Only 4 Texts Remain from the Maya Civilization After Thousands Were Destroyed
Despite the fact that we are not very far removed from their heyday, we know very little about Maya civilization.
And it’s not because the Maya weren’t into recording their history.
The Maya were prolific writers and actually evolved from using scrolls to a form of folded paper called the codex right around the same time as the Romans, though each appears to be independent of the other.
[…]
Maya glyphs and the records of the Spanish conquistadors themselves attest to thousands of these codices existing by the time the two cultures met in the 16th century.
But, due to their being destroyed by priests, conquistadors, ship raiders, and even time and mold, only about 22 codices, of which only four have Maya origin, exist today.
None of them are complete, and none have their original covers.
[…]
And you might have noticed that the oldest one only goes back to 200-300 years before the Spanish conquest.
We know that the codices went back at least 800 years prior to that, so we’re essentially looking at the tip of a fingernail and trying to guess what the hand looked like.
And that’s how the soul of a culture gets erased from history…
See also: Burning the Maya Books: The 1562 Tragedy at Mani
The last codices destroyed were those of Nojpetén, Guatemala in 1697, the last city conquered in the Americas. (Wikipedia)
We humans seem to do that pretty often. Library of Alexandria, the Sacking of Rome, Nazi Germany burning books… We’re even doing that nowadays by getting things like the Internet Archive sued and stuff
That sort of generalization lets the monsters off easy and pointlessly demonizes everyone. Throwing “we” around like that only makes excuses for the worst people around.
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.
I wholeheartedly agree.
Christianity became the dominant religion in a lot of other
regions by very different means, such as persuading kings to convert or outright co-opting local traditions, for example.
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.
That’s a very good point of clarification: that really was a choice and “human nature” platitudes are deeply unserious indeed.
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).
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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!
Bad people did bad things throughout history for a number of bad reasons and Christianity was only sometimes involved, even in pretense. Not sure what you’re getting at.
Bet you tankoids never considered that it was human nature to be genocidal conquerors
“Humans are biologically evil therefore all bad things humans do can be excused by biological evilness and nothing can be done to discourage, prevent, punish, or correct wrongdoing. My view of the world is very well thought out and I should be in charge of running society.”
It always pisses me off that people who think humans are bad by nature almost always conclude that we must embrace our supposed evil nature, as therefore evil must be the real good and vice versa. If not just be indifferent to evil. I never see someone say that humanity’s evil nature should be suppressed.
Burgerland’s primary propaganda flow continually emphasizes that no one should ever be told what to do ever ever ever (except when the corporate police state feels like but stay with me) and therefore even the suggestion to not be an asshole is seen as worse than being an asshole.
You can add Nalanda Mahavihara to that list.
The destruction of Nalanda is a contentious topic because it is sorta the epicentre of Buddhist anti-Islamic sentiment.
It’s held among scholars that the Muslim empires that displaced Buddhism from Pakistan and Afghanistan (Gandhara, one of the most important civilisations to Buddhism, straddled Pakistan and Afghanistan and there’s the famous Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan that were partially destroyed by the Taliban) as well as the destruction of Nalanda Mahavihara and northern India coming under Muslim rule that directly influenced Buddhist eschatology and specifically the Kalachakra Tantra. (Also the Tibetan empire spanned all the way to Kabul in Afghanistan briefly before they got pushed back by the Abbasid caliphate.)
The Kalachakra Tantra has a lot in it but there’s the prophesied end times, where “barbarians” (guess who) with their “false dharma” will lay waste to all of Buddhism (what’s the Buddhist analogue of the word Christendom?) and then the king of the fabled kingdom of Shambhala will ride out with a massive army to repel the barbarians and restore peace and justice and Buddhism to the world, ushering in a global Buddhist golden age.
(The Kalachakra Tantra puts lots of the big Abrahamic prophets on blast, referring to figures like Abraham, Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and the Islamic eschatological figure Mahdi [who also serves a similar role to the king of Shambhala to Muslims in Islamic teachings] as being demonic, but it positions Islam squarely as the primary antagonist.)
The Kalachalra Tantra became a largely Tibetan Buddhist thing over time and it is of central importance to the Jonang school of Tibetan Buddhism, ironically it was a previous Dalai Lama and his Gelug school that suppressed the Jonang school and banned their writings and practices, and much of the Jonang school survived in Western China outside the reach of the Dalai Lama and (again ironically) the Jonang school was sheltered in post-revolutionary China. The larger ironic twist here is that the current Dalai Lama has himself brought the Kalachalra Tantra to forefront of Tibetan Buddhism, riding on a wave of sinophobic red terror sentiment and the post-9/11 islamophobic war or terror sentiment in the west.
I’m trying to avoid any particular heavy-handed bias here, besides calling the “Tibetan Buddhism is all peace, love, and understanding” trope to account because it’s important to understand that the Dalai Lama pitches a lot of stuff specifically to the west in order to curry favour. It’s also important to understand that, while the Dalai Lama claims to be a simple monk, his actions are very much rooted in political manoeuvres and there are things like him fostering interfaith dialogue at events where he is teaching Kalachakra Tantra, which is pretty ironic to do when you are spreading teachings that assert that Abrahamic religions are demonic. But this was also at time when those other religious leaders were in the region to commemorate the anniversary of the execution of the (sorta) last Sikh guru at the hands of the (Muslim) Mughal Emperor, so if you know your Buddhist theology and your North Indian history then it casts this interfaith dialogue in a very different, very political light.
It’s quite a can of worms.
My best advice would be to avoid falling into simplistic narratives of the noble underdog when it comes to talking about things like the destruction of ancient libraries - it definitely sucks that these libraries were destroyed and it represents a huge loss to humanity but at the same time if you extrapolate out too far you end up seeing history through the lens of the Muslim barbarians vs the sympathetic underdog Buddhists who barbarically suppressed the sympathetic underdog Jonang school who promulgated the Kalachakra Tantra which barbarically vilifies the sympathetic underdog Muslims who barbarically destroyed the Nalanda Mahavihara, which was a major centre of learning and culture for the sympathetic underdog Buddhists… you get the idea.
(On the other hand, what the Europeans did in the Americas was one of the absolute worst atrocities that the world has ever witnessed so maybe adopting a partisan angle isn’t always the worst thing to do.)
Ancient Buddhist history is really interesting. I can’t remember where it was but I recall once reading something about how in the westernmost reaches of Buddhist influence you had Hellenic stuff intermingling with Buddhism in a similar way that Buddhism has syncretised with different traditions and beliefs in Asia which is really fun to imagine
That’s the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom! (And the related civilisations.)
It’s super interesting because everyone has at least some idea of Alexander’s conquests but most historical documentaries or highschool history classes just focus on how wonderful and powerful the Greek empire was but they don’t look at the cultural interplay that occurred or how the influences flowed into Greek culture. This is because of the background radiation of cultural supremacism and shit, of course.
This is partly why I’m fascinated by religious studies: your run of the mill history studies tends to be more focused on conflicts between different civilizations or just on one particular civilization but religion is sort of like the fingerprint of a society’s values, the interplay between different cultures, and it traces directly along routes of trade and the flow of information (given that it was usually the religious figures who were literate and it often ancient libraries were maintained by clergy - in fact, this is such a mainstay of history that we have the word “clerical” to mean everything to do administration and documentation but this traces its etymological roots directly to the words clergy, since the clergy and their clerical undertakings were so synonymous).
This is gonna be a hot take but I’m especially interested in religious jurisprudence because ultimately it says a lot about what a society values, what it rejects, the conditions that it reponded to, and how it seeks to establish “the good life” for its followers. This is absolutely a parallel to the (mostly) secular radical projects that seek to achieve their own good life for the people.
In a sense, as radicals, we seek to abolish certain aspects of society that we see as being wholly or largely detrimental and we seek to establish the necessary elements to ensure a good life amongst the masses. This is exactly what the prophet Muhammad did by enforcing a strict code of ritual cleanliness (back when people were legitimately gross with regards to hygiene which risked the outbreak of plagues - he even went so far as to serious consider mandating that people had to brush their teeth daily, and I’m not even kidding lol) and it’s exactly what the tenth Sikh Guru did by establishing very visible articles of faith so that Sikhs are basically walking billboards for Sikhism with the expectation that if you are announcing to the world that you are a Sikh then you’d better be representing Sikh values like upholding justice even at the risk of one’s own life.
If you read what Guru Gobind Singh said about why Sikhs must display visible articles of faith, it’s not all that far removed from Marx staying “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.”
Mao’s Three Rules and Eight Points are effectively laws and axioms that aren’t dissimilar from religious rules about what an army can and cannot do, to the point where the PLA choir still recites this in the same way that a mantra is recited.
I guess a superficial take here would be that I’m trying to cast radical politics as being religious or that communists are basically a cult something but really what I’m interested in is what can be learned about history, where I can use historical/cultural/religious principles and values to agitate and organise for revolution, and to learn what works and what doesn’t when it comes to enforcing a set of standards for society to achieve “the good life”.
The PLA distinguished itself from warlords because that was the era they emerged from and warlords were undeniably a plague on Chinese society that brought untold amounts of suffering and hardship down on the masses. There’s a lot to be learned from that and even today in China, the police serve the people in a way that is markedly different from the police in America which emerged from slave patrols who were reacting to slaves who attempted to abscond in order to be free.
CW: moderate discussions of animal abuse and slaughter ahead
Judaism made religious prohibitions against taking meat from animals without slaughtering them first. This is perhaps the oldest historical record of animals rights being established as it prohibited Jews from causing immense suffering to an animal by butchering it while it was still alive.
There’s a reason why this law is etched into Judaism and later Islam. The societies that existed before and around these religions either permitted this practice or it was frowned upon but society was still fairly permissive of the practice, and Abrahamic religions reacted to these circumstances.
In a similar vein, are we as radicals not seeking to respond to the lessons and the failures of previous revolutions?
If I were asked to make principles or axioms on this basis, I would literally say things like:
“Do not accept IMF loans except as an absolute necessity” (Yugoslavia)
“Do not allow for uneven economic prosperity that leaves ethnic groups or regions behind” (China, Yugoslavia)
“Enforce strict ideological discipline within the party” (USSR)
“Uphold the rights of people to express their sexual orientation and gender identity without persecution or harassment, do not favour one gender or sexuality over others” (Cuba)
“Maintain strict control over all armed forces” (Chile) etc. etc.
Is that really any different to the Three Rules and Eight Points that Mao established? Is that really so different from the Ten Commandments or Hammurabi’s Code?
The contents are different, sure, but ultimately I see far more parallels than I do points of difference.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I’m not sure I would agree that the destruction of Nalanda is the epicentre of the issue. More like one of the highlights.
I do agree about how the Tibetan syncretists politicized their lineage, though.
The burning of the Library of Alexandria was accidental and though the sacking of Rome caused cultural destruction (and to a much greater extent, human misery), I don’t think there was even the faintest attempt of the systematic obliteration of a culture, they were just looting shit and incidentally breaking things (and kidnapping women, which is the human misery part). The Nazis are the only historical comparison that actually holds up, because their bibliocausts were very similar in character to the cultural genocide in the OP.
I’m mad about the Internet Archive stuff too, but I need to say that it’s again a completely inappropriate comparison. The archive is being attacked over opposition to freedom of information and, even if it gets effectively taken down and everything on it wiped, the real cultural destruction involved will be purely incidental to the real capitalist purpose of protecting intellectual property sovereignty. They aren’t aiming to erase any information, they are just completely apathetic to such a thing happening.
No connection between these ideologies and systems, nope! It’s all just huMaN NatURe
I’m not sure why everyone assumes that is what I’m saying. I would say it is a moral failing on the part of the people doing the burning, both those who are active participants and those who simply had the power to do something about it and chose not to do so.
never have the actions of those functioning within systems been moral, because we’ve never had moral systems built by the common people for the benefit of all
So, yes you ARE saying that when you say “we humans”
the library of alexandria didn’t go down like that lol.
it’s basically all whites and Arabs except for that one time in Cambodia
I would recommend this video on the Library of Alexandria https://youtu.be/M4WU8gqrgsQ
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: