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There so many hadiths (quotes) and riwayahs (anecdotes) about the life of Muhammad the prophet or messenger who brought Islam.

I have heard more than 200,000 hadiths exist, sahih(authentic) and not sahih. Many anecdotes with exceptional details of his life and the life of his companions exist. by the way I also know the number of hadiths with repetition are mentioned up to 1 million

For example, there are books which just one of them is something like 110 volumes.

All I have said so far is just for the sake of giving you an estimate of the volume I intend to know about and regardless of the exact numbers being correct or not.

Is there any other period of history in other parts of the world with a similar volume of details in history, I meant how many pages of books maybe are written for documenting the history in that period? obviously I'm not talking about the current era and I want the period to be until the printing was invented?

Farhang Amaji
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  • please comment if you think my question should be modified and just don't vote down – Farhang Amaji Nov 10 '21 at 19:52
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    Skeptics.SE is for asking whether a given notable claim is true or not. Your question does not cite a specific claim that is widely believed. – jwodder Nov 10 '21 at 19:59
  • right first of all I don't know how to cite it cause have read it in a persian not widely known book, and I want to know how to ask my question, so help me to recorrect my question. – Farhang Amaji Nov 10 '21 at 20:03
  • should I add some exclamation at the first of my question, to warn the argument itself may be wrong but the volume I want to know about is in this volume and Im focused more on the answer of period of history with this voulme of details? ofc also change the title of question. – Farhang Amaji Nov 10 '21 at 20:05
  • btw number of hadiths in shia islam and sunni totally differs cause hadiths in shia also come from imams or other companions. – Farhang Amaji Nov 10 '21 at 20:21
  • If you could cite where it is claimed that more than 200,000 hadiths exist, that would be a good start. – Mari-Lou A Nov 10 '21 at 20:48
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    I don't know how to empirically prove this, hence I'm not posting it as an answer, but there is *absolutely no chance* that 7th-century Arabia was better documented than 21st-century civilization. The Internet means we can document things permanently, smartphones mean we can document things immediately, and the global population is nearly 40 times larger than it was in Muhammad's time, so there are more people *to* document things. Twitter's database of tweets probably outstrips the entire volume of hadiths about Muhammad by several orders of magnitude. – F1Krazy Nov 10 '21 at 20:52
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    [*Hadith scholars have estimated **the total number of hadith texts as being from four thousand to thirty thousand**. These same scholars describe expert hadith scholars as having had repertoires ranging from three hundred thousand to a million hadiths.*](https://answerstoall.com/science/how-did-bukhari-collected-hadith/) – Mari-Lou A Nov 10 '21 at 20:55
  • @Mari-LouA I will provide some citation later – Farhang Amaji Nov 10 '21 at 20:59
  • @F1Krazy obviously Im not talking about the current era, so I modify question to up until the printing was invented – Farhang Amaji Nov 10 '21 at 21:05
  • @Mari-LouA thanx for ur help of providing some internet citation – Farhang Amaji Nov 10 '21 at 21:14
  • @F1Krazy "I don't know how to empirically prove this": so should I ask for some thing quantizable on this site? is it in rules or your are just trying to note me that so If I want make it more quantizable . cause Im looking for rough estimate and not exact numbers. – Farhang Amaji Nov 10 '21 at 21:24
  • The link that Mari-Lou posted that you've incorporated into your question is still not what I would call a "notable claim". It doesn't cite anything itself, it isn't being widely promulgated, and appears to be just a yahoo answers clone site. – jdunlop Nov 10 '21 at 22:44
  • I know its not a citation, and searched the net for the answer, but unfortunately I found so many questions like "how many hadiths are there in total" but most of them were unanswered, except sahih(authentic) hadiths of bukhari which is 2200. depending on creed, the numbers are mentioned are totally different. besides finding islamic sources in english online is hard for me now, but if the problem is the citation Id provide it later, but I mentioned regardless of exact number. – Farhang Amaji Nov 10 '21 at 23:09

1 Answers1

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It is a safe bet that China was more thoroughly documented

When Muhammed was allegedly alive, the Tang dynasty ruled over a population of more than fifty million people. A truly astonishing amount of paperwork was involved in this ruling process, and while much of it has been lost, an enormous volume remains.

The Diamond Sutra, the oldest-surviving woodblock printed book, dates from that era, and there were extensive records kept of property, trade, ownership, and legal obligations. There were star charts. Maps. Treatises.

Paper was just being adopted in the middle east around the time that Muhammed was supposed to have lived, but it had been in use in the Chinese civil service and public life for five hundred years at that point. If you have an easy, relatively cheap (compared to parchment or papyrus) material to write on, you do a lot more writing.

jdunlop
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  • I meant sth like how many pages of books maybe are written for documenting the history in that period? – Farhang Amaji Nov 10 '21 at 23:05
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    @FarhangAmaji - Modern, or contemporary? In the modern era, tens of thousands of books have been written documenting the Tang dynasty. At the time, probably a few tens of millions of pages? – jdunlop Nov 10 '21 at 23:16
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    @FarhangAmaji - for reference, my local library (the one down the block) has 146 books on Tang Dynasty history alone. – jdunlop Nov 10 '21 at 23:18
  • no the documents belonging to that era. – Farhang Amaji Nov 10 '21 at 23:31
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    Documents from that era were so numerous that they were not widely collated. The details on the various rulers of the era (particularly Wu Zetian) were so comprehensive that they included things like a special "cooling room" with mechanical fans and fountains built into the palace for hot summer days. Every official wrote hundreds or thousands of pages, and the Imperial civil service numbered tens of thousands of officials. Many thousands of documents survive from the era, as opposed to the Hadith, where the earliest known copies date from a hundred years afterwards. – jdunlop Nov 10 '21 at 23:39
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    The [Romans](https://www.recordsbackground.com/blog/do-any-ancient-roman-records-still-exist-today/) made extensive records too. *"One of the greatest innovations of the ancient Romans was the collection of governmental documents in archives. Tax records, records of land ownership, public decrees, and many other documents were carefully recorded on papyrus, vellum, and parchment. These were stored away but when the Roman way of life began to crumble most of the ancient archives were plundered, destroyed, or allowed to rot away. Today only a small percentage of Roman documents still exist."* – Weather Vane Nov 12 '21 at 08:35
  • @WeatherVane - and some of the earliest surviving papyrus and parchment scraps from Egypt are tax records and invoices. Basically, where there are empires, there too comes paperwork. Even before there was paper! – jdunlop Nov 12 '21 at 18:20
  • im not looking for things like tax records but for documents related to events and stories about personal life or quotes – Farhang Amaji Nov 13 '21 at 13:25
  • @FarhangAmaji - this is called "Moving the Goalposts". You did not specify this in your question, which also still doesn't cite a reliable source for your initial claim. It is worth noting, however, that the surviving records from the Tang dynasty includes poetry, royal history, books of advice of how to live one's life from the Empress and her advisors, and all of it was written _at the time they were alive_, unlike the hadiths. So China still has the more complete history, regardless of how thinly you slice it. – jdunlop Nov 13 '21 at 18:00
  • you know sometimes u think u have defined and confined the border of ur question enough but then again when u face the answers u absolutely understand there is more need to defining – Farhang Amaji Nov 13 '21 at 23:14
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    @FarhangAmaji That just means you haven't thought through the question well enough before asking. – Rushabh Mehta Nov 18 '21 at 16:49
  • @FarhangAmaji - it's also worth noting that, historically, tax records and trade documents are much more valuable than personal stories or quotes, as they paint a more complete picture of the time period from which they emerge. – jdunlop Nov 18 '21 at 19:14