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Comment by exdsq | Hacker News Reader

And even if they were written down, the Catholic church sure did love to burn books back then!

Please don't post religious flamebait to HN. It leads to religious flamewar, the most avoidable of all flamewar, which we do want to avoid here.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649134.

I don't think it's religious flamebait, I believe it's historically accurate - but okay.

Those are not mutually exclusive.

Quite the opposite: you have copyist monks to thank for the survival of the vast majority of written material that remains from pre-christian antiquity.

How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe is a non-fiction historical book written by Thomas Cahill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Irish_Saved_Civilizati...

Love this book it was the first time I came to here the story of St. Patrick

I thought that was mostly due to Islamic scholars. Weren't the monks mostly erasing and repurposing old scrolls to make copies of the Bible?

It's complicated but yes, Islamic scholars had a role to play in preserving Greek philosophy.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-greek/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43577272

You are getting downvoted but this is the traditional history of philosophy as I understand it too (the history of Christianity will be different).

Hellenic culture and texts had permiated Africa and and Mid-east. There were various ancient libraries and academies. Byzantine scholars at the Neoplatonic Academy fled to Persia after it was closed by Justinian. Later in the 8th Century, the Greaco-Arabic Translation Movement gathered books and translated original Greek texts into Arabic at the House of Wisdom (Grand Library of Baghdad). Study of hellenic philosophy restarted in the Arabic world until the Golden Age of Islamic Philosophy with Averroes whose commentarities reintroduced Hellenic philosophy to Europe in the 12th century.

I don't think that particular flow needs any Irish Monks but <shrug> I don't know the specific sources of books used by the Translation Movement.

The monasteries of Ireland and Scotland survived the crisis and disorder of the Migration Period and re-christianized the Continent from the 8th century onwards. Yes, some texts from antiquity have come down to us only as palimpsest, but the classical writers were copied.

what? no. if we can read plato and aristotle - and a bunch of others - it's thanks to Catholics monk.

The works of Aristotle were translated from Greek to Arabic by Islamic scholars in the early Middle Ages, mostly pre-dating the Latin translations, and they were sometimes the source from which the Latin translations were made.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_of_Aristotle

2. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arabic-islamic-influence/

But people never forgot Greek. It was, and still is, a living language. (Not to mention the undesirability of second-hand translations...)

Greek Orthodox; Roman Catholics forgot Greek. Until Marsilio Ficino translated Plato to Latin around 1450, Plato had been effectively lost in the west for 1000 years.

A lot of those scholars were not "Islamic" or "Muslim", just happened to live in the area. Many of them were christians (Church of the East), Sabians, Jews, or local hellenistic inspired cults. Also some of those translations were translated to other local languages (eg. Assyrian, Hebrew...) then to Arabic.

Of course, in todays world, one could say Arabic/Islam becoming the dominant culture/religion minimized the work and exposure others get.

Here are some of the more famous ones

Christians: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunayn_ibn_Ishaq - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishaq_ibn_Hunayn - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergius_of_Reshaina - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masawaiyh

Sabians: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinan_ibn_Thabit

Cult of Sin: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thābit_ibn_Qurra

>Of course, in todays world, one could say Arabic/Islam becoming the dominant culture/religion minimized the work and exposure others get.

Similarly, 10,000 books have been translated into Arabic in the past 1,000 years. That is fewer than the number translated in Spain in one year. (<https://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/04/entertainment/et-ar...>)

The "love to burn books" mostly happened during the Counter-Reformation, which is several centuries after this book would have been written.

However, there was also the Albigensian Crusade and not a single piece of catharian writing survived this.

This is false. The "Liber de duobus principiis" survived.

Mind that this originated from a diverging faction, written about 1240, essentially after the crusade (1209–1229).

well that and the entire Mayan corpus.

what pittance of codices we have today come from Christianized Maya scribes, a massively condensed post-columbian highlight reel of their obliterated textual culture compiled at the behest of the Spanish crown and under the direction of their Catholic overseers.

Also, languages like Guarani survived because of the efforts of missionaries (the Jesuits in this case).

(But I will say that the current policy of "protecting" the isolated tribes in the Amazon from human contact by categorically shutting them off is quite horrible and uncharitable. This is rooted in the preposterous myth of the noble savage. Tribal peoples are not innocent children.)

> the current policy of "protecting" the isolated tribes in the Amazon from human contact by categorically shutting them off is quite horrible and uncharitable

I dunno. If you make contact with them, most of them will die of diseases to which they have no immunity. This happens over and over. Amazon tribes. Pacific islands. On a huge scale in the Americas. For those that do survive, the event may be so traumatic that they develop a very understandable hostility to outsiders.

I'm not sure anyone would thank Bishop de Landa for burning the entire written work of a thousand year old civilization.

Disrupting a cycle of ritualized torture may find some support on humanitarian grounds, but it was no excuse to annihilate the rest of Maya literary culture as well.

To be fair, that was also during the Counter-Reformation, or somewhat afterwards. Even if it was unrelated to the Counter-Reformation itself.

Books were still hand written and centralized, they’d have been burned such that we aren’t aware of them today - doesn’t matter if it’s 15th or 17th century

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