The sacking of the great library of Alexandria

Ancient porn all gone too. Sad.

The House of Wisdom

On February 13, 1258, the Mongols entered the city of the caliphs, starting a full week of pillage and destruction. With all other libraries in Baghdad, the House of Wisdom was destroyed by the army of Hulagu during the Siege of Baghdad.

Throughout the 4th to 7th centuries, scholarly work in the Arabic languages was either newly initiated or carried on from the Hellenistic period. Centers of learning and of transmission of classical wisdom included colleges such as the School of Nisibis and later the School of Edessa, and the renowned hospital and medical academy of Jundishapur; libraries included the Library of Alexandria and the Imperial Library of Constantinople; and other centers of translation and learning functioned at Merv, Salonika, Nishapur and Ctesiphon, situated just south of what was later to become Baghdad.

Millions of ancient books were burned, a tragedy even bigger than Alexandria

I recall reading about one where the guys trying to save the books, put them in crates & then took them down the river in the middle of the night. They were black & they had to pay people along the way to let them go through. They got caught at least once & the crates got opened (I think the police/guards/whatever thoguht they were moving drugs.

Another event that doesn’t get much global recognition was the sacking of the Enryakuji temple complex on Mt. Hie in Japan by the warlord Nobunaga.

It is hard to overstate the sheer wealth and luxury that had accumulated at Enryakuji by the 1500s...mountains of gold, silver, precious jewels, priceless art from many eras of Asian history, and multiple enormous libraries full of esoteric Buddhist texts. Ostensibly a “humble monastic compound,” Enryakuji grew to become a collection of hundreds of buildings piled high with treasure. It enjoyed imperial and aristocratic patronage, and owned vast tracts of Tax-free land that it managed at a distance (and at a huge profit). It owned several banks that were among the largest in Japan, and it had its own private army of warrior monks. Perched along a high mountain ridge, it was a safe oasis of luxury and scholarship in the brutally bloody Warring States period.

The vast power and wealth, as well as the significant military strength of its private army, brought it to the attention of Nobunaga, who was trying to unite a war-torn nation and saw Enryakuji as less a religious institute and more a haughty competitor for worldly power. He attacked and burned the entire complex to the ground, leaving only one small hall intact after slaughtering every living thing and flattening every structure. It was said dual rivers of molten gold and blood flowed down the mountain. It cannot be said this rather worldly institution was particularly clean-handed, but the centuries of lost scholarship may have rivaled the Alexandra library in volume.

Good post OP! I too have often wondered what was lost. It angers me when I see people pitch old books. I buy / salvage more than I should I'm sure, but I want to ensure my children, children's children and so forth reap the beauty of knowledge and great stories. I'm on the hunt for Ridpaths ancient history books that came out turn of the century.

Evil hates knowledge because it is easy to reign over the ignorant.

Karma!

All the more better to preserve and protect it.... don't you think so??

The most painful part is that this was intentional destruction for stupid zealot religious reasons. And most ironic, overall, that the asshat that ordered it later was "canonized" (declared to be a Saint).

The spanish jesuits did the same thing in Mexico.The Chinese taught the Aztecs how to cook with spices.Right now,libraries in Calfagia are being cleaned out."intolerance".

Just another reason why the world shouldn’t fall prey to muslam/islam.

who burned it?

And both were motivated by a stupid mixture of religious and political zealotism BS.

Any time someone asks what is the single thing I would get humanity rid off if given the chance, I always choose ignorance, which in turn would get us rid of every other nuisance.

This one was probably the most important one lost:

- The Book of Thoth, a legendary manuscript alluded to in Egyptian literature believed to contain the secrets to comprehend the power of the gods and speech of animals.

mental masturbation

No, I've heard that story as well and I believe he is speaking of the Library of Nishapur in India.

I think it's true the saying that Politics and Religion will destroy the world.

They have in the past. It takes decades even centuries to grow a civilization and it can all be destroyed in one instant.

Reminds me of how all the old big trees were cut down. We will never have an environment again like the forests of old when everything was healthier, greener and bigger.

"The house of Wisdom"..The human race almost never had the 0123456789,algebra,and trigonometry....Note,there is an abandoned RR tunnel,thru solid rock,taken over by the Gov.,'50's.Special doors built on each end.Doors can withstand a direct hit,Nuclear.....everything ever published in the English language on microfilm.

yeah- purportedly 'Enoch' and 'HERMES TRISMEGISTUS'... essentially godfather to Sumeria, cuneiform, ziggurats... the land where abram/abraham was from...

comes down to Babylon the great, as they say... lots to blame but the mentality of Rome and her shape on the entire world still to this day is undeniable

If any of the scrolls survived, the Vatican, or private collections, are the most likely location.

It's all the stuff that we don't know about that was burned that is the real problem. Family names from antiquity, lineages, real history (of Egypt and more), how the pyramids were built, astronomy, etc.

I read that the burning of the books provided the fuel to heat the roman baths for months. I think the fire was deliberate to erase ancient history.

And everyone gives the Templars a hard time yet they brought back from the ME a trove of important information from forever ago.

I still say the majority was hidden &/or in the Sanican...err..Vatican "archives".

Most probably we all consider the Alexandria Burning related to the murder of Hypatia, but history is never so simple. That is the most "iconic" burning, but the events are not so crystal clear nor impartial those who created the historical records.

This article attempts to provide a more wholesome view, and that's why I say that it was a mixture of religious and political zealotry.

[link to ehistory.osu.edu (secure)]

About part or the whole of it ending in the Vatican library vaults, we all know they are adept at keeping things hidden and I would never discard the possibility, nor can I assert they did.

Now that is probably what happened. They want people to think it was all destroyed. People have hidden away all sorts of things when they knew destruction was near. Heck my relatives buried all sorts of things like silverware during the civil war so the troops wouldn’t get it. The people who worked at that library most likely did the same thing. They got those scrolls out of dodge.

This is prescient and scary...because it's likely true. We cannot let this happen.

Hogwash. Our technology level accurately reflects the level of our mind. In fact, it is the sole unbiased metric.

depends who you talk to... some say the Library's major works were stolen then it was burned down?

They should've had an off site backup at a colo.

A priest in college told us that there are six levels of archives below the Vatican, and most ancient holdings there would never see sunlight.

Absolutely! Nothing is lost, just hidden and kept for themselves (that's a whole other topic), the vast amount of knowledge acquired and held by the very few I believe surpasses anything from the past by leaps and bounds.