Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack
The Garima Gospels have been housed in northern Ethiopia for around 1,500 years, and boast one of the earliest surviving complete illuminated Christian manuscripts in the world. They’re also on the verge of destruction at the time of writing, with the armies of Ethiopia and Eritrea besieging the area within which they’re housed in a monastery.1
Whether or not the Garima Gospels survive as physical objects (they were digitised in 2005) depends for the most part on the monks devoted to their preservation. “They will gladly sacrifice themselves for the treasures they guard, it is their life’s work”, claims the head of the library and museum department of the Ethiopia Orthodox Church. And this fragile situation encapsulates much of what Richard Ovenden writes about in Burning the Books, which is as much about the heroes who risk their lives to save written knowledge as it is about the destruction of books and the magnificent spaces that house them.
It’s worth clarifying one possible misconception for anyone planning to pick up a copy of this: it’s not just about book burning.2 In fact, Ovenden chronicles a variety of ways that knowledge has been lost over the centuries. Sometimes that’s the systematic looting and destruction committed by states and governments, and for example of that look no further than Henry VIII’s “great argument” in the sixteenth century, a time when up to 80 percent of the contents of the pre-Reformation libraries of the British Isles were lost.
Sometimes book burning is not motivated by religion and ideology but by a wish to save reputations, as in the dramatic encounter at 50 Albermarle Street that ended with Byron’s personal memoirs thrown into the fireplace by his friends. In more recent years, Philip Larkin insisted that his diaries should be burned after his death, which they were; conversely, Kafka’s works that went unpublished during his lifetime were brought to the public’s attention after his death - an act that went very much against his wishes.
Some of the most memorable passages in this book detail the ways in which knowledge that was once under threat is rediscovered. Take, for example, Austen Henry Layard’s remarkable find at Nineveh in 1851: thousands and thousands of clay tablets dating from the 7th century BC, constituting what’s now known as the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal. “The Royal Library of Ashurbanipal was perhaps the first attempt to assemble under one roof the entire corpus of collectable knowledge that could be assembled at the time”, writes Ovenden. The Babylonians wrecked it in 612 BC in retaliation for their subjugation under the Assyrians, but the fire that ravaged the building may have played a role in preserving the contents of the library, baking the clay cuneiform tablets which meant that we can still read them today - more than 30,000 of them, including the Epic of Gilgamesh.
But another rediscovery is one that stayed with me long after I finished this book.
The Oyneg Shabes was a group that formed in the Warsaw Ghetto and dedicated themselves to the task of chronicling life around them: 30,000 pages of essays, poems, letters and photographs, carefully stored in three large milk cans and ten metal boxes, and buried deep under the Ghetto. Much of this remarkable material has since been found, but the last milk can still remains hidden beneath the streets of modern-day Warsaw. This is a story I hadn’t previously known, just as I didn’t know that when the Louvain Library in Belgium was destroyed by German troops at the commencement of WWI, the Director of the John Rylands library in Manchester encouraged other libraries to donate books in order to help re-establish its collection. My current employer, Auckland Public Library, was one such donor.
So this isn’t a book about book burning, and it’s not even a book entirely about the destruction of the written word. To me this is a book about the remarkable efforts we go to when cultural heritage is under threat, and the people who put their lives at risk to ensure that future generations can learn from what otherwise would be lost to the ravages of ideology or the degradation of simple neglect (the ultimate fate that Ovenden attributes to the Library of Alexandria).
I’ll leave the final words to the author, himself a librarian: “Libraries and archives take the long view of civilization in a world that currently takes the short-term view. We ignore their importance at our peril.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/ancient-garima-gospels-in-peril-as-fighting-rages-around-ethiopian-monastery-bc29kpljr
Several people on Goodreads felt the title was misleading: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3534686694?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1