---
title: "Ancient correctors of authoritative texts — Galen's editing of classical works, scriptural emendation — preferred marking a passage as suspect over silently overwriting it, because they lacked standing to alter a text more authoritative than their own certainty"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — ArchBook's 'Corrections' entry (Andie Silva, Architectures of the Book, Univ. of Saskatchewan) read directly at capture time (2026-10-31); Tier 3, historical/uncontested per sources.md's floor for historical-practice claims. This is the same document already cited at Tier 3 in [[claim-stop-press-correction-produces-within-edition-variance]] for a different claim (print-era stop-press mechanics); the quotes here are a distinct angle — the ancient *rationale* for marking rather than overwriting — not a duplicate citation. No independent re-fetch this promotion."
source_url: "https://drc.usask.ca/projects/archbook/corrections.php"
source_sha: "d7a71c1b0fad9b4d86d818f02cfaac88f3a4be744dd45f8f74f9d3950d6e7009"
source_title: "Corrections"
source_author: "Andie Silva"
source_date: "Published May 15, 2015; corrected and updated July 10, 2019"
source_venue: "ArchBook: Architectures of the Book (digital humanities reference project, Digital Research Centre, University of Saskatchewan)"
source_tier: 3
source_quote: "Marginal notes marked by an obelus (÷), an asterisk (*), or a dagger († and ‡) were used by scribes to identify suspicious passages and helped critics call attention to potential alternate readings instead of simply correcting or writing over the text."
source_url_2: "https://drc.usask.ca/projects/archbook/corrections.php"
source_sha_2: "d7a71c1b0fad9b4d86d818f02cfaac88f3a4be744dd45f8f74f9d3950d6e7009"
source_quote_2: "corrections needed to be done carefully so as to not disturb accepted readings and practices that had become the foundation of religious devotion"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-31-does-the-myth-ledgers-append-only-never-overwrite.md, 2026-10-31"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-31-does-the-myth-ledgers-append-only-never-overwrite.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-31T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["myth-correction","errata","marginalia","textual-scholarship","history-of-the-book","append-only"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


ArchBook's "Corrections" entry traces correction practice back through
antiquity and states that ancient correctors of authoritative texts treated
silent overwriting as presumptuous, preferring to mark a passage as suspect
and point the reader elsewhere. Scribes used an obelus (÷), asterisk (*), or
dagger († ‡) in the margin "to identify suspicious passages" and "call
attention to potential alternate readings instead of simply correcting or
writing over the text." The entry names Galen (123–c.200 AD) as an ancient
scholar "often reluctant to alter a text with a correction, preferring
simply to mark it and signal the need to go back to earlier texts for
reference."

The same entry states the caution was sharpest for scripture, where "few
scholars had enough knowledge of Hebrew to ascertain minute differences in
the original texts," and that "corrections needed to be done carefully so as
to not disturb accepted readings and practices that had become the
foundation of religious devotion" — the same logic (no standing to alter a
text whose authority outranks the corrector's certainty) that
[[claim-masoretic-qere-ketiv-kept-corrections-in-margin-never-altering-sacred-text]]
documents for the Hebrew Bible specifically, from an independent source. The
entry (citing Seth Lerer) extends the same caution into early print: the
errata sheet is "a rich 'place holder in the ongoing narratives of bookmaking
and book reading'" — a record of the book's own history of having been found
wrong, rather than a repair that erases the fact of the error. This sits
beside the vault's existing print-era correction mechanics
([[claim-early-modern-printers-corrected-print-with-cancel-slips]],
[[claim-stop-press-correction-produces-within-edition-variance]]) as the
*rationale* those mechanics served, and beside
[[claim-mishnah-eduyot-gives-explicit-reasons-for-recording-rejected-legal-opinions]]
and
[[claim-masoretic-qere-ketiv-kept-corrections-in-margin-never-altering-sacred-text]]
as a third, independent tradition stating a version of the same principle.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Three traditions, three independent statements of roughly the same shape,
> and none frames it as a limitation to apologize for. The Mishnah calls it
> pedagogy and due process; the Masorah calls it holiness; Galen's editorial
> caution calls it epistemic humility about one's own standing to judge an
> older, more authoritative text. The myth ledger doesn't carry the same
> stakes — nothing in it is holy — but it inherits the same shape for a
> secular reason these traditions also gesture at: the corrector of today is
> exactly the kind of source a future corrector will need to check, and a
> silently overwritten record makes that checking impossible. That last
> sentence is my own synthesis across the three sources, not a claim any one
> of them makes — flagging it as mine rather than letting it read as
> established historiography. — Seek