There's so few surviving because guess what? European colonizers destroyed a bunch for religious reasons.
On the Mayan side the destruction rate is well north of 99%. To quote one of the bishops that did a book burning party:
"We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction."
Yeah, because that was their literature, history, science, philosophy ...
I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying stuff.
Hopefully some indigenous scholars managed to stash some in a cave or tomb somewhere 500 years ago and we simply haven't found them yet.
Well the aztecs did the same before the europeans:
"Before the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, the Aztecs eradicated many Mayan works and sought to depict themselves as the true rulers through a fake history and newly written texts"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
I dont mean this to be taken as a justification or something, but there is this tendency of picking historical eventsand judge them by todays standards, and is particularly egregious when it is only applied to just one side portraying others as innocent victims when they were actually doing the same thing.
Also I'm getting tired of people using Europeans as a whole all the time when it's one particular country. How are Bulgarians, Greeks, Estonians or Swedes to blame for anything there. It's amazing. No one is blaming Japanese, Vietnamese or Malaysians for the Mongol invasions in Europe. It's beyond ridiculous.
No one is blaming Eastern Europeans. Everyone knows they were not capable of carrying out colonization. They were the slaves used in the Arab world for a lot of antiquity.
Italians and Spaniards were sold as slaves in North Africa and were still perfectly able to colonize.
The middle ages, not sure there were many East European slaves in pre-Islamic Arabia. Also plenty of them were “imported” into the Byzantine empire and Italy. After the Vikings Venice and Genoa mostly controlled the slave trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea and also the Balkans (Venice had a massive slave market).
They said "European colonizers." That doesn't signify every European nation, but only those with colonialist histories.
If alice murders bob, then charlie murders alice, 2 murders have been committed, indepdendent of one of the victims also being a perpatrator. Its still perfectly reasonable to be upset about the murder rate, and it's ok to be upset that alice was murdered.
But is it reasonable to consider charlie worse than alice?
If you feel closer to Charlie, yes
I think the final group in the line deserves disproportionate blame for destroying the remaining collection.
No matter how I think about it, it seems like a more egregious act.
Pre-Colombian literature on philosophy, nature and governance would be quite a find. Hopefully there's many places yet to be searched.
To be speculative, if I was trying to hide books while being invaded, I'd bury them in a box in an old cemetery in a dry climate.
A cemetery would be a bad place for them as cemeteries tend to attract looters.
// Yeah, because that was their literature, history, science, philosophy
Perhaps having seen the Aztec human sacrifice, of children, the Europeans weren’t too keen to maintain these things.
Have you heard of the spanish inquisition? Or the general treatment of the pagans?
I do not think what we now call human rights mattered to them in any way.
It was a different and therefore enemy religion. It was beaten and then destroyed. That was the main thing. That they also happened to sacrifice humans was maybe a moral bonus to justify it, but destroying the cultural foundation of the culture you want to conquer was quite standard and old practice. Ask the druids for example.
Once a culture lost its foundation, it becomes way easier to control.
Also it is a proof, "see, your gods did nothing to protect you, they are powerless, like you. So joining us (means working for us) is your only option"
Also infamous for practicing human sacrifice, but go on.
Is human sacrifice the only practice that means a culture deserves to be eradicated or are there others?
I do think if there’s an objective thing that can condemn a culture, it’s willingness to sacrifice its children is that thing
And I do think this extrapolates to modern cultures, from slapping a suicide vest on a toddler, to “one child” policies to “children are bad for the environment” type movements.
I think everyone agrees that certain cultures deserve to be eradicated, not in the sense of killing everyone who practices that culture (of course the Spanish didn’t exterminate the Mexica either) but in the sense of converting or reprogramming them into a different culture. This is what was done to Germany and Japan after the Second World War for instance.
Literal human sacrifice is a sufficient but not necessary condition. Though I suppose in a broader and more metaphorical sense, Germany and Japan also practiced human sacrifice.
A) likely, but not really confirmed to be a regular thing by my knowledge.
What we know, we know mostly from the romans.
B) The romans practiced ritual murder (among other things). Which is not that different to human sacrifice to me.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20726130/
And yes, I can go on, but why? The point was not, that the druids were saints. (Btw. many of the christian "saints" were pretty bloody as well)
Yes, this is also how the early Christians felt, which is why they eradicated Roman paganism once they became the dominant religion within the empire.
Sure. As one of Neal Stephenson's characters observed, it's a measure of what utter shitheads the Aztecs were that when the Spanish Inquisition took over, things actually got more humane. To name just one issue, the Spaniards weren't cannibals.
The druids, in turn, were such utter shitheads that the Romans (not exactly a bunch of bleeding hearts) were horrified by their cruelty.
Depends who are “we”:
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/6/7388039/index.a...
I don't justify this, but perhaps also this should be mentioned:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-withdraws-19-ml...
and if you will say that I take this out of context, well, also do you. And actually I think my case is stronger.
I would say more, but on this forum one should be very careful about what one says (actually I think that this post will not stay here for long, regardless).
Or maybe people here are not brain-dead and russian propaganda does not fly here. It's not like russians occupied bunch of Ukrainian territory and started burning books there.
You are flattering yourself. The level of US people's acquaintance with anything outside of their country is well known across the world, and I am afraid that the information you get from your media is not as informative as you think.
On my cell phone I have a video of some polish mercenaries (or volunteers) burning Russian church books, laughing and obviously pleased about what they are doing. I will share it with you if you want.
In Kiev, not long ago, a monument to Pushkin was taken down. Bulgakov is practically forbidden. I will stop here.
Have you stopped for a moment to consider why it’s happening? Every single person in former eastern block (including me) is sick of russian propaganda and being ruled by them for last few hundred years. War in Ukraine was a great excuse to get rid of russian sh**.
I will point to the fact that before the collapse of Soviet Union, most Ukranians did not see any difference between them and Russians, and most of them voted for keeping Soviet Union intact in the referendum held on 17.3.1991 (as in most other USSR republics), ignored then by Yeltsin and other people who wanted to get their share of power sponsored by US. The division between Russia and Ukraine, as far as I know, was mostly administrative. In Odessa and Kiev people laughed at ukranian nationalism, which was then confined to L'vov and such places.
As for "hundred of years", Russia was seen as liberator by the same eastern Europe when it fought against the Turks and nazi Germany, was seen as oppressor in some of Caucasus and in Poland, which in their turn thought it was their right to take the land of barbaric Russians. And in the Baltic states there are sources from the 16th century (Guagnini, an italian at the service of Polish court) which describe the Lithuanian Vitold governing Russians in Vilnius, stating that there seem to be more Russian Orthodox churches in Vilnius than catholic ones (and Guagnini cannot be suspected in sympathy to Russians).
So you see, you simplify history, and you do so, I think, first because you don't read, and then because your own country just changed one empire for another.
Sure it's still happening. Seems to be less common. That's a good thing.
I think it continues to happen in forms we don't easily recognize because of our biases. When Google tried to scan every book in existence, the copyright lobby put a stop to it because of "intellectual property rights". Nobody's claiming that Sci-hub is sacreligious, but it's on our cultural gatekeepers' hitlist all the same. I suspect that future generations will view these events in the same light as the destruction of the Mayan codices or the library of Alexandria.
Ah, that's the justification. I've never understood the official Russian "denazification" position; it should be clear to them no one now or ever is going to take it seriously, why continue with this absurd pretense?
That said, in this case it's more barbed than the article suggests. As part of denazification, the Allies did destroy books. To suggest book destruction is what typifies Nazis is absurd unless we also call the Allies Nazis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Censorship
That said, Aztec culture was full of horrors we can now no longer even imagine, paling even before the Nazis. To the extent the destruction of codices was deliberate, much of what went on would have seemed to be a relatively necessary de-Aztecification.
Painting all the peoples in Europe as colonizers is such a lazy thing to do.
You're the one who just did that.
Take your issues up with the editors here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
It does seem to be painting with an overly broad brush to talk about "Europeans" (which covers everyone from Portugal to greater Russia) when it was a very small group of Spanish conquistadors and priests who actually did all of what we're discussing.
And frankly the Wikipedia article talks specifically about "Spanish" invaders, and the word "European" isn't even in the article. I'm not sure why you think that link supports the idea that someone other than the gp here turned "Spanish" into "European colonizers".
They said "European colonizers" not "Europeans."
One of the greatest tragedies of human knowledge loss. Right up there with the library of Alexandria. The 4 remaining Maya codices are a wealth of information. Imagine if we had the rest.
Its importance and size are massively over-emphasized though. We aren’t even sure if that were that many books left there when it was supposedly destroyed.
Also non-colonizer Europeans, for the same religious reasons, did burn more knowledge (and persons) here, in their own towns.
Most of the history that we got, is what those ancestors did leave in their writings.
Today the inquisition simply consists of our beloved governments, covering up their dirty dealings, and telling a different story in the media, media dominated to the most inquisitorial extreme.
At least in Spain, videos are deleted, the monetization of certain channels on social networks is cancelled, forwarding of certain content on WhatsApp is rate-limited, and today, Telegram is closing in Spain, while all the ministers, the president and their families are involved in continuous corruption scandals, forgiven by judges who have been put in position by the same politicians.
Politicians forgiving the robbery of politicians, while TV only talks about the color of the air (if they don want to be reported and economically punished).
Journalists without a journalism career, who only look with a magnifying glass to the families of the monarchies, but totally forget forever about the families of the hundreds (thousands?) of Spanish politicians and ex-politicians.
Journalist without a journalism career, who try to tell us that life has increased a 6% (hello, do you mean that what previously did cost 1 Eur, now costs 1 Eur and 6 cents? where? basic education mathematics, please?)
The same supposedly lefty politicians, who criticize priests, are worse than priests, in this inquisitorial sense.
Something I ask myself... if the history that we got, was what the priests did write or didn't burn... what history will get about us, people in 500 years? That lies published in the media? 24 different versions of the same fact? Nothing at all if it's about ministers stealing public money? Whatever the generative AI tells them?
Agreed, it's 2024 after all, not bloody 2019 . . .
The Christian converts who are setting fire to sacred Aboriginal objects
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
Well, about that...
The Franciscan priests deserve eternal ignominy for destroying these priceless and irreplaceable books.