Launched this week
TextSurf
The world's sacred and ancient texts, free to read
2 followers
The world's sacred and ancient texts, free to read
2 followers
A free library of 18,200+ sacred and ancient works in 38 scripts, easy to search and find, from the Tao Te Ching in Chinese to Genesis in Hebrew, read with the original, its romanization and English side by side, and 12,800+ manuscripts to page through.
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Hello, I built TextSurf because the sacred and ancient texts of the world are scattered across hundreds of archives, each with its own format, difficult to find, and most readers only ever see one English translation.
Who it is for: anyone who reads esoteric stuff, philosophy or ancient texts, students of religion, history and languages, translators and whatnot.
What's in it so far:
18,200+ works in 38 scripts, from Chinese, Devanagari, Hebrew and Greek to Tibetan, cuneiform, Coptic and Ge'ez, and everything in between
The original, its romanization and a translation read side by side (for many of them)
12,800+ manuscripts you can page through and zoom into, from Nag Hammadi Codex II to the Papyrus of Ani and Tibetan block prints
260+ traditions to browse by
A citation for every page in AMA, APA and BibTeX, with its license
All sources in there too
What is free: all of it. Reading needs no account, and there are no ads.
Credit: the texts come from the projects and scholars listed at text.surf/credits, among them Sefaria, OpenPecha, CBETA, the Perseus Digital Library, eBible, GRETIL and Project Gutenberg. Each one has its own page, and every edition names its source and license on the page you read it on.
Would love to hear what's missing/needed otherwise or anything else. Thanks.