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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

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.

YurgenJurgensen 3y ago
>I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying stuff. Well, about that...
daliusd 3y ago
Depends who are “we”: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/6/7388039/index.amp https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/6/7388039/index.a...
- Amezarak 3y ago
  > Details:The National Resistance Center has reported that the Russians are using the pretext of removing "Nazi literature" to explain their actions, while the list of such literature includes all books in Ukrainian. In doing so, the occupiers are repeating the practice typical of Nazi Germany. 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. > As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were then banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offense. All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Censorship 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.
  - iperboreo 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - lukan 3y ago
      Sorry, but this meta vague mysteries conspiracy claim thing usually does not fly here. Either you have something to say, then say it, or don't.
      - iperboreo 3y ago
        [flagged]
        lukan 3y ago
        Well, so far it is not even a conspiracy, as you said nothing except saying you cannot say it. Things very seldom get deleted here btw. but yes they do get flagged (and hidden for most users unless they choose to see it, like me) if many think you are not contributing. So your post is already flagged, you are now free to say it, if you have anything to say about the matter.
        iperboreo 3y ago
        " if you have anything to say about the matter." Effectively banning Russian language (they cannot, but they do try), tacit license to use violence against people who see themselves as Russians (massacre of Odessa, other cases), the ukranian nationalism which is a direct continuation of that of nazi collaborationists and jew murderers (yes, I know that Zelensky is a jew; so am I). Encouraging killing russians (all russians) on their telegram channels. I could compose here a text with examples etc, but I don't see the point of doing this. I think this post will soon be deleted ("flagged"), the account shadow banned or whatever, and so I would simply waste my time.
        lukan 3y ago
        So you are saying the reason for russia to destroy everthing ukraine, is the ukraine trying to destroy everything russian in ukraine, after russia invaded in 2014? Maybe you got cause and effect mixed up here? In either way, I condemn both attempts at attacking different cultures. Still, ukraine did not declare there is basically no russia. And the did not invade russia to exterminate. But russian officials did it with ukraine. Saying they are all russian. And invaded. And are destroying everything ukraine in Ukraine. That is the reason Ukraine tolerates their nazis, as they fight against the threat to all of them. But they surely ain't all Nazis. That is just a weak reason to reestablish a russian empire. And that's the main thing here happening, for some reason Ukraine does not want to be part of your empire anymore and you try to force them. (After russia confirmed their sovereignty in Budapest 1994)
- kristopolous 3y ago
  Sure it's still happening. Seems to be less common. That's a good thing.
  - gradschool 3y ago
    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.
- iperboreo 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dziulius 3y ago
    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.
    - iperboreo 3y ago
      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.
      - dziulius 3y ago
        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**.
        iperboreo 3y ago
        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 "hundreds 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.
127 3y ago
Painting all the peoples in Europe as colonizers is such a lazy thing to do.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  They said "European colonizers" not "Europeans."
- kristopolous 3y ago
  You're the one who just did that. Take your issues up with the editors here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
  - EA-3167 3y ago
    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".
defrost 3y ago
> I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying stuff. 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-converts-who-are-setting-fire-to-sacred-aboriginal/11527402 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...
txutxu 3y ago
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?
soyyo 3y ago
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 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.
- sophacles 3y ago
  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.
  - hugetim 3y ago
    But is it reasonable to consider charlie worse than alice?
    - mmustapic 3y ago
      If you feel closer to Charlie, yes
- kristopolous 3y ago
  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.
  - infoseek12 3y ago
GnarfGnarf 3y ago
The Franciscan priests deserve eternal ignominy for destroying these priceless and irreplaceable books.
xyzelement 3y ago
// 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.
- lukan 3y ago
  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"
  - Turing_Machine 3y ago
    > Have you heard of the spanish inquisition? 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. > Ask the druids for example. The druids, in turn, were such utter shitheads that the Romans (not exactly a bunch of bleeding hearts) were horrified by their cruelty.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    > Ask the druids for example. Also infamous for practicing human sacrifice, but go on.
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      Is human sacrifice the only practice that means a culture deserves to be eradicated or are there others?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nathancahill 3y ago
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.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  > library of Alexandria 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.
  - MerManMaid 3y ago
    The historical significance of the burning of the Library of Alexandria is absolutely overstated but not for the reasons most think. Like most Libraries today, the bulk of the collection most likely consisted of reprints of works that could be found other libraries littered across the Mediterranean. (And there was a LOT of them: (Royal Library of Antioch, Imperial Library of Constantinople, Academy of Gondishapur, not to mention local city libraries) The best analogy I've read was it would be like the equivalent of the library of congress burning; sure we'd lose some stuff but most of the collection still exists in one form or another. Obviously that isn't to say it wasn't a tragic event, just that in terms works that were forever lost has been vastly overstated in public consciousness. One thing that we definitely lost forever was all the notations made by contemporary scholars as the Library was a mecca of intellectual thought for hundreds of year... Truely heartbreaking to think about about all the information we could of gleaned about their worldview from the annotations they made on those works.
    - ffgjgf1 3y ago
      Where are talking about when it was supposedly burnt during the civil war with Caesar/Cleopatra? Or some other event? > for hundreds of year > Truely heartbreaking to think about about all the information we could of gleaned about their worldview from the annotations they made on those works. It’s heyday supposedly lasted ~100 years. It was unavoidable though because how unstable rhe ancient world was. Basically you had to have an extremely stable central authority willing to dedicate enough resources to it for hundreds of years for that to happen. While in reality libraries like this rarely survived for longer than a few generations. Decentralization seems to be a lot more sustainable longterm (e.g. 50 medieval monasteries instead of a single massive centralized library)
trelane 3y ago
Destroying things and killing others for religious reasons has a long history, even amongst atheists. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_t... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_during_the_French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_d...
asimpletune 3y ago
Yeah, this comment about the mass destruction of Mayan texts actually reminds of me of something I read in another one of the codices, the Florence one. It was a little prologue that the monk wrote to justify its preservation. I don't have it in front of me so I'm paraphrasing, very roughly, but it quoted a catholic scholar (I don't remember who, maybe even a saint) and used that quote to argue that to fight the devil and save their souls they must know the devil's work. I thought it was interesting and it seemed to me like the author/editor of this codex knew what was needed to be said to justify the creation of that text, in a political climate like the one above. Even in those times people had to navigate a bureaucracy and play politics to do what they thought was the right thing in the name of humanity and intellectual curiosity. I believe many of these catholic priests were serious scholars, but they still had to be careful about what was put in writing and how it may be used against them by their enemies and competitors within the church.

YurgenJurgensen 3y ago

>I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying stuff. Well, about that...

daliusd 3y ago

Depends who are “we”: https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/6/7388039/index.amp https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/02/6/7388039/index.a...

Amezarak 3y ago
> Details:The National Resistance Center has reported that the Russians are using the pretext of removing "Nazi literature" to explain their actions, while the list of such literature includes all books in Ukrainian. In doing so, the occupiers are repeating the practice typical of Nazi Germany. 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. > As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were then banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offense. All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification#Censorship 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.
- iperboreo 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - lukan 3y ago
    Sorry, but this meta vague mysteries conspiracy claim thing usually does not fly here. Either you have something to say, then say it, or don't.
    - iperboreo 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - lukan 3y ago
        Well, so far it is not even a conspiracy, as you said nothing except saying you cannot say it. Things very seldom get deleted here btw. but yes they do get flagged (and hidden for most users unless they choose to see it, like me) if many think you are not contributing. So your post is already flagged, you are now free to say it, if you have anything to say about the matter.
        iperboreo 3y ago
        " if you have anything to say about the matter." Effectively banning Russian language (they cannot, but they do try), tacit license to use violence against people who see themselves as Russians (massacre of Odessa, other cases), the ukranian nationalism which is a direct continuation of that of nazi collaborationists and jew murderers (yes, I know that Zelensky is a jew; so am I). Encouraging killing russians (all russians) on their telegram channels. I could compose here a text with examples etc, but I don't see the point of doing this. I think this post will soon be deleted ("flagged"), the account shadow banned or whatever, and so I would simply waste my time.
        lukan 3y ago
        So you are saying the reason for russia to destroy everthing ukraine, is the ukraine trying to destroy everything russian in ukraine, after russia invaded in 2014? Maybe you got cause and effect mixed up here? In either way, I condemn both attempts at attacking different cultures. Still, ukraine did not declare there is basically no russia. And the did not invade russia to exterminate. But russian officials did it with ukraine. Saying they are all russian. And invaded. And are destroying everything ukraine in Ukraine. That is the reason Ukraine tolerates their nazis, as they fight against the threat to all of them. But they surely ain't all Nazis. That is just a weak reason to reestablish a russian empire. And that's the main thing here happening, for some reason Ukraine does not want to be part of your empire anymore and you try to force them. (After russia confirmed their sovereignty in Budapest 1994)
kristopolous 3y ago
Sure it's still happening. Seems to be less common. That's a good thing.
- gradschool 3y ago
  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.
iperboreo 3y ago
[flagged]
- dziulius 3y ago
  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.
  - iperboreo 3y ago
    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.
    - dziulius 3y ago
      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**.
      - iperboreo 3y ago
        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 "hundreds 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.

127 3y ago

Painting all the peoples in Europe as colonizers is such a lazy thing to do.

AlecSchueler 3y ago
They said "European colonizers" not "Europeans."
kristopolous 3y ago
You're the one who just did that. Take your issues up with the editors here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
- EA-3167 3y ago
  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".

defrost 3y ago

> I'm glad we aren't currently so dedicated to destroying stuff. 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-converts-who-are-setting-fire-to-sacred-aboriginal/11527402 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-convert...

txutxu 3y ago

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?

soyyo 3y ago

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 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.

sophacles 3y ago
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.
- hugetim 3y ago
  But is it reasonable to consider charlie worse than alice?
  - mmustapic 3y ago
    If you feel closer to Charlie, yes
kristopolous 3y ago
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.
- infoseek12 3y ago

GnarfGnarf 3y ago

The Franciscan priests deserve eternal ignominy for destroying these priceless and irreplaceable books.

xyzelement 3y ago

// 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.

lukan 3y ago
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"
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > Have you heard of the spanish inquisition? 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. > Ask the druids for example. The druids, in turn, were such utter shitheads that the Romans (not exactly a bunch of bleeding hearts) were horrified by their cruelty.
- philwelch 3y ago
  > Ask the druids for example. Also infamous for practicing human sacrifice, but go on.
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    Is human sacrifice the only practice that means a culture deserves to be eradicated or are there others?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nathancahill 3y ago

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.

ffgjgf1 3y ago
> library of Alexandria 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.
- MerManMaid 3y ago
  The historical significance of the burning of the Library of Alexandria is absolutely overstated but not for the reasons most think. Like most Libraries today, the bulk of the collection most likely consisted of reprints of works that could be found other libraries littered across the Mediterranean. (And there was a LOT of them: (Royal Library of Antioch, Imperial Library of Constantinople, Academy of Gondishapur, not to mention local city libraries) The best analogy I've read was it would be like the equivalent of the library of congress burning; sure we'd lose some stuff but most of the collection still exists in one form or another. Obviously that isn't to say it wasn't a tragic event, just that in terms works that were forever lost has been vastly overstated in public consciousness. One thing that we definitely lost forever was all the notations made by contemporary scholars as the Library was a mecca of intellectual thought for hundreds of year... Truely heartbreaking to think about about all the information we could of gleaned about their worldview from the annotations they made on those works.
  - ffgjgf1 3y ago
    Where are talking about when it was supposedly burnt during the civil war with Caesar/Cleopatra? Or some other event? > for hundreds of year > Truely heartbreaking to think about about all the information we could of gleaned about their worldview from the annotations they made on those works. It’s heyday supposedly lasted ~100 years. It was unavoidable though because how unstable rhe ancient world was. Basically you had to have an extremely stable central authority willing to dedicate enough resources to it for hundreds of years for that to happen. While in reality libraries like this rarely survived for longer than a few generations. Decentralization seems to be a lot more sustainable longterm (e.g. 50 medieval monasteries instead of a single massive centralized library)

trelane 3y ago

Destroying things and killing others for religious reasons has a long history, even amongst atheists. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_t... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_during_the_French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_d...

asimpletune 3y ago

Yeah, this comment about the mass destruction of Mayan texts actually reminds of me of something I read in another one of the codices, the Florence one. It was a little prologue that the monk wrote to justify its preservation. I don't have it in front of me so I'm paraphrasing, very roughly, but it quoted a catholic scholar (I don't remember who, maybe even a saint) and used that quote to argue that to fight the devil and save their souls they must know the devil's work. I thought it was interesting and it seemed to me like the author/editor of this codex knew what was needed to be said to justify the creation of that text, in a political climate like the one above. Even in those times people had to navigate a bureaucracy and play politics to do what they thought was the right thing in the name of humanity and intellectual curiosity. I believe many of these catholic priests were serious scholars, but they still had to be careful about what was put in writing and how it may be used against them by their enemies and competitors within the church.