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)
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.