this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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You know, I actually think it's a bit more myopic than that? There have been many despicable warlords in history and even they weren't all the same.
The standard explanation for the spanish burning the mesoamerican canons is that, in so doing, they were erasing a people's identity and memory. It would be about power and empire building. Truth be told, the spanish also have a record of ensuring loyalty and compliance of the exploited peasantry by also *co-opting * local religious traditions. So even they could have just... not burned all of those texts. Hell, there are even Church arguments not to do so because a deeper knowledge of the 'pagan traditions' would be in the interest of the colonizing faith.
It's not a human thing. It's a historical circumstances thing.
But that's just the thing, that co-optation of local traditions I mentioned? It happened in Yucatán as well! That sort of thing happened everywhere in the portuguese and spanish empires where state power was too far for the comfort of local landlords. This being the early modern state, we are talking about almost across the whole territory. This makes a lot of sense because many of those same landlords were themselves former native elites.
The spanish themselves, in this instance, had a choice to make and they made it.
Poland for example. However i hate this shit and regardless of mountains of suffering it resulted in later, adopting catholicism by Duke Mieszko the First in 966 was a political jackpot that solved so many problems for him and it took over half of century till pagan reaction resulted in great uprising in 1025 and even then it was pretty easily defeated in few years (another speculative reason why all that seems to went so easy is that Mieszko and probably his half-legendary father were really merciless rulers that united the tribes by massacring local elites till no one protesting it survived, it also explains lack of tribal separatism in the early history of Poland).
Well this is measurably different. The Mongols sacked Baghdad but within two years of the sack the libraries were back open. Neither Arabic nor Persian culture was intentionally suppressed, their languages and great works did not disappear, and the sacking of a city and its destruction is rather dissimilar to an intentional destruction of all cultural artifacts and memory of an entire people. Same with the Library of Alexandria; the works of the Greeks are still extant, there was no sustained effort to destroy and bury ancient knowledge, etc. It's just a siege. What the Spanish did in Mexico is leagues worse.
well some important volumes probably perished in Bagdad and Alexandria which we only know from excerpts and references. but whether those wouldve made it to present day without those events is speculation
Oh absolutely we lost things. For instance, I really wish more of Euripides plays were extant (specifically Bellerophon, would love to read that one based on the fragments we do have), and we know that the Library of Alexandria had copies (there's a famous story, perhaps apocryphal, that the librarian had all of Euripides' manuscripts sent from Athens, meticulously copied and disseminated across the Hellenic world), and they probably burned. But plenty of others had copies too, and none of those have survived to the present. But it is different in that we often know what we lost. The Little Iliad, for example, or Sappho's poetry. And we do have a mass amount of stuff we didn't lose. In the case of the Maya, we lost everything. We have only a tiny idea of what texts were out there. The texts we do have a fragments, none complete. Hell we only decoded Mayan glyphs in the mid 20th century!