Our Occulted History by Jim Marrs

Author:Jim Marrs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

BOOK BURNING

Although history lavishes praise on the Greek and Roman empires for the advances they brought in military strategies, construction, and sanitation, scant attention has been paid to the destruction of ancient sacred sites and indigenous cultures as these empires spread across the world.

Ancient knowledge and history were forgotten by the masses, often because the ruling classes destroyed libraries and historical records. Only a few of Homer’s poems survived the destruction of his works by the Greek tyrant Pisistratus in Athens. Nothing survived the destruction of the Egyptian library in the Temple of Ptah in Memphis. Likewise, an estimated two hundred thousand volumes of priceless works disappeared with the destruction of the library of Pergamum in Asia Minor.

When the Romans leveled the city of Carthage in their drive for world conquest, they destroyed a library said to have contained more than five hundred thousand volumes. Then came Julius Caesar, whose war against Egypt resulted in the loss of the great library at Alexandria, considered the greatest collection of books in antiquity. With the loss of the Serapeum and the Bruchion branches of that library, a total of up to seven hundred thousand volumes of accumulated knowledge went up in flames.

European libraries also suffered under the Romans and later from zealous Christians. Between the sacking of Constantinople by Crusaders in 1204 and the Catholic Inquisition (1137–1825), an inestimable number of ancient works were irretrievably lost.

Collections in Asia fared little better, as Emperor Ch’in Shih Huang Ti ordered all histories of ancient China burned just before he died in 210 BC.

“Because of these tragedies we have to depend on disconnected fragments, casual passages and meager accounts,” lamented Australian author Andrew Tomas. “Our distant past is a vacuum filled at random with tablets, parchments, statues, paintings, and various artifacts. The history of science would appear totally different were the book collection of Alexandria intact today.”

Always this destruction was done in the name of God or the people. In Rome, the official slogan was Senatus populus quis Romanus, meaning the Senate (government) and the Roman people are one, or synonymous. It was an early and eerie forerunner of the German Nazi slogan Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer, or One people, one Empire, one Leader.

The book burning of the Nazis is well known, but such destruction of knowledge did not stop with the end of World War II. In Iraq, the central al-Awqaf Library, founded in 1920, contained 45,000 rare books and more than 6,000 documents from the Ottoman Empire. At the onset of the U.S. invasion, arsonists set fire to the building in April 2003. Although the staff managed to save 5,250 items, including a collection of older Korans, all else was lost. The fire spread, destroying all 175,000 books and manuscripts at the library of the University of Baghdad’s College of Art. The entire library at the University of Basra was reduced to ash, and the Central Public Library in Basra lost 100 percent of its collection. Also lost in the invasion

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