Everything in history depends on a where and when.
*Forgery and Counter Forgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Ancient Polemics” by Bart Ehrman might be of interest to you for how early Christians grappled with assigning authorship of the New Testament. Some church fathers were more concerned with the message than the authors, some gospels and writings were rejected based on their early textual analysis.
In general though, ancient Greeks and ancient Chinese (and even generally all ancient cultures I think, I just mention these two because these areas I know a bit more of) didn’t put a primacy on “these ideas came from this person.” It’s not always someone setting out to forge a document, it’s “wow, this is useful and very smart, so Confucius must have written it!”
For example - the Spring and Autumn Annals are a series of fairly terse historical accounts of the dealings of ancient petty Chinese kingdoms - about the era before and around Confucius’s time. It is very doubtful that Confucius wrote them. However, ancient Chinese scholars assigned authorship to him, to the point where every line of the Spring and Autumn Annals must have some sort of meaning. The connotation of a single word can mean that Confucius was trying to disapprove of an action or vice versa. (The interpretation is often very weird too - I read Chinese at an elementary school level but have sorta wiggled my way through some of the Analects in Classical Chinese, so I get it really can be subtle and complicated. I have a lovely beautiful copy of the first full English translation of the Zuo traditions with this interpretation saved for a lovely day.)
Medieval people kept on this tradition too, by accidentally or purposefully writing the wrong names on things. If you have a random medical text, it might as well be Galen. You knew that the ancient authors had a shit ton of lost media out there, why wouldn’t this random play be by Aeschylus?
Everything in history depends on a where and when.
*Forgery and Counter Forgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Ancient Polemics” by Bart Ehrman might be of interest to you for how early Christians grappled with assigning authorship of the New Testament. Some church fathers were more concerned with the message than the authors, some gospels and writings were rejected based on their early textual analysis.
In general though, ancient Greeks and ancient Chinese (and even generally all ancient cultures I think, I just mention these two because these areas I know a bit more of) didn’t put a primacy on “these ideas came from this person.” It’s not always someone setting out to forge a document, it’s “wow, this is useful and very smart, so Confucius must have written it!”
For example - the Spring and Autumn Annals are a series of fairly terse historical accounts of the dealings of ancient petty Chinese kingdoms - about the era before and around Confucius’s time. It is very doubtful that Confucius wrote them. However, ancient Chinese scholars assigned authorship to him, to the point where every line of the Spring and Autumn Annals must have some sort of meaning. The connotation of a single word can mean that Confucius was trying to disapprove of an action or vice versa. (The interpretation is often very weird too - I read Chinese at an elementary school level but have sorta wiggled my way through some of the Analects in Classical Chinese, so I get it really can be subtle and complicated. I have a lovely beautiful copy of the first full English translation of the Zuo traditions with this interpretation saved for a lovely day.)
Medieval people kept on this tradition too, by accidentally or purposefully writing the wrong names on things. If you have a random medical text, it might as well be Galen. You knew that the ancient authors had a shit ton of lost media out there, why wouldn’t this random play be by Aeschylus?