comprehensive collection of literature from official and folk sources, allowing them to be taken as indicators of the prevailing thought of that time. The era-text was then classified into 12 eras and added to the intertextuality modelling. For a specific collection of text, its intertextual association with the era-text implies its popularity in that era. The Historical Status Index H was designed to measure the school status in each era. The schematic diagram of this index is shown in Fig. 4b , and the details of the calculation are as follows.

We first calculated the average intertextual score between the keystone works of each school and the era-text in each era. For each school, its index H is defined as the ratio of the average intertextual score in a specific era to its mean across all eras and schools. Let \(S = \{ S_1,S_2 \ldots S_v\}\) denote the set of schools, and \(E = \{ E_1,E_2 \ldots E_f\}\) denote the set of eras. For a given school S k and era E e , where school S k has l keystone works and era E e has c books in era-text, the Historical Status Index H ke is calculated as follows:

H ke reflects the status of school S k in the era E e . If its mean value \(\bar H\) in era E e exceeds 1.00, it suggests that the school had an above-average influence in era E e . The Historical Status Index of five schools in 12 eras is shown in Fig. 6 .

The timeline gives the name of each era, with the approximate AD years of its beginning and end. The histogram shows the H of each school, while the line chart indicates its mean value in each era.

School transformation in history

As society changed, schools of thought experienced booms and declines in Chinese history. Historical events like wars, policies and regime changes have impacted the school’s evolution. In this section, we investigated the quantitative textual evidence of these connections through the diachronic changes in their intertextual distributions.

The results show that the keystone classics of these five schools were highly intertextual with era-text within about a thousand years ( \(\bar H > 1\) ) and then gradually decreased ( \(\bar H < 1\) ). Although the original texts created during the axial period were still classic, they gradually became unsuitable for the new era (Feng and Bodde 1948 ). This could be the reason for the decrease in the \(\bar H\) index. Throughout the millennium of prosperity, we can observe the connections between school transformation and historical events.

The popularity of the school of Military was affected by the division of the country in the Three Kingdoms period (220–280), when China was divided into three comparable kingdoms. The country was in turmoil, and wars often broke out between these three kingdoms. Against this background, the school of Military, which was themed on the philosophy of war, reached its heyday ( \(H = 3.15\) , for Military in the Three Kingdoms period).

The linkage between political events and the prosperity and decline of the school manifested in the quantitative results. Confucianism was a school of humanism (Juergensmeyer 2005 ), while Legalism was a school that advocated legal institutions. Some scholars believe that ancient China was influenced by both Confucianism and Legalism (Zhou 2011 ; Zhao 2015 ). In Qin (221 BC - 207 BC) and Han (202 BC - 220) Dynasties, favour from the government made two schools stand out rapidly. The Shang Yang Reform (356 BC & 350 BC) and the advocation from the emperor Qin Shi Huang brought Legalism to a peak in the Qin Dynasty ( \(H = 3.67\) , for Legalism in the Qin Dynasty). However, this brief prosperity ended with the demise of the Qin Dynasty. The policy implemented in the Han Dynasty, which banned other philosophical schools and venerated Confucianism, caused the drop of \(\bar H\) and made Confucianism ( \(H = 1.73\) , for Confucianism in the Han Dynasty) exceed others ( \(H = 0.94\sim 1.23\) , other schools in the Han Dynasty). This advantage continued since then, and Confucianism had long been the dominant philosophical school in ancient China.

School influence in various domains

Confucianism and Taoism were representative schools of collectivism and individualism in ancient China (Munro 1985 ). As the two most prominent native philosophical schools, Confucianism and Taoism have often been compared. In this section, we studied the influence of Confucianism and Taoism through their intertextual distributions among various cultural domains.

Confucianism placed greater emphasis on family and social relations, whereas Taoism focused more on nature and the spirit. For most of the time since the Han Dynasty (202 BC - 220), Confucianism was far superior to other schools of thought. Nevertheless, there was an anomaly in history. As shown in Fig. 6 , Taoism experienced a revival from the Three Kingdoms period (220–280) to the Jin Dynasty (266–420). In the Jin Dynasty, the status of Confucianism ( \(H = 2.14\) , for Confucianism in the Jin Dynasty) and Taoism ( \(H = 2.10\) , for Taoism in the Jin Dynasty) was very close. It stemmed from the collapse of the Han Dynasty, which advocated Confucianism. During this period, people sought to find a successor from the theories of other schools (Feng and Bodde, 1948 ). In the background, Wei Jin metaphysics developed from Taoism theory. However, this prosperity did not last long. After the brief revival, Taoism decayed while Confucianism remained the mainstream.

In addition to the diachronic investigation, we discussed the status of Confucianism and Taoism in different cultural domains according to their intertextuality with texts on related topics. History books in ancient China tended to record political events. Therefore, we took the intertextual associations with history books to indicate the political status of a school. The average Tendency Index of history books is shown in Fig. 7a . We also test whether the Tendency Index of Confucianism exceeds Taoism significantly with a one-tailed paired samples t-test. The distribution of their difference value is shown in Fig. 7b , which corresponds to normal distribution. The significance level α is set to 0.05. Confucianism exceeded Taoism significantly in the political domain ( \(P = 2.22e - 15\) , \(n = 55\) ).

a The average Tendency Index of history books. b Difference value distribution of Tendency Index between Confucianism and Taoism among 55 history books. c The average Tendency Index of 125 classics from various cultural domains. d Difference value distribution of Tendency Index between Confucianism and Taoism among 125 classics. e Tendency Index of 125 classics towards Confucianism and Taoism, sorted by their difference value.

Although Taoism did not replace Confucianism in the political domain, it is comparable to Confucianism in broader cultural communities. We calculated the average Tendency Index of 125 classics from various cultural domains, and the result is shown in Fig. 7c . We test whether their Tendency Index is variant with a two-tailed paired samples t -test. The distribution of their difference value is shown in Fig. 7d , which corresponds to normal distribution. The significance level α is set to 0.05. There is no significant difference between Confucianism and Taoism among these classics ( \(P = 0.8014\) , \(n = 125\) , not rejecting the null hypothesis). Specifically, Fig. 7e shows the Tendency Index of 125 classics towards two schools. Among these classics, Confucianism and Taoism had respective advocacy groups. Books on politics and regulations are highly intertextual with Confucianism, while books on mythology, occultism, and medicine are close to Taoism.

These indicators show that Confucianism has advantages in the political field, while Taoism attempted to surpass Confucianism yet failed. However, Taoism was on par with Confucianism in other fields of ancient Chinese culture. Thus, it is suggested that in ancient China, the political domain was the territory of collectivism, while individualism flourished in the diverse cultural fields.

Study 3. Communication with foreign culture

At the third level, we investigated the communication between ancient China and foreign cultures, with a focus on Buddhism, one of the most influential foreign religions in ancient China. The preaching of Buddhism experienced imitation and integration (Zürcher 2007 ). We started by identifying the native schools that are most intertextual with Buddhism and then discussed the different stages of the infiltration between Buddhism and native Chinese culture.

Although the dissemination of information in ancient times was much slower than it is now, ancient China had extensive communication with foreign cultures. As a result, the cultural evolution of ancient China was not isolated. Buddhism, a religion that originated in ancient India, spread to ancient China during Han Dynasty. Buddhist scriptures were translated into Chinese versions, which were widely disseminated over the next millennia.

In this section, we investigated the preaching of Buddhism in ancient China through the intertextual association between Buddhist scriptures and native classics. We selected the four most influential Buddhist scriptures in ancient China ( Diamond Sutra , Lotus Sutra , Shurangama Sutra , and Avatamsaka Sutra ) as the keystone work of Buddhism and added them to the modelling. The diachronic changes of intertextual distributions reveal the evolution of cultural integration in different stages. The topics of intertextual associations show the commonalities between Buddhism and native culture.

Analogue in native cultural groups

As a newly introduced religion, Buddhism inevitably interacted with the existing native cultural groups in its preaching. Taoist religion, which developed from Taoist philosophy, was the dominant indigenous religion in China. Scholars generally believe that Buddhism and Taoism imitated each other in many ways (Mollier 2008 ), including textual scriptures, image symbols, and organization. In this study, we concentrate on textual scriptures. Figure 8a shows the Tendency Index of Buddhist scriptures towards the five native schools. Taoism is the closest native school as expected ( \(T = 1.83\) , \(P = 0.0131\) , \(n = 62693\) , for Taoism).

Besides, we found that Buddhist scriptures borrowed language expressions from existing Chinese terms in the translations of Buddhist concepts. Figure 8b shows two cases from the detected intertextual sentences. The term “Amrita” (meaning “immortality drink”) was borrowed from the word “甘露“ (gan lu, meaning “sweet dew”) when translated into Chinese. This word refers to “rain” in the native Taoist classic Tao Te Ching . Similarly, the Chinese translation of “Sattva” (meaning “sentient beings”) employed the term “众生“ (zhong sheng, meaning “all living beings”), as found in the Taoist classic Zhuangzi .

Evolution of cultural integration

Apart from the philosophical schools, intercultural communication manifested in various aspects of society. Therefore, we expanded the horizons to broader cultural domains. In this section, we compared the intertextual associations between Buddhism and native literature before and after its introduction.

During the Jin Dynasty (266–420), these four Buddhist scriptures were translated into Chinese, paving the way for Buddhism to flourish in ancient China. After separating the texts before and after AD 420, we ranked native classics based on their intertextual scores with Buddhist scriptures. The top 10 classics are shown in Fig. 8c and e . We also juxtaposed Buddhism with five native schools and calculated the Tendency Index of these classics.

Before the introduction of Buddhism, its similar native classics often focused on myth and religion, implying that the Chinese version of Buddhist scriptures retained the original theme. Besides, it may attribute to their assimilation of the corresponding native literature in the Chinese translation of Buddhist scriptures. Specifically, three similar cases from the top three classics are shown in Fig. 8d . The Chinese version of Buddhist scriptures shares similar phrases with native myths in their discussions of mysteries, including the control of ghosts and gods, and the description of the mysterious phenomenon of “burning day and night”. It also mimicked the language expression of native religious discourses. For example, the description of the choice between justice and evil is highly consistent between Cantongqi and Avatamsaka Sutra .

After the introduction of Buddhism, Buddhist doctrines diffused into various domains of native culture. Compared to the previous period, there was an overall increase in the Tendency Index of Buddhism among the top 10 classics. It indicates the promotion of Buddhism’s influence on Chinese culture. One notable change is the emergence of three native Buddhist works. It symbolizes that Buddhism built its advocacy group in ancient China. These works remoulded Buddhism in a new cultural environment with localized doctrines. In addition to expanding its own religious territory, Buddhism integrated into other native religions (Zürcher 1980 ). For example, the top 1 work shown in Fig. 8e is the native religious classic named Xuan Zhu Lu , which deeply absorbed Buddhist theories. In terms of missionary targets, the preaching of Buddhism was not limited to ordinary people and even reached the supreme ruler, such as the Emperor Wu of Liang (464–549), which ranks third in Fig. 8e . With the advocacy of the emperor, the Liang Dynasty was the heyday of Buddhism in the Southern Dynasty (Strange 2011 ). For details, Fig. 8f shows three similar cases from the top three native classics after the introduction of Buddhism. Religious concepts from Buddhism were mixed into Chinese as new words (e.g., ten directions, immeasurable and Buddha). India’s “Ganges River” flowed into ancient China along with Buddhist scriptures.

Online platform

In this paper, we focused on the theme of cultural evolution. However, there are many other meaningful findings in our modelling results, which await further explanation by relevant scholars. Therefore, we have developed an online platform ( http://evolution.pkudh.xyz/ ) featuring an interactive visualization system that displays the corpus and intertextual sentences. This platform shows millions of intertextual cases detected in this work and provides support for further data analysis. Even researchers without programming backgrounds can gain valuable insights into our work and develop further studies using this convenient tool. We gave several screenshots of the platform in Fig. 9 .

a Intertextual sentence browsing from corpus. b Intertextual sentence statistics and visualization within a custom collection. c Visualization of intertextual sentences distribution among different chapters of a book within a custom collection.

With the leap forward of big data and AI technology, computer-assisted cultural studies have expanded in both scale and depth. Intricate cultural problems can be discussed quantitatively with the support of large-scale data. In this paper, we used digital methods to quantify the cultural evolution of China over the past thousands of years within a large-scale corpus of ancient literature.

We gave validated results for several acknowledged cultural phenomena. The two evolutionary paths of Taoism and Confucianism, inspiring new branches of school and migrating to religious fields, were confirmed by intertextual associations. Besides, we provided quantitative evidence for the connections between the schools’ status and several historical events. It shows the intertwining of philosophical schools and politics in ancient China.

Through our analysis, we gained quantitative insights into some long-debated cultural problems. For literature with controversial school attribution, our findings suggest that Lüshi Chunqiu is a syncretic work headed by the theory of Taoism. As for literature with controversial authorship attribution, we revealed that Five Sets of Filial Piety Biographies and Book of Ministers are divergent from other works of Tao Yuanming in ideological preference. In the comparison between Confucianism and Taoism, we propose that collectivism represented by Confucianism was mainstream in the political domain, while individualism represented by Taoism was active in extensive fields of ancient Chinese culture.

Furthermore, we investigated intercultural communication between Buddhism and Chinese native culture. The results suggest that the influence of this foreign culture evolved at different stages, from imitation to integration. In the early days, Buddhism imitated similar aspects of native culture to ease resistance (Kohn 1995 ). After the initial prosperity of Buddhism in China, it was remoulded through localized Buddhist works. As time went by, Buddhism became a part of the local culture. It was evident in various cultural domains of ancient China.

Our study demonstrates that hierarchical intertextuality modelling is a promising tool for cultural analysis within the large-scale corpus. However, there are still limitations in quantitative intertextuality research on Chinese literature. The evolution of language over time presents challenges in detecting intertextuality between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese is challenging. Besides, intercultural communication from different languages requires cross-lingual detection, which is still an area that remains underexplored.

This research represents an innovative attempt to study the evolution of Chinese culture from a digital perspective. It provides new insights into the interpretation of ancient Chinese culture and raises important questions for further exploration: How did ancient Chinese culture evolve into its modern form? What was the impact of global culture on this process of evolution? To conduct more comprehensive research, interdisciplinary and intercultural collaboration is necessary.

Data availability

The open-sourced code, data catalogue and online platform can be found here: https://github.com/CissyDuan/Evol . The textual data can be downloaded from open websites: http://www.xueheng.net and http://www.daizhige.org/ . The pre-trained model is accessed from an open-sourced model: https://github.com/ethan-yt/guwenbert .

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the NSFC project ‘the Construction of the Knowledge Graph for the History of Chinese Confucianism’ (Grant No. 72010107003).

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SD wrote code and paper, conducted experiments and data analysis, and designed the online platform. JW initiated this research, proposed research questions and technical paths, and revised the paper. HY collected and processed the data and revised the paper from a humanities perspective. QS directed this work, including technical innovation, cultural analysis and paper writing. All authors approved the final manuscript.

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Duan, S., Wang, J., Yang, H. et al. Disentangling the cultural evolution of ancient China: a digital humanities perspective. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 10 , 310 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-01811-x

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Article contents

The index in the premodern and modern world.

• Kyle Conrau-Lewis Kyle Conrau-Lewis Department of Classics, Yale University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1224
• Published online: 23 February 2021

In the history of the book, indexes emerged as a result of a number of developments in paratexts and organization. The earliest examples of this device varied significantly in layout, organization, and textual form. While various kinds of tables of contents are attested in the ancient world, the index is a much later innovation. The earliest use of indexes is found in legal and then scholastic and patristic texts in continental Europe; they were particularly useful for university students and preachers. Indexes served as aids to help them navigate the growing corpus of legal and theological compilations and commentaries. However, their format and function were variable: the manuscript evidence shows a great degree of experimentation, combining alphabetic, vocalic, and systematic orders of arrangement. In the early modern period, with increasing anxieties about how to organize and manage information, treatises instructed readers how to compile an index. In turn, from the 16th century and well into the 18th, writers cautioned against an excessive reliance on these book aids in lieu of reading the whole books and lampooned so-called “index learning.” The use of indexes in Greek, Hebrew, and Islamic book culture only began in earnest in the early modern period.

• index learning
• history of the book

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The history of indian literature.

Author: Weber, Albrecht

Keywords: Indian literature - History Indian literature Ancient Sanskrit literature - History

Publisher: Trubner & Co, London

Source: Central Secretariat Library

Type: Rare Book

Received From: Central Secretariat Library

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A History of European Literature: The West and the World from Antiquity to the Present

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The history of European literature and of each of its standard periods can be illuminated by comparative consideration of the different literary languages within Europe and of the relationship of European literature to world literature. The global history of literature from the ancient Near East to the present can be divided into five main, overlapping stages. European literature emerges from world literature before the birth of Europe—during antiquity, whose classical languages are the heirs to the complex heritage of the Old World. That legacy is later transmitted by Latin to the various vernaculars. The distinctiveness of this process lies in the gradual displacement of Latin by a system of intravernacular leadership dominated by the Romance languages. An additional unique feature is the global expansion of Western Europe’s languages and characteristic literary forms, especially the novel, beginning in the Renaissance. This expansion ultimately issues in the reintegration of European literature into world literature, in the creation of today’s global literary system. It is in these interrelated trajectories that the specificity of European literature is to be found. The ongoing relationship of European literature to other parts of the world emerges most clearly at the level not of theme or mimesis but of form. One conclusion is that literary history possesses a certain systematicity. Another is that language and literature are not only the products of major historical change but also its agents. Such claims, finally, depend on rejecting the opposition between the general and the specific, between synthetic and local knowledge.

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Advancements and Challenges in Ancient DNA Research: Bridging the Global North–South Divide

Vasundhra dalal.

1 Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad 500007, Telangana, India

Nagarjuna Pasupuleti

Gyaneshwer chaubey.

2 Cytogenetics Laboratory, Department of Zoology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi 221005, Uttar Pradesh, India

3 Ancient DNA Lab, Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeosciences, Lucknow 226007, Uttar Pradesh, India

Vasant Shinde

Associated data.

Not applicable.

Ancient DNA (aDNA) research first began in 1984 and ever since has greatly expanded our understanding of evolution and migration. Today, aDNA analysis is used to solve various puzzles about the origin of mankind, migration patterns, and the spread of infectious diseases. The incredible findings ranging from identifying the new branches within the human family to studying the genomes of extinct flora and fauna have caught the world by surprise in recent times. However, a closer look at these published results points out a clear Global North and Global South divide. Therefore, through this research, we aim to emphasize encouraging better collaborative opportunities and technology transfer to support researchers in the Global South. Further, the present research also focuses on expanding the scope of the ongoing conversation in the field of aDNA by reporting relevant literature published around the world and discussing the advancements and challenges in the field.

1. Introduction

The primal evidence for understanding the past living forms and environment comes from instances of direct observation, the existence of homologies and fossils and certain biogeographical patterns. The first comprehensive theory of evolution, published in the middle of the 19th century by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, substantially offered a distinctive arena for academicians to delve into the past to understand the present [ 1 ]. Subsequently, until the 1980s, the majority of the research work generated was regarding evolutionary processes inferred through morphometric analysis. Eventually, the possibility of exploring the genetic extent of past events to provide direct historical evidence opened a novel line of research in 1984.

The molecular Investigation of ancient DNA (aDNA) was initiated in 1984 when a team of researchers was able to isolate and sequence a short DNA fragment from the dried muscle of a museum specimen of the quagga, a South African equid (Equus quagga) that became extinct at the beginning of the twentieth century [ 2 ]. This initial aDNA study employed bacterial cloning to amplify short sequences retrieved from the skin of the animal. The very next year, another breakthrough research conducted by Pääbo et al. recovered a 3.4 kilobases long DNA fragment from the dried tissue of an Egyptian mummy that was 2430 years old [ 3 ]. These studies, nonetheless, in a way, were premature as the DNA from ancient samples can have a high degree of damage or have contaminated DNA along with it, which will make it difficult to isolate and clone the specific DNA sequences as desired. However, the advancements in molecular biology tools, primarily polymerase chain reaction, fueled aDNA investigations [ 4 , 5 ]. The PCR enabled the generation of an infinitely large number of copies from very few or even a single original DNA. Henceforth, several copies of the same DNA sequence from the same specimen could be amplified, allowing for the scientifically rigorous study of ancient DNA.

Now, more than thirty decades later, scientists and researchers are probing to solve various puzzles regarding the origin of mankind, migration patterns, the advent of infectious diseases and their spread throughout ancient populations. aDNA analysis has emerged as a cutting-edge genetic tool altering our comprehensive understanding of the past, gaining impetus from all over the world. For instance, in recent breakthrough research, aDNA analysis of seven individuals revealed the origin of the plague strain that caused the Black Death in present-day Kyrgyzstan [ 6 ]. In fact, from identifying “lost” Indigenous populations to encountering new branches within the human family, including that of the Denisovans, close relatives of Neanderthals, has been aided by aDNA [ 7 , 8 ]. Many ancient animals, such as woolly mammoths and cave bears, have had their genomes sequenced, as have human tribes, ranging from Vikings to Paleo-Eskimos to Neanderthals [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 ].

Today, with the help of aDNA, the existing atlas of genetic variety is no longer confined to a glimpse of the diversity observed in modern-day populations throughout the globe. Rather, it is constantly updated with data sets that monitor changes in human, animal, plant, and even microbial populations’ genetic ancestries as they grow, implode, and adapt to new environmental factors [ 14 , 15 , 16 ]. Apart from biological and archaeological prospects, aDNA also holds the potential to establish powerful political and cultural connections with other nations [ 17 ]. More broadly, aDNA data have revolutionized our knowledge and curiosity, leading to the publication of enormous amounts of literature. The latest innovations in technology have further proved to be an exceptional tool for scientists and researchers in the race to fetch the “gold” (aDNA). In the present research, our aim is to expand the scope of ongoing conversations in the field of aDNA by reporting the relevant literature published around the world and elaborating on the advancements and challenges in the field.

2. Rise of aDNA Field

aDNA has developed from a niche area that has recently been transformed into a very lucrative and rising area of study and has truly advanced our understanding of the evolutionary history of many species. Ever since the emergence of aDNA analysis, bone and teeth have been the most researched substrates to retrieve an efficient amount of DNA from the specimen. The majority of paleontological hard tissues consist of relatively low levels of endogenous DNA [ 18 ]. As a result, there has been a great deal of research on techniques (including column-based extractions) to extract endogenous DNA from bone specimens and from other skeletal components, such as the petrous bone and dental cementum [ 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 ]. The frequently used next-generation sequencing or NGS in association with enriched capture-based techniques has, however, been responsible for resolving the primary constraints on aDNA research concerning time and expense [ 18 , 24 ].

Most commonly, the fields comprising aDNA analysis are also known as palaeogenomics or archaeogenomics. While the number of studies employing aDNA over the past few decades has substantially escalated, in this context, the present study notably managed to illustrate the trend of aDNA studies consisting of human and non-human samples ( Figure 1 and Figure 2 ).

The studies extracted from Web of Science (date: 1 August 2022) containing the terms (palaeogenom* OR paleogenom* OR archaeogenom* OR “archaic DNA” OR archeogenom* OR “Ancient DNA” OR (archeology* NEAR/1 DNA) OR (archaealogy* NEAR/1 DNA) OR “extinct DNA” OR (historic* NEAR/1 DNA) OR (paleo* NEAR/1 DNA) OR (palaeo* NEAR/1 DNA). Further, the studies were manually examined to verify the authenticity of the derived data. The screening criteria include checking the relevance by title, abstract and keywords.

The total number of aDNA research articles (encompassing Sediments, Archaeological Artefacts and Ecofacts, Calcified and Mineralized substrates and Biological and Cultural archives) consists of 3187 non-human studies and 1588 human studies.

It is evident from Figure 2 what aDNA research has yielded so far. The studies screened for the present research highlights the branching of aDNA into various fields, such as anthropology, archaeology, geology, botany, zoology, paleopathology, microbiology, molecular biology, and genetics and developing a symbiotic relationship. This amalgamation has outlined some broad areas where aDNA sequences have provided novel insights.

2.1. Species Phylogenies

The potential to link extinct and extant species via molecular phylogenies is one clear study path offered by ancient DNA analysis. Australian marsupial wolves [ 25 ], New Zealand moas [ 26 ], American ground sloths [ 27 ] and endemic Hawaiian geese [ 28 ] are prominent examples of animal species that are now extinct. Even several natural history museums have created standards for removing samples for molecular studies and have even set up molecular laboratories to work on their collections, acknowledging that they are genetic repositories [ 29 ]. This has helped researchers to obtain nuclear DNA sequences from various Pleistocene animals and from plants that are preserved in dry environments [ 30 , 31 , 32 ].

The evolutionary connections of various non-human primates, however, are still unknown. This is because those primates were primarily located in hot, humid climates with acidic soil, such as tropical rainforests, where DNA storage is poor [ 33 ]. Many of the recently extinct Malagasy lemurs’ evolutionary connections have also been investigated utilizing aDNA methods. As several of Madagascar’s now-extinct lemur species lived until as recently as 500 years ago, they can be considered evolutionary contemporaries of living species [ 34 ]. Nevertheless, the study of extinct lemurs has already provided results utilizing ancient mitogenomes that have cast doubt on existing morphologically based lemur phylogenies [ 35 ]. The research in this direction opens the door to a number of new avenues for learning more about the previous history of macaques in Europe and apes on mainland Asia throughout the Late Pleistocene, as well as their subsequent local extinction [ 33 ].

2.2. Migration and Phylogeography

The support of the “Recent African Origin” idea of modern human origins, first put out on the basis of fossil data, is one of the most important findings of mtDNA analysis [ 36 ]. Various research on mtDNA variation in populations have constantly discovered further evidence for this hypothesis, with the most common ancestor of human mtDNA located in Africa about 100,000–200,000 years ago [ 37 , 38 ]. Furthermore, precise mtDNA analysis of Neanderthal and their contemporaries, early modern humans from Europe, revealed quintessential results ruling out any significant genetic contributions from Neanderthals to early modern humans, but it does not preclude a lesser contribution [ 39 , 40 ]. A comprehensive knowledge of past human migrations shed light on significant events in human expansion—peopling of the New World, the colonization of the Pacific, and the initial migration to New Guinea and Australia [ 41 , 42 , 43 , 44 ].

Recent publications have also contributed to this specific sub-domain of aDNA studies by solving the long-standing debate on ‘Anglo-Saxon settlement’ [ 45 ]. The results published demonstrated that the mediaeval society in England must have been the result of mass migration across the North Sea. A study conducted in 2019 revealed surprising results, suggesting that during the Neolithic period, the spread of farming in Eurasia resulted in the formation of a gradient in southwestern Asia that stretched from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age [ 46 ]. This gradient was characterized by a mix of ancestry related to Anatolian farmers in the west and Iranian farmers in the east. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the history and evolution of human populations in this region [ 46 ].

Despite the rich history and cultural diversity of South Asia, the prehistoric genomic details of this region have remained largely unknown due to a lack of ancient DNA data. However, several studies have recently emerged to shed new light on the complex origins and genetic ancestry of modern South Asian populations, providing valuable insights into the migratory history, admixture, and genetic diversity of the region. Moreover, ancient DNA studies have provided strong evidence for a mixture between European and South Asian populations [ 47 , 48 ]. A study by Allentoft et al. (2015) analyzed the genomes of 101 ancient individuals from across Europe and found that there was significant gene flow between Europe and South Asia during the Bronze Age (c. 3000–1000 BCE). This gene flow is thought to have been driven by the expansion of the Steppe pastoralists, who migrated from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe (located in modern-day Ukraine and Russia) into Europe and South Asia [ 47 ]. In addition to the Steppe pastoralists, there is also evidence of gene flow between Europe and South Asia during the Indus Valley Civilization [ 47 ]. Moreover, a study analyzing genome-wide data from ancient individuals in eastern Iran, Turan, Bronze Age Kazakhstan, and South Asia has provided some insight into the complex origins of South Asians [ 49 ]. This study suggests that there was a southward migration from the Eurasian Steppe to South Asia around 2300–1500 BCE. Another study represented the evidence of admixture between Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI), which is present in the modern Indian populations, including tribal groups from the Andaman Islands [ 50 , 51 ].

Further, adding to the curiosity to understand the Indus Valley Civilization, Shinde et al. (2019) reported the first genome-wide data from the specimen excavated at the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi, Haryana, India. Such findings have made significant contributions to our knowledge of the South Asian genetic history, the spread of agriculture throughout South Asia, and Indo-European languages [ 52 , 53 ]. The startling discovery of relics of queen Keetvan in India and numerous skeletons in the Roopkund lake was the start of pioneer studies conducted in India that strengthened the roots of the aDNA field in India [ 17 , 54 ]. Adding to the field, the latest research on the Ajnala massacre showcased the implication of aDNA in population migration and forensic science by employing isotope dating methods along with aDNA analysis to identify the origin of the specimens [ 55 ].

2.3. Archaic Hominis

The abundance of newly accessible ancient human genetic data has been helpful in shifting our picture of the human past from one of long-term population continuity and isolation to one in which movement and population mixing have played considerably major roles [ 16 ]. The most crucial contribution of aDNA is towards solving the complex puzzle—Neanderthal Man. It is now evident that the progenitors of all modern non-African populations intermingled with Neanderthals [ 56 ]. The recent genetic evidence suggests that all modern non-African populations possess approximately 2% Neanderthal ancestry [ 57 , 58 , 59 ]. Furthermore, through the analysis of linkage disequilibrium, researchers have determined that this event of hybridization occurred around 50–65 thousand years ago, providing a vital time frame for early human migration [ 60 ]. A study examining the intricate history of interaction between Neanderthals and modern humans has shown that the East Asian population has a higher concentration of Neanderthal sequences (approximately 20%) compared to the European population [ 58 , 61 , 62 ]. This difference underscores the impact of natural selection and the occurrence of additional hybridization events in the ancestors of present-day East Asians after the separation from the European population.

Apart from this, a small finger bone discovered in the Denisova Cave in Siberia led to a publication of ground-breaking research in 2010 [ 8 ]. This bone’s morphology was insufficient to determine if it came from a contemporary human, a Neanderthal, or something else. When the nuclear DNA of this bone was examined, however, it revealed a unique scenario: the group represented by this bone is a sister group of Neanderthals that separated from them after modern humans’ ancestors parted from Neanderthals [ 8 ]. This was further confirmed by analyzing a high-coverage genome obtained from the same fossil [ 63 ]. Denisovan have a unique hybridization history with contemporary people. It was also reported that Melanesians and aboriginal Australians have Denisovan heritage, as do other East Asians to a lesser extent [ 64 ]. Although Denisovans are only known from a solitary cave in Siberia, their mixing pattern implies that they formerly inhabited a larger area [ 64 ]. The examination of partial genomes recovered from two teeth discovered in the Denisovan Cave supports this result [ 65 ].

2.4. Paleopathology

aDNA from microorganisms, including pathogens and commensals, can give insights about peoples’ health, as well as shifts in diet and ecology of the diseases. Initially, the research on ancient microbes used PCR-based techniques to identify pathogens (for example, pathogens responsible for causing skeleton lesions characteristic of leprosy) and also to analyze the 1918 influenza virus. However, PCR-based techniques failed to distinguish ancient and modern contaminating microbial DNA, which was overcome by the NGS-based techniques [ 66 ].

The contribution of palaeopathology has unveiled crucial information about most of the diseases that have significantly affected the past population or are still persistent in the present society. For instance, aDNA analysis from samples with congenital hip dislocation in the mediaeval community of Notre Dame du Bourg in Digne Les Bains, France, revealed that the condition, which is more common in this group, was caused by a mechanical element rather than a genetic (hereditary) factor [ 67 ]. In India, the first instance of leprosy in ancient skeletal remains was found in a man from the second millennium [ 68 ]. Furthermore, the prevalence of TB in America prior to the arrival of Europeans has been confirmed by the finding of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in a 1000-year-old pre-Columbian mummy [ 69 ]. The very same bacteria were discovered in Egyptian skeletons dating from 2500 to 5000 years ago, in British mediaeval bones, and in Hungarian skeletons dating from 300 to 1300 years ago [ 70 , 71 , 72 ]. All this evidence has enabled researchers to study the development of Mycobacterium TB and its interactions with its hosts [ 73 ].

Moreover, when Yersinia pestis was detected in the teeth of 400-year-old plague victims [ 74 ] while Mycobacterium leprae (leprosy agent) was discovered on the bones of 300-year-old archaeological German and Hungarian sites [ 70 ], the analysis from the victims of both the Plague of Justinian and the black Death demonstrated that Y. pestis was the causal agent in both the dreadful pandemics [ 75 , 76 ]. Despite a plethora of research that has achieved widespread recognition in the field of archaeoparasitology, there have not been many notable reports from South Asian nations. However, in a short report published in 2018, an attempt to examine parasites on Indian archaeological specimens collected from the Mature Harrapan site and Chalcolithic sites was made, proposing the possibility of conducting paleoparasitological studies in India [ 77 ]. Such exploration in ancient pathogen genomic divergence and its evolutionary histories could help researchers to reconstruct and study the origins of present-day geographical distribution and diversity of clinical pathogen infections, as well as recognize potential pathogen evolutionary responses caused by environmental factors [ 78 ]

2.5. Adaptation

From several studies, it has been identified that the capacity to analyze how people have adapted to climatic change through time is a core promise of aDNA research. aDNA analysis has also highlighted the significance of Late Pleistocene climatic cycles, as well as representing how the Holocene and modern environments’ generally stable circumstances may be regarded rather abnormal when examining recent evolutionary events [ 79 ]. Early research revealed that some epigenetic alterations, for example, methylation of cytosine, may be examined in ancient material [ 80 ]. This now leads us to explore the changes in epigenetic markers in large numbers of samples from populations undergoing substantial environmental changes over time [ 81 ].

An interesting take on adaptation further leads us to discuss a study published in 2019, where ancient remnants found in a lake situated in the Himalayas not only questions the reasons behind their death but also their presence in the area at such an altitude [ 54 ]. At 5029 km above sea level, where oxygen levels are low, it becomes nearly impossible to breathe unless they have a sort of adaptability to such an extreme environmental condition [ 54 ]. Henceforth, there are numerous questions for archaeologists, anthropologists and geneticists to address, which would pave the way for interesting opportunities not only to examine extreme human adaptations but also the evolution of microbiomes as species adapt to different climates and diets.

3. Technological Advancements

Currently, researchers are processing hundreds of specimens in what has been compared to a “factory-like method” of extracting ancient DNA [ 82 ]. This explosion of research in aDNA could only be possible due to improvements in extraction methods and sequencing technologies.

3.1. Revolutionized Extraction Methodologies

Since the majority of recent ancient genetic research has focused on bone and teeth, extraction techniques have been adjusted to enhance the recovery of endogenous DNA [ 83 , 84 ]. Because the knowledge about DNA preservation that we have is meagre, there is an exigency for the improvement in DNA extraction techniques from the tissues. Generally, when there are enough materials (ancient specimens) for comprehensive analysis, researchers started to inquire about the potency of various extraction methodologies for decayed plants [ 85 ], dental calculus from the archaeological specimens [ 86 ], parchments [ 87 ] and coprolites [ 88 ]. With regard to exotic archaeological artefacts, the analysis is dependent on contemporary experimentation or artificially damaged materials [ 89 ]. It is imperative that the challenges in authenticating aDNA from unusual materials (ancient specimens) put forward a captivating scenario for “unified protocols” to extract a variety of genetic information [ 88 , 89 ].

Further, to extract crucial information in the form of DNA, destructive methodologies have been adopted by researchers around the world. Because of this, museums and archives are urging to safeguard the archaeological specimens for future analyses by opting for non-destructive sampling [ 90 , 91 ]. Considering this, research has created unique sampling methods that do not need intrusive procedures for bones, teeth, insects, shells, parchment, as well as shells [ 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 ]. We are optimistic that with more advancements in extraction methodologies, a whole new arena of information will be revealed, even from minute samples.

3.2. Evolution in Sequencing Technology

With the invention of PCR, researchers were profoundly able to target and replicate specific DNA sequences. Before 2010, researchers substantially used PCR along with Sanger sequencing to retrieve ancient genomic sequences [ 89 ]. However, the limitations that were observed in the former application were overcome by the development of the next-generation sequencing (NGS). NGS made it possible for the researchers to analyze the evolutionary changes in the plethora of species through time and sequence the entire mitochondrial genome along with the reconstruction of nuclear genomic regions [ 96 , 97 ]. This pioneering technology has further redefined aDNA research through its technical applications, such as DNA hybridization capture [ 18 , 98 ]. Hybridization capture has proved to be fruitful specifically in rejuvenating research on ancient pathogen DNA as an active area of study [ 99 ]. In addition, for the non-permafrost samples where even shotgun sequencing drastically failed, DNA hybridization made it possible to recover the earliest aDNA, which was from a ~ 400,000-year-old archaic hominin [ 20 ].

An encouraging approach to enable aDNA analysis attainable to a substantially greater number of laboratories is to utilize the “1240k capture” method on ancient samples. This “1240k capture” panel is advantageous, as it increases efficacy by focusing on specific regions of the human genome that will be examined while providing access to genome-wide data from ancient samples with minimal amounts of human DNA [ 100 ]. Another added advantage of hybridization capture is that it can be used in both solid and liquid phases. Both procedures incorporate washing away non-specific DNA fragments, eluting target DNA fragments from the probes, and sequencing the enriched libraries using NGS systems. Interestingly, capture methods can be utilized to produce accurate nuclear sequence data even when endogenous DNA concentration is less than 0.03% since they are appropriate for short DNA fragments that are frequently maintained in ancient materials [ 101 ]. Despite being primarily used to analyze modern DNA, capture technologies have been successfully employed to retrieve the entire genome of a mediaeval Yersinia pestis sample as well as to query hundreds of SNPs in the Neanderthal genome [ 24 , 75 ].

3.3. Advancements in Data Analyzing Tools

Tools for data analysis have significantly transformed the study of aDNA. Depending upon the nature of the research objective, that is, if it is focusing on extracting information on population history modeling, microbiological profiling, or paleo-environmental reconstruction, various pipelines and tools could be adopted [ 14 ]. Assessing contemporary populations for variations seen in aDNA is one of the fundamental techniques for locating ancient haplotypes. This straightforward method has been successfully used to pinpoint contemporary populations in Europe where aDNA samples revealed mtDNA mutations, providing an estimate of populations/regions that contain such ancient genetic fingerprints [ 102 , 103 ]. Astonishing results from the ancient sample came forward with the single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) analysis that revealed primordial characteristics such as skin, hair and eye pigmentation along with identification of sex by determining the ratio assigned to the Y- and X- chromosomes [ 104 , 105 ].

As more and more ancient human remains are retrieved with continuously advancing technologies, researchers have gained a better understanding of the genetic diversity within populations by utilizing admixture-based techniques on contemporary and historical samples [ 106 ]. When combined with anthropological information and historical records, tools and procedures originally created for population research of modern people can be used to retrace migration routes, places of origin, and local and global ancestries of extinct populations. The exploratory statistical methods have further elevated the aDNA field by condensing the genetic variations, representing the genetic affinities [ 107 , 108 ]. Adding to this, rarely does endogenous DNA (1%) appear in ancient DNA (aDNA) libraries; environmental DNA often takes up the majority of sequencing capacity. The aDNA obtained from the biological sample consists of a short length with frequent dominance of environmental microbial DNA contamination; however, the processed reads are now being utilized not only in reference to the targeted species but also to possible microbial pathogens that the individuals may have been exposed to throughout his or her life [ 14 ]. Moreover, aDNA extracts typically exhibit a full metagenomic diversity of ambient microorganisms that mostly colonize the subfossil material after death [ 10 , 109 ]. In this context, numerous bioinformatic pipelines are designed to map and estimate the source of microorganisms, such as soil, gut, and oral microbiota [ 14 ]. Further developments in bioinformatic tools could have the propensity to raise the resolution of evolutionary events by considerably aiding whole-genome sequencing.

4. Dominance of Global North in aDNA Research

Going further in the research, it is equally important to understand the status of aDNA studies around the world. We utilized the web of science database to accumulate articles on aDNA studies around the globe and plotted them on the world map. It became apparent from the observation ( Figure 3 and Figure 4 ) that there are clearly significant differences between the Global North (GN) and Global South (GS) (the terms used to classify nations according to their socioeconomic and political characteristics) in terms of research outputs [ 110 ]. The underlying premise that could be drawn from such results is that aDNA is a specific area of research where asymmetries among infrastructure, funding support, and training for research could create this division—GS (lower-income countries) and GN (higher-income countries) [ 111 ]. The researchers from the GN (with the exceptions of Australia and New Zealand from GS) frequently travel to the GS to gather data and materials for processing, analyzing, and publishing findings with little to no local collaboration leading towards developing a whole new approach referred to as “helicopter research” or “parachute research” [ 112 , 113 ]. Sometimes, this unfair collection of samples (without collaboration or proper acknowledgements) leads to a breach in ethical concerns and ultimately shows no remorse towards local beliefs.

World map showing aDNA human-based research publications around the globe.

World map showing aDNA non-human-based research publications around the globe.

The lack of aDNA research output from the lower-income countries could possibly be due to operating costs associated with establishing aDNA laboratories, which also, down the line, hinders the sustenance of the laboratory. Additionally, for many developing countries, the aDNA does not necessarily take precedence over financial and health crises. Moreover, the plight of the researchers from tropical countries is further exacerbated, as in these regions the DNA preservation of the ancient biological remains is not amenable, because of which very little data on ancient DNA have been generated [ 64 , 114 , 115 ]. In this regard, the most well-established laboratory in the world has the capability to utilize their powers to support researchers from Global South, as they are hardly encouraged to determine the research objective [ 109 ]. As the majority of laboratories around the world are still struggling to have access to the latest technologies, the transfer or exchange of technologies could further prove to be a boon [ 116 ].

5. Challenges to Overcome

Although astonishing results appeared in Figure 2 . depicting a gradual increase in the exploration of non-human and human aDNA studies, respectively, the subject is rife with challenges and pitfalls [ 14 ].

5.1. Availability of aDNA from the Ancient Biological Samples

The enzymatic repair systems protect DNA molecules from chemical damages that often occur in live cells, preserving the genome’s integrity [ 117 ]. These cellular restoration processes cease to work once the host is dead. The genome is consequently subjected to the full effects of several causes that endanger its stability. These causes include intracellular nucleases, which are no longer locked away inside the cell and can thus access and break down DNA, as well as microbes that spread through decomposing tissues. All recoverable DNA may be lost as a consequence of these forces working together. However, under unfavorable environmental circumstances, such as when tissues freeze or quickly dry up after death, these processes are slowed down before all DNA that is endogenous to the organism is completely destroyed. Even though it is not difficult to retrieve ancient DNA from warmer places, the quality of the genetic material is typically much worse [ 118 , 119 ]. Adding to this, the duration of DNA survival in tissue is then limited by additional damaging mechanisms, especially hydrolytic and oxidative activities and with the increasing age of ancient remains [ 120 , 121 ].

However, if preventive measures taken by archaeologists at the site can further help in limiting contamination. It is necessary to accurately document the archaeological site and findings, as it could further help geneticists and anthropologists to understand if there were chances of contamination. When dealing with biological specimens, archaeologists should not use the same equipment. Along with this, while working on the burial site, only a single site should be targeted at once to avoid any environmental contamination or exposure to sunlight.

5.2. Contamination and Authenticity of aDNA

The environmental settings around the ancient remains are abruptly altered during the excavation. The chances of experiencing greater thermal stress are the highest because of the frequent exposure to sunlight for long periods, specifically in tropical regions [ 118 ]. Moreover, without protective gloves, handling the ancient biological remains will leave the excavator’s DNA on the surface of the specimen. While excavating ancient human remains, it is necessary to wear personal protective equipment (PPE), as ancient human remains are particularly vulnerable to modern human DNA contamination. It is because of these preventive measures that, at the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi, India (a tropical region where preservation conditions are not favorable), archaeologists and scientists were able to extract aDNA from the specimen ( Figure 5 ) [ 52 ]. aDNA can also be hampered despite having a good preservation environment and excavation techniques. For example, research conducted in 2008 observed a unique instance of contamination in the specimen (cattle); as the bones were excavated under pristine circumstances, several samples were tainted with goat DNA [ 122 ]. Even after the successful excavation of the specimen, it is crucial to provide optimal storage facilities (reducing the chances for DNA damage) such as electric cool boxes, plastic bags and cool, dry and dark conditions.

Contamination-avoiding measures taken by the excavators at the Harappan site of Rakhigarhi.

As aDNA is highly sensitive towards contamination, it requires a laboratory setting with positive air pressure, UV surface irradiation, stringent cleaning techniques (bleach treatment of surface) and filtered air systems to minimize contamination [ 14 , 123 ]. However, maintaining such facilities costs a hefty amount of money, which most institutes/countries could not afford and hence resulted in a limited number of aDNA laboratories around the globe. Further, the variety of statistical analyses that may be performed on genome-wide sequence data is essentially infinite, which can get obstructed by contaminations, damage by post-mortem DNA, and read alignment [ 14 ]. Unsurprisingly, the debunking of a number of claims regarding the extraction of valid DNA from different tissues has led to a great deal of criticism and cynicism toward the subject of aDNA. To reduce this widespread contamination and damage in highly deteriorated samples, studies then might have been confined to reads exhibiting post-mortem damage or restricted to transversion, which dramatically impacts the availability of the data [ 10 , 124 , 125 ]. However, concrete modeling accompanied by quantitative analysis of contamination and damage can help in validating the findings [ 126 ].

5.3. Ethical Concerns

Oftentimes paleo-genomics research poses ethical and cultural issues that should be carefully considered before, during, and following the research. Even the destruction of relics or defiling of holy places has brought up some serious concerns from ethnic communities. For instance, the case of Kennewick Man led to a huge feud between the Indigenous communities and the researchers [ 127 ]. Further, researchers flocking to aDNA-based research have raised concerns about addressing the ethical issues. Moreover, the genetic findings at times might result in the repression of Indigenous communities either by communal and personal convictions or by perpetuating chauvinist concepts [ 110 ]. Therefore, researchers have taken the initiative to publish papers accompanied by remarks outlining the efforts with which the research team have addressed the ethical issues [ 128 , 129 ].

Dealing with human remains becomes a sophisticated matter, as human remains have ingrained values, holding cultural beliefs of many communities in addition to being significant for solving scientific questions. Such concerns have led to producing certain guidelines to form an alliance between researchers and Indigenous communities, which includes addressing cultural and ethical implications, developing strategies to communicate and handle the data, engaging the Indigenous section of the society and formulating strategies for long-term responsibilities [ 130 , 131 ]. For example, in the USA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), requires consultation with Indigenous communities to transfer ancient human remains [ 131 ]. Hence, to enrich the research process, it is advised prioritizing community engagement (Indigenous scholars and stakeholders) [ 130 ].

6. Mapping out the Future Direction

The capacity to identify and recreate the genetic archaeological record will undoubtedly enrich the human narrative and contribute to the transdisciplinary scientific endeavor of comprehending our shared past in the future. In recent decades, aDNA research has expanded and matured in reaction to breakthroughs in the social sciences and humanities and has progressed in lockstep with technical and computational advancements in the biological sciences. The realization that a vast and unseen molecular history exists in the archaeological evidence has profoundly influenced archaeologists, geneticists, and anthropologists, promising a slew of fresh and unexpected discoveries in the future.

From our perspective, more than ever, it is now crucial to address the concern regarding collaborations between researchers, especially from Global North and South. The sharing of technology and equipment is the need of the hour for the researchers in the Global South. Supporting local researchers through collaborative initiatives and providing international grants for research can further boost strong links among the research communities. Apart from that, institutes or nations that have funds to set up aDNA laboratories, and researchers working in highly advanced aDNA facilities should come forward with efficient protocols, contributing to escalating research outputs in the field of aDNA [ 132 ]. Another aspect that should also be brought into consideration is organizing workshops, seminars and conferences that are more inclusive. As the cost of being a participant is very high, reducing it or providing financial assistance to researchers enables them to be a part of the global collective discourse. Furthermore, focusing on Global South, educational institutes, apart from mainstream courses, should also emphasize interdisciplinary courses such as palaeogenetic/archaeogenetic, biological anthropology and population genetics, further facilitating a greater influx of researchers in the ever-growing field of aDNA.

Recently, it has also been noticed that a few labs from Global South have been exceptionally producing ground-breaking research. For instance, India has marked its position in producing quintessential aDNA discoveries [ 17 , 52 , 54 , 55 , 133 , 134 ]. Being able to extract aDNA from the biological specimen in such climatic conditions signifies the extraordinary precaution taken in the field and in the laboratories. Apart from this, the genetic diversity present within India has caught the attention of the world, as it stands as an epitome for studying various diseases, admixtures, and migration [ 51 , 52 , 54 , 135 , 136 , 137 ].

The study of ancient DNA has the potential to provide answers to long-standing questions about the origins of certain populations. Such as when did West Eurasian groups first arrive in South Asia and mix with most Indian people? Moreover, the presence of South Asian ancestry in modern European populations has important implications for the study of disease susceptibility and population-specific traits. Understanding the genetic contributions of South Asian ancestry to modern European populations can help researchers identify genetic risk factors for certain diseases and develop targeted therapies. Certainly, by utilizing advanced techniques for analyzing ancient DNA and working in conjunction with archaeologists and anthropologists, it is possible to delve into the past and reconstruct the population history around the world. Further, this approach may allow us to gain a deeper understanding of the events and influences that have shaped the genetic makeup of the modern Indian population after the collapse of the Harappan civilization.

The field of aDNA has reached a significant milestone after the historic recognition of Svante Paabo’s paleogenetic research on Neanderthals by Nobel Prize in 2022. Fortunately, in recent years, scholars have increasingly learned to collaborate and have developed several initiatives to establish and strengthen the critical interdisciplinary dialogue by encouraging extensive symbiotic association between archaeologists and geneticists/anthropologists to elevate the domain knowledge forming the foundation for future reflective archaeogenetics.

Funding Statement

This research was funded by CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, India, 500007.

Author Contributions

Conception and design, V.S., V.D. and N.P.; writing—review and editing, V.S., V.D. and N.P.; revision, G.C. and N.R.; supervision, V.S., G.C. and N.R.; proofreading, V.D., N.P., V.S., G.C. and N.R. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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