WE CAN ONLY IMAGINE the knowledge that was lost with the burning of the ageless libraries of the Roman Empire, libraries destroyed by a combination of misfortunes including the same traditional Islamic rage against "infidel" knowledge that led the Taliban to savage the ancient Buddhas of Afghanistan.
It is my own belief the Romans were even more civilized – and far more learned both about human history and world geography – than our ethnocentric arrogance allows us to imagine. There is, for example, evidence the Roman Empire regularly traded with Imperial China; there is also evidence the Roman Navy explored North America (perhaps using nautical charts captured from those ancient queens and sea-lords Taliesin described as "...the rulers of Britain, abounding in fleets"). There is evidence pre-Christian sailors circumnavigated the globe perhaps as early as Minoan times, and strong suggestions much of the ancient world was, albeit at a much slower pace, every bit as cosmopolitan as ours – that the Romans were themselves but latecomers to the shores that someday would be America. Benighted post-Medieval Europeans, suffering from the unimaginably ruinous Dark Ages destruction of human knowledge, could only conceive of America as a "New World," but a thousand years before Columbus the Keltoi called it Yargalon, the great land beyond the sunset, a fact rediscovered only about 20 years ago. Nor did we know, as the architects of Stonehenge knew 4000 years ago, that lunar eclipses move in 56-year cycles: it took the astrophysicist Gerald Hawkins (Stonehenge Decoded) to resurrect this long-lost knowledge.
When I think of the magnitude of what was lost in the burned libraries – when I think of the very concept of such loss – I am filled with an emotion that is akin to sadness but can only be expressed in music: a plaintive, minor-keyed flute song, heard as if from far away, a lament beneath a waning moon that shines on toppled stones and broken marble, lunar light on running water that chuckles without mirth. It is similar to the feeling of a breathtakingly beautiful woman fleetingly glimpsed from a great distance and no chance ever to approach, a sensation of impossible yearning for which there is no word in English and perhaps in no other human language either. The loss of What Was, and thus of an entire Future. The loss of What Might Have Been...
But now there is the chance at least some of this gaping wound will be healed. The story linked here is thus literally the most hopeful news in centuries, more potentially revolutionary than the very concept of revolution itself.
Posted by Loren at January 24, 2005 11:18 PM