There once was a priceless book. We know its name because it is mentioned or referred to by a few of the oldest bits of manuscripts we have from ancient times. Carl Sagan referred to it in a couple of his books. It was called “The True History of Mankind Over the Last 100,000 Years.” The reason you have never heard of it is because it was destroyed when the great library of Alexandria was burned.

Alexandria’s library was the world’s greatest. It housed half a million books in a day and age when a king might be able to own two or three books if he was outrageously wealthy. It was the repository of all the knowledge man had acquired up to that point. It employed over 100 scholars full time to research, file, and classify the documents, inscribed stones, etc. It had its own zoo, gardens, and nine shrines to the Muses. Its loss is one of the top two or three most tragic crimes against humanity in the ancient world.

Who burned it? As hard as this is to believe — we aren’t sure who started its destruction. Some say that Julius Caesar first attacked it by accident in 48BC. Pursuing Pompey, Caesar was cut off by several Egyptian ships. He set some smaller boats on fire and let them drift against the ships of his enemy (a common naval tactic of the time). The counterattack was successful, but the Egyptian ships, now ablaze, ran aground by the library and caused significant damage. Caesar wasn’t terribly proud of that and didn’t mention it in official Roman archives; we get this from Alexandrian writings only. The second attack on the library was by a Bishop named Theophilus around 400AD. He took over one of the chapels — the Temple of Seraphis which held about 10% of the library’s manuscripts — and turned it into a Christian church. Sometime during that switchover, it seems he burned the manuscripts, either as a display of disdain for pre-Christian writings or, more prosaically, as fuel for cooking fires. Later, after Theophilus died and his son, Cyril became chief Bishop (Patriarch), the pagan ruler of Alexandria, Orestus, killed a Christian monk. Rumors spread quickly that the monk was killed because Hypatia, a female philosopher and the head of the library, had leaned on Orestus and demanded it. True or not, pagans and Christians went after each other in the streets and riots swept through the city.

But we’re not done. Jews, who used to wield great power in the city, used this opportunity to ambush some Christians and kill them. Three different groups went at each other hammer and tongs — pagans, Christians, and Jews. Eventually, Hypatia was killed and dragged through the streets (or was killed by being dragged — it’s hard to nail this down). By the time it was all over, the library had lost between 20-30% of their manuscripts, inscriptions (on disks, stones, statues, idols, tablets — all of which would have been viewed with great suspicion by both Christians and Jews). The rest of the library was safe… until…

The Muslims came sweeping in as Caliph Omar attacked in 640AD. He had been told of a library that housed all the knowledge of mankind from the very beginning. His general (Amr ibn al-Aas) asked the Caliph what should be done with the information there. The Muslim leader replied “they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous.” He ordered the manuscripts to be used for fuel for bathhouses. One of those books was called “The True History of Mankind Over the Last 100,000 Years.” The stones and inscriptions were savagely torn apart and thrown into the bottoms of ships to serve as ballast or used as paving stones. There were so many books, it took six months to burn them all.

The Chinese had their own version of this tragedy. In 212BC Emperor Chi Huang Ti ordered all ancient texts (i.e. any that predated him) destroyed throughout the kingdom. Everything pertaining to history, science, and philosophy was lost because of this order given by the master architect of the Great Wall. Many works by Confucius and Mencius were lost forever.

The Spanish Conquistadors destroyed thousands and thousands of Mayan codexes. They wanted all of that “pagan” writing to vanish from the face of the earth and they nearly succeeded. Today, we have a grand total of four Mayan books. It is estimated that over 10,000 were destroyed.

Roman Catholics under direct orders from the Vatican swept into towns all over North Africa and throughout Europe killing men, women, and children for the crime of being Christians with their own ideas or ways to worship. In Southern France alone, nearly a million were killed. When the generals asked how to tell the true (i.e. Roman) Christians from the heretics, they were told “Kill them all. God will know His own.” Their books were, of course, burned. When Crusaders, under direction from Rome and with its blessing, sacked the Christian city of Constantinople they were expressly told to destroy all the manuscripts in its library. Lost forever were hundreds of books by early Christians and thousands of books by those who came after them.

We cannot recover that knowledge, lost forever because some Bishop or Imam wanted to heat some bath water or because some Pope was afraid of anyone whose worship he didn’t control. The stories of those cities under the Mediterranean, the exploratory voyages of the ancients, or even how to translate thousands of odd inscriptions we still have… all gone. What we have to do now is hunt for clues carved on the side of mountains in West Virginia and Morocco, scraps of manuscripts in Libya that match symbols found in Mexico, etc. That is what the Hidden History/Hidden People series is all about. It is detective work, an adventure story, a tragedy, and an attempt to decipher shadows seen out of the corner of our eyes. The good news is… if we ignore the Standard Story, there is much there to learn.