When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall.
It’s one of those images that stick with you: Hypatia, pagan philosopher, dragged from her lofty chariot through the streets of Alexandria, her flesh cut from her body with oyster shells, burned to death as the last vestige of idolatry. She was accounted by some as not merely a librarian at the great Library of Alexandria, but its head librarian; the last head librarian; her death is therefore accounted by some as the end of that great era.
By some. We’re pretty sure she was murdered, but the oyster shells while a nice touch are not so certain, and as to whether she was the head librarian, well. It makes for a nice story. And the burning of the Library itself? We’re not even too sure about who did that, or when, or how. It went, we know that—it was there, unquestionably, and now it isn’t, and people got upset about it. But not enough of the record survives to tell us for sure what happened to it.
The same problem threatens to inconvenience future generations: video tape degrades, after all, and links rot; digitial media is upgraded willy nill without taking the time to bring everything from the past with us—what will you do with that 8-inch floppy disk, grampaw? And, paradoxically, there is too much information: too many stories flying around, written and told too many different ways. Who knows how what is happening here and now will end up being told in a thousand years?
Which is why it is incumbent upon all of us to engrave these words somewhere and kept them in that peculiar taboo state, untouchable and safe, where the sacred meets the profane:
The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over, and over, and over, and it’s the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times, and you think, “My goodness, were there that many vases? Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?”
So that when our children, and our children’s children, and their children besides, ask, “Who destroyed the treasures of the Fertile Crescent? Who let the golden harp of Sumer slip through his fingers? The cuneiform tablets and the copper shoes? Who pledged to do his best not to war on the earliest history of humanity, and failed to keep his pledge? Who destroyed the history and the heritage of the people he tried to save, thus fueling the very hate from which he hoped to save them?” we can smile sorrowfully at them and say, “Donald Rumsfeld,” and then, demurely, spit, to rinse the foul taste of his name from our mouths.
Is it possible there were that many vases in the whole country?
—Some will frame this as a moral dilemma and yes, if you were to ask me, point blank, would I save the person or the Picasso from a burning building, I’d rather see RAWA live and thrive than save a hundred ancient statues of the Buddha, any day. But RAWA’s not exactly thriving these days, either, and anyway, the dilemma’s a false one. It’s more like this: if you plan to set fire to a museum to smoke out a madman, are you morally obligated to arrange to save as many paintings as possible? When you saw the bough off the tree, should you not try your best to catch the cradle?
Well?
The Jews ambushed the Christians, and the Christians slaughtered the pagans with oyster shells and fire. Cæsar didn’t give a fuck how he got his outnumbered force out of Dodge and torched the city to cover his escape. ’Amr bin Aas, who conquered Egypt to prove that he was a better general than Khalid ibn Walid, is supposed to have been asked what he would do to secure the scrolls and codices of the great Library; he is supposed to have said:
If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed.
But that’s apocryphal. Especially the bit about him burning the scrolls and codices to heat his bathwater for six months. —The irreparable destruction of the irreplaceable cradle of civilization is not apocryphal, for all that it is not burning up our television screens. The blood and the oil and the hypocrisy are not apocryphal. The seven billion dollars for capping nonexistent oil fires is very real, and the monumental stupidity and colossal ignorance preen openly before the press.
Is it possible there were that many vases in the whole country?
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Thanks for this. The only Hypatia I'd heard of was (ahem) Hypatia Lee. I'm trying to figure out what, if anything, was the connection. Perhaps Ms. Lee's day job was librarian?
I will now spend all week reading each one of these links. But right now I am glad to have read this post. The images I have seen on television and the newspaper are the devastated insides of museums, pottery smashed, tablets in pieces, crap from the cradle of civilization returning to the earth after a hiatus of a few thousand years. Most of the sentiments you express here, in particular holding the invading nation responsible for the safety of the occupied nation and its cultural treasures, has been forcefully made by the Iraqis themselves, shouting and jabbing their fingers at the soldiers standing around, no doubt dumbfounded. The grunt on the ground obviously has no orders to secure the history of the area, just the area itself, and only from further attack. The buck travels up much farther. The sight of Rummy shrugging his shoulders, poopooing the reports of looting as exaggerated, even while some experts predict that the ongoing lawlessness could be more ruinous than the bombing, is disgraceful.
Tell the Syrians to store their artefacts in a secure bunker somewhere. They're next.
It looks to my admittedly unmilitary and un-barrister like mind that the Geneva Convention, as well as the UNESCO accords the US signed stipulate the protection of the assets of an occupied country, including cultural assets. And no, it doesn't look good that we can spare the people to protect oil wells and not the National Museum, or the libraries, from looting.
Um...
Amen? Or at least Bravo, well-said.
Hypatia Lee was a porn star in the 1980's. She was half cherokeehalf irish and 100%horni. I hope she found happiness after her porn career.