Does the Indic civilization possess the greatest written heritage?

[enkidu_]

Impressive numbers, keep in mind these are not statements from overconfident "Hindu nationalists" who find the latest scientific theories in the Vedas, but respected academics, the first one incidentally being in fact bashed by these "Hindu nationalists" :

The effects of print are often exaggerated by theorists, precisely to create a contrast with the supposed communication deficiencies of premodernity. The true watershed in the history of communicative media, in India at least, was the invention not of print-capitalism but of script-mercantilism of the sort found in both Sanskrit and vernacular cultures. This manuscript culture was enormously productive and efficient. It has been estimated that over thirty million manuscripts are still extant (eight million in Rajasthan alone), along with many hundreds of thousands of inscriptions—a mere fraction of what once must have been available(1.) This script-mercantilism involved professional scribes and patrons who purchased their wares as well as nonprofessionals who copied manuscripts for personal use or for family members or teachers. (Recall how King Jayasiaha spent 300,000 coins to have Hemacandra’s grammar reproduced, so that the text “circulated and grew famous in all lands” from Assam to Sri Lanka to Sindh.) Continuing oral performance practices, their reproducibility enhanced by comparatively stable text-artifacts, magnified the impact of script-mercantilism to produce a dissemination of the culture-power ideas of the Indian epics greater than anything achievable through print-capitalism.

(1) The estimate comes from the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. For all of Greek literature, classical, Hellenistic, and Byzantine, some thirty thousand manuscripts are extant—which the Indic materials thus exceed by a factor of a thousand (Christopher Minkowski, in conversation).

Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, p. 558

In the sphere of imagination and its written expression, South Asia boasts a literary record far denser, in terms of sheer number of texts and centuries of unbroken multilingual literacy, than all of Greek and Latin and medieval European culture combined.

Sheldon Pollock (edited by), Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern Asia, p. 4

How many Indian manuscripts are there? The National Mission for Manuscripts in New Delhi works with a conservative figure of seven million manuscripts, and its database is approaching two million records. The late Prof. David Pingree, basing his count on a lifetime of academic engagement with Indian manuscripts, estimated that there were thirty million manuscripts, if one counted both those in public and government libraries, and those in private collections. For anyone coming to Indian studies from another field, these gargantuan figures are scarcely credible. But after some acquaintance with the subject, and visits to manuscript libraries in India, it becomes clear that these very large figures are wholly justified
(...)
A reader unfamiliar with the Indian case, and thinking such numbers inconceivable, might assume that these are fragments or single leaves, a kind of trans-continental Geniza. That is not the case. These millions of Indian manuscripts are mostly full literary works, typically consisting of scores or hundreds of closely-written folios, most often in Sanskrit, and containing works of classical learning on logic, theology, philosophy, medicine, grammar, law, mathematics, yoga, tantra, alchemy, religion, poetry, drama, epic, and a host of other themes. Throughout history, Indian society has vigorously privileged higher learning, and the record of over two and a half millennia of artistic and intellectual work has been transmitted in manuscript form to the twentieth century.

Dominik Wujastyk, Indian manuscripts