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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

There's basically no surviving Mayan literature, thanks to the hard work of the Catholic church. So good luck finding more evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_civilization#Writing_and_...

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Led by Bishop Diego De Landa, specifically.

>We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which were not to be seen as superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affliction.

The same individual of whom it's been said

>ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us in the pages that follow, or have learned in the use and study of what he told.

So yeah, scholarship of the Maya civilization is extraordinarily challenging.

That quote still shocks me every time I read it. Such depravity.

Dude, those indios were gonna go to hell if they kept reading those books. Letting them be tortured for all eternity would be truly depraved.

I think the word you were looking for is “narrow-minded”. But even then, Landa thought he had gone through enough to see that there was nothing of value in the Maya books. Even tried to learn the language a little. He just didn’t have the mental and cultural framework to care about other perspectives.

You know they tortured people right? This wasn't some soft-minded priest who just wanted to save them from the devil, by offering them waffles and a nice little chat.

You're giving a racist and close-minded Bishop too much credit IMHO

Or you're attributing malice when stupidity suffices. Hanlon's razor.

Hanlon's razor is great and all. But sometimes there really is just a lot of malice and stupidity at the same time.

Stupidity is itself malicious. CatWChainsaw's Nastier Razor.

It's a miracle that India was spared this fate.

All thanks to the East India Company being a soulless megacorp devoted to profits instead of religious zeal like the other colonists.

Even before East India Company, India faced several outsider attacks.

From Alexander the Great to various Khan's, then Mughals, then Portuguese etc. Some important Indian texts were burned/destoryed in these attacks, For eg., the Nalanda University

Still, a lot of texts remained both in written format and in Oral format.

>Nalanda University.

I feel like the role of Nalanda in Indian history has been greatly exaggerated.

The education system was very decentralized, and that's really why most things have survived.

There is not much evidence of concrete knowledge/resources being lost at Nalanda.

Nalanda U operated for 600 years from 427 CE (!!!) holding over 9m texts [2] The importance of texts from that generation at that scale cannot be overstated

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220120055253/https://www.patna... [2] https://www.myindiamyglory.com/2017/09/11/nalanda-9-million-...

The 9 million figure is exaggerated by a few order of magnitudes.

Also, think about it in this way: if some of the manuscripts there was the only copy available, were those really impactful?

Two more factors, India had contact with most of the world since the beginning, so no new disease wiped it on contact. Also you can not overestimate the population of India.

The population density was not higher than the Mayans, Aztecs (and several dozen civilizations in the middle east) who did get wiped out.

You are right about the diseases being endemic in the population.

Using the word "literature" is highly eurocentric here. These weren't really books, more like very specific manuals for an esoteric and very small caste of priests.

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