Losing the Past on Purpose—The Willful Destruction of the Written Word Throughout History
Product ID: LK7
Report Topics:
- History of the destructions of the great libraries of Assyria, Egypt, Greece and Persia
- The Roman Empire’s torching of major book collections throughout the ancient world
- Repeated annihilation of the Chinese Imperial library during its long history, ending in the nation-wide bibliocide under Mao
- The deliberate destruction of myriads of written works by the Church, Moslems, Mongols, Turks, Nazis, Communists and modern culture
- Will we one day lose what is left of our literary heritage because of computers?
Full Report:
Tragically, the literary chronicle of our origins has been severely disrupted not only by natural cataclysms, but also by humanity itself. Whether we like to admit it or not, many of history’s missing pages were deliberately torn out. Humanity’s guardianship of the knowledge and wisdom of the past has been nothing short of pathetic.
Here is a brief background to some of the more infamous devastations that have occurred to the great libraries, book collections and archives of records in ancient and modern times.
The Girginakku or Great Library of Ashurbanipal, consisting of over half a million clay tablets written in cuneiform, was razed during the seige of Ninevah by a coalition of Babylonians, Scythians and Medes in 612 B.C.E. The ruler’s collection had been gathered from the ziggurat-temples of Assur, Nippur, Akkad and Babylon, and included unknown histories, scientific and astronomical observations, as well as religious and literary works from ancient Sumer dating back thousands of years. Though approximately 30,000 of the tablets were later unearthed and translated by European excavators in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the vast majority were reduced to dust because of the intensity of the conflagration.
When Cambyses invaded Egypt in 525 B.C.E., he ordered his Persian soldiers to ransack and destroy all the temple libraries along the Nile, in order to “assimilate” the land as a satrapy of his Empire. The already ancient Old Kingdom papyri stored in the temple of Ptah in Memphis, the royal annals at Karnak and Luxor, as well as the treasured scrolls of the Ramesseum, Medinet Habu, Edfu and Philae, were all consigned to the flames. According to Iamblichus of Syria, the Ramesseum, situated on the West Bank from Thebes, alone had more than 20,000 manuscripts of incalculable age and value. Of these, only twenty remain, found hidden away in a tomb beneath the sanctuary.
In Athens, the famous library collection of Pisastratus Pisander, stored in the Lyceum of the Acropolis, once contained the works of a thousand of ancient Greece’s most famous thinkers, scientists, mathematicians, literary authors, playwrights and political visionaries. It suffered multiple destructions and plunderings, beginning in 480 B.C.E. with the invasion of the Persian tyrant Xerxes. Despite the city’s regaining its freedom, throughout the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. the works of out-of-favor philosophers were periodically burned in the Agora. In 86 B.C.E., the Roman Sulla carted off large portions of the Athenian collection as tribute. In the year 260 the city was sacked by the Goths, who chastised the Greeks for neglecting the art of warfare because they read too much. What little literature remained was decimated by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, who declared anathema all “philosophical inquiry as repugnant to Christian doctrine.”
Without a doubt the most famous center of learning in the classical world was the Library of Alexandria. Its massive archives were divided and housed in different portions of the city, the most notable locations being the Temple of the Muses and the Serapeum. It was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.E., and at the peak of its half a millennium existence its complete collection numbered well over 500,000 scrolls, with an index of 20,000 authors. Being at the crossroads of dawning trade between West and East, the collection boasted works not only from Egypt, Rome and Greece, but also from Babylonia, India, Persia and even China.
In the course of time, however, various sections of the Library underwent periodic destructions until very little was left. The first disaster occurred in 48 B.C.E. when Julius Caesar set fire to an enemy fleet in the city’s port, and the conflagration spread to several buildings surrounding the harbor, including about a third part of the Library itself. To gain Cleopatra’s favor, Mark Antony plundered the Library of Pergamum in Asia Minor, which was said to contain 200,000 volumes, and brought back the booty to reconstitute the Alexandrine collection. In 213 Caesar’s distant successor, Caracalla, attacked the rebellious city; in 273 it again suffered partial ruin at the hands of Aurelian; and in 296 Diocletian laid seige to the port and burned large areas. In each case, the archives slowly but dramatically dwindled in size and quality.
The final blow came in 391 when the local bishop, Theophilus, led a Christian mob against the Serapeum and successfully razed it, claiming it possessed works of black magic and sorcery. What the crowd actually did in their ignorance was burn rare editions of the Biblical canon. By the time the Muslims invaded Egypt in 640, the remaining volumes, a few hundred all told, were too dilapidated from neglect to be saved any further. After an army of Arab translators reproduced them as best they could and eventually relocated their copies to Baghdad, the last of the original scrolls were said to have been used as fuel to heat the local steam baths of Alexandria.
In 330 B.C.E., Alexander the Great was responsible for the wholesale destruction of Persepolis, seat of the once proud Persian Empire. Within the Palace of Darius and Xerxes was a large set of halls designated as the Fortress of Writings. The Greek conquerors reported that part of its library consisted of 200,000 lines written in gold letters on 5,200 pages made from cowhide. Archaeological explorations have revealed the presence of a two-foot layer of burnt clay, all that is left from the seal impressions of what must have been thousands of text scrolls long turned to ash and blown away in the wind of centuries. Also lost were the original works of the Zoroastrians, including the Zoromaster, considered to be the Book of Books.
The Romans, despite their claim to preserving the arts and letter of their Greek forebears, exhibited a particular intolerance toward the written word during the many expansions of their power throughout the Mediterranean region and into Europe and the Middle East. In 181 B.C.E., when King Numa’s buried library was discovered in Rome, it was promptly put to the torch because of the books on philosophy it contained. In 146 B.C.E., the Romans utterly destroyed Carthage in a seventeen-day fiery holocaust, and its vast book collections totaling half a million volumes was turned into smoldering ashes. A fire in Rome in 83 B.C.E. destroyed the last two thousand original works of the Sibylline Oracles. A few decades later, Julius Caesar oversaw the eradication of the libraries of the Celtic Druids throughout Gaul, estimated to have included 100,000 scrolls of leather. In 12 B.C.E. Augustus Caesar ordered over two thousand “superstitious” works to be publicly burned in the Forum.
In the year 57 the great library of Ephesus was turned into a funeral pyre by early Roman Christians led by the apostle Paul. In 64, the burning of the city of Rome by Nero also destroyed large storage facilities housing manuscripts that had been plundered from all parts of the Empire. Between 188 and 191, several clandestine Christian-instigated assaults took place against Rome’s leading pagan sanctuaries and repositories, which included the burning of the library of the Temple of Jupiter. In 303, as a reactionary move, Diocletian ordered the gathering and destruction of all Christian and Hebrew scriptures. Sixty years later, Emperor Jovian razed the large library of Antioch, and in 371 Valerian pressured the citizens of the city to condemn to fire all remaining non-Chrisitan books. Finally, in 546 the Ostrogoths sacked Rome, and what little was left in the way of both classical and Chrisitan writings was lost forever.
In medieval Europe the Church’s brutal suppression of religious and intellectual heresy, especially through the covert workings of the Inquisition, resulted in the wholesale destruction of tens of thousands of irreplaceable volumes of Latin, Greek and Hebrew origins. The scourging of the Jews, Cathars, Albigensians and Anabaptists, along with most secular scientists, philosophers and scholars, was accompanied by the general disappearance of all their works into holy sanctioned bonfires.
The rise of Islam and the advent of the Crusades only worsened the situation, as waves of conflicting Christians and Mohammedans flowed back and forth across many lands, annihilating each other’s libraries in the process. Between 614 and 644, the Arabs and their allies were responsible for destroying the major archives of Jerusalem, Ctesiphon, Gandeshapur and Caesarea, as well as early “errant” copies of their own Qu’ran wherever found in the territories they conquered.
Later, the Library of the Caliphs in Cordoba was razed by Almanzor in 980; the major collection of Baghdad was decimated in 1059; the Archives of the Caliphs in Cairo was pillaged in 1068; the books of Tripoli were ravaged by Crusaders in 1192; and the Bibliotheca Byzantina in Constantinople suffered tremendous loss at the hands of the Franks in 1204. Another tragic wave of bibliocide arrived with the Mongol invaders in the thirteenth century. In 1258 a total of thirty-six libraries were destroyed by them in Baghdad alone. Most devastating of all was the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, which had been the last refuge for vast manuscript collections trying to escape the plunderings from both directions.
Back in Europe, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the blossoming of the Renaissance and the Reformation, which only brought in their wake deeper political and religious divisions that in turn initiated new attacks on book storehouses everywhere. Rich patrons lavished fortunes on creating private libraries with rare and expensive editions, only to see them swept away into oblivion when their owners fell from power. Warring Catholics and Protestants took great pride in ransacking the archives found in each other’s churches, cathedrals, abbeys and monasteries in the attempt to expunge their “corrupted” beliefs. Even the invention of moveable type, while it greatly multiplied the production of books, ultimately contributed to the demise of the earliest inscribed works, for when these were sent to the presses to be copied, the originals were often destroyed or sold for pulp.
The sixteenth century also witnessed the arrival in the New World of the Spanish conquistadors led by the likes of Cortez and Pizarro, who very swiftly and efficiently wiped out the Aztec, Maya and Inca civilizations. On their heels came the Inquisition and the eradication of all Indigenous written records. In 1539 the Church in Mexico ordered all Aztec Codices destroyed; shortly after in 1561, the missionary Fathers in the Yucatan began their systematic devastation of everything marked with Maya glyphs, be it on stone or animal skins. The Peruvian Incas, while they had no script writing, did possess religious pictographs and a unique form of recording information using strings and knots called quipus. The Church Council of Lima in 1583 decreed them to be anathema, and sanctioned the destruction of all religious icons and quipu libraries throughout the defeated Andean empire.
The fate of the inscribed page did not fare much better in the Far East. In 213 B.C.E. Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Zheng announced that history should begin with him and therefore ordered all books to be burned except the I Ching, Book of Changes, which he personally found to be beneficial. After his death there was a frenzied attempt to find any volumes that had been secretly hidden, and restore them in a new Imperial Library. But the renaissance was short-lived, for in 207 B.C.E., during the conflict among rival contenders to the throne, the capital suffered a general conflagration lasting for three months, and the saved books joined their earlier unfortunate cousins.
What was considered to be the second greatest literary disaster in Chinese history came in the year 23 when the usurper Wang Mang devastated yet another Imperial Library, this one consisting of over 13,000 works. Even when the capital was moved elsewhere under the Han Dyasty the same fate once again was visited on the relocated Imperial collection in 190. However, seventy carts of books managed to escape—only to be turned to ashes during another firestorm in 208. By 311 over 3,000 scrolls were recovered, but these were to suffer at the hands of Emperor Yuan Liang who ordered them burned.
By the time of the Siu Dynasty, the magnificent Yang Palace had been built which included the Hall of Writings. In the eighth century Emperor Xuanzong added 2,600 titles in 48,000 scrolls to the already impressive collection. But in 1281 the Mongol conquerors ordered all literary works gathered together in one place, where they became part of a giant pyrotechnics display. Later, in 1597, the Qi family library, the most important collection of the Ming Dynasty, was also ravaged by flames.
As the fortunes of the various Dynastic rulers continually rose and fell, so did their archives, either destroyed or sold off, never to be seen again. In 1900, the collapse of the Boxer Rebellion helped facilitate the European and American ransacking of Chinese literary works. The nationalistic wars which followed exacted their own toll, culminating in the destruction of several surviving collections by Japanese bombings beginning in 1932.
Yet as much as was then lost, it pales into insignificance compared to the almost total annihilation of practically every existing book by the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao during the 1970’s. The “cleansing” was so thorough that it set back Chinese science and arts several decades, and only now are the common people relearning about the richness of their ancient heritage. Ironically, it is the literature that was plundered by the West at the turn of the last century that is being relied upon in order to help with the restoration.
In Europe, the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the Age of Technology in the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries intensified both the geometric accumulation and the massive destruction of all forms of written knowledge. The same machinery which spat out books by the millions also produced guns, cannons, artillery, tanks, airplanes, jets, aerial bombs and rockets. The production and dissemination of such weapons of terrible violence spawned civil wars, revolutions, invasions, the sudden downfall of governments, the lightning rise of powerful tyrants and dictators, the creation of intellectual-purging political states such as Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, as well as two World Wars and dozens of devastating regional conflicts such as Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia and the Middle East.
In all these increasingly mechanized and technologically sophisticated contests, the greatest loss has always been wherever learning has been freely concentrated and preserved—in universities, colleges, schools, institutes, museums, galleries, and of course libraries both public and private. What has taken a lifetime to bring together and offer in the name of universal education, can now vanish in a single act of terrorism, war or even accident.
Especially ruthless has been the impact of modern societies on the last remnants of ancient and indigenous cultures around the globe. The Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet in the 1950’s, the incursion of Western corporate commercialism in South America and Africa in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and the imposition of religious fundamentalism in such places as the Central Asian Republics, and in Afghanistan by the Taliban in the 1990’s. In such cases—from the lamaseries in the Himalayas, and the tribal cultures of the Amazon and the Congo, to the ancient Buddhist cavern-temples of the Asian steppes—vast libraries of ancient written and oral traditions are being undermined or deliberately destroyed. In these remote places of our planet, the last vestiges of our most distant memories are being stolen from us. Unless we try to reverse these tragic cultural holocausts, a most important heritage concerning our true origins will be lost forever.
Now that we have entered the twenty-first century, our prospects for preserving the knowledge of the past may not bode any better. Computers have taken over the accumulation of all information, especially by way of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The positive side is that unimaginable amounts of data of every sort can now be instantly accessed by practically anyone around the globe within arm’s reach of a cell phone or PC.
But the downside is the fragile nature of the medium. All data is stored electronically in cyberspace and cannot be acquired by any other means. Simply turn off the cell phone or reach over to the wall socket and pull the master plug, and the information becomes inaccessible and nonexistent. Hard copy by printed page is the recommended backup, but even printers need electricity to operate.
Our almost total dependence on electric power makes our civilization particularly vulnerable, and in the end may prove to be our downfall. While we may regard our ancestors as having been “primitive” for their use of stone, bone, clay, animal skins, papyri, vellum and paper to record their knowledge, they at least had media that were real and material to fall back upon when other sources were destroyed.
In contrast, if our global power grids were to fail or be sabotaged through terrorism, war or natural cataclysms, the entire basis of how we run government, business, education, defense, scientific inquiry and communications would come to a sudden halt.
And if for some catastrophic reason the generation of electricity around the world could never be restored again, then not much of our civilization would be left.
What little could be remembered from computer records will once again be committed to written pages, the pages will be gathered into books—and the process of the re-accumulation of knowledge will begin all over again.
But as always, once more such knowledge will be deemed to be dangerous to someone in political, religious or social power—and the race will be on yet again to try to save it from those who would threaten our written inheritance with destruction.
The question will remain, how long will humanity continue to decimate its own past?
[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]
