More tidbits I’ve found while researching
- tumblr has a sad-boner for the burning of the library of alexandria
- which was not actually one burning but several
- and while the Library of Alexandria was an immense historical and national treasure, a lot of ppl tend to forget about the other book and library burnings that occurred in antiquity
- Places like the library of Nalanda, in India, which contained an elaborate classification system to hold what was then seen as the largest collection of Buddhist literature
- and the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, which contained Greek and Arabic works on mathematics and astronomy to zoology and cartography
- and more recently, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (no, that does not mean sexual witchcraft) which was burned by the Nazis b/c the majority of tomes dealt with same sex relationships and gay rights and acceptance.
- and omg, this makes me so mad. The Libraries of Fisheries and Oceans in Canada has all its collection thrown away in an attempt to save taxpayer money and on the hope that all of its material was digitized. Only 5 to 6% was.
- and the Saeh library in Lebanon, which was burnt b/c of terrorism.
- Book burnings are happening right now, y’all.
Not to mention how the Spanish systematically destroyed the entire literary output of whole societies in Mesoamerica, to the point where we only have a handful of their codices today
We should talk, too, about the heroism of those trying to save books from violence, not least because the deliberate destruction of cultural artifacts is evidence of genocide. A few libraries not mentioned above:
- The National Library of Bosnia, located in Sarajevo, which was destroyed in August of 1992 by Serb forces. It was targeted with incendiary shells, and over a million books testifying to Bosnia’s multicultural history were lost in the resulting fire. Aida Buturović, a young librarian, was killed by sniper fire while trying to carry books from the burning building. The Oriental Institute, housing the majority of Sarajevo’s Islamic manuscripts, was destroyed that May, but it wasn’t the first library burnt in Sarajevo: during World War II, the Nazis decimated the collection of La Benevolencija, one of the oldest Jewish organizations in the city.
- The Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu, which was burned in January 2013 by Tuareg rebel forces fleeing the city, who had been using the library as a barracks. The fire destroyed 4,000 manuscripts – but Abdel Kader Haïdara, a librarian, saved 400,000 more from libraries all over the city by smuggling them out in the preceding months. He had help, and the ‘book rustlers’ of Mali – who risked their lives to do it – saved 800 years of West African history.
