The Mayans had libraries.
I repeat.
The Mayans had libraries.
I mean, we have the Codex Dresdensis:
39 pages written on both sides with a total height of 3.56 meters. Some of it is currently exhibited at the Library Museum of Dresden in Germany because Hernán Cortez or someone shipped it all the way to Europe with all the rest of the riches they stole.
The Mayans had hieroglyphic charts for centuries, and they even had their own way of making paper-like material, sort of like papyrus or vellum by beating bark material from a tree they called huun. To this day there are still people who know how to make it.
This Codex wasn’t the only manuscript produced by the Mayans; they had many books, they had goddamn libraries. Guess what happened?
That’s right. The Spanish colonizers burned them all.
Here’s a quote from the Spanish missionary Diego de Landa, of the Monastery of Izamal Yucatán writing in the sixteenth century:
“We found a great number of books written with their characters, and because they contained nothing but superstitions and falsehoods about the devil, we burned them all…”
You know. The burning of the Library of Alexandria is always cited as a great tragedy. And it was, I guess. But there’s a great many examples of historical Europeans just up and burning huge chunks of human knowledge for disagreeing with their horribly narrow view of reality.
