Christopher Columbus Letter on What He Discovered in America Could Fetch $1.5M | Hacker News Reader

Christopher Columbus Letter on What He Discovered in America Could Fetch $1.5M

news.artnet.com

24 pointsrmason13 comments

Not to be on dangling modifier patrol, but I’d be quite amused if Columbus thought discoveries from America were worth $1.5M dollars (in a currency that hadn’t even come around yet)

Yeah the title is a little hard to parse.

To be fair, the headline doesn't say US dollars, and both the name and symbol were taken from the Spanish dollar, which was not unknown to Columbus.

It very much was unknown to Columbus - The first spanish "Dollars" were minted with New World silver.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler#Etymology / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaler#Spain_and_France

It's a shame the people who settled the islands of the Pacific, the Caribbean, etc thousands of years ago didn't have written language. The stories they could tell!

Mayans had an extensive library but colonizers burned all except for 3 or 4 of the pre-colombian books.

https://www.archaeology.org/issues/44-1211/features/maya-201....

The Mayan colonized there neighbors pretty brutally, so much so the suppressed tribes supported the conquistadores. So guessing, there libraries were filled with empire justification nonsense as found today still in the old colonial time libraries of Britain, France, Russia and us.

So, let us reconstruct one: "tar, we are gods chosen special people for we murdered and enslaved the hippies of the costal regions. We brought them roads and protection from inter tribe warfare. This empire of ours will go on forever.we have no pity for God told us all the others are not real people and we can trample them freely. "

Your utopia is in another castle, Mario.

Even if it is empire justification, there is going to be a ton of actual information in there about the way of life, hierarchy, gods, professions and whatever other incidental thing comes along with the royal honorifics.

Usually destroying a library is a haphazard thing done by illiterate people. When the secularists raided the monastrys during the Bildersturm, the old tomes were used to line the muddy roads, thrown into ditches and ponds. Maybe something similar happened here. One of the helpers, afraid of the return of the empire that always was, packed holy scripture into pockets/pots and then took it home. In that case it would make sense to look for them near the old villages of the tribal helpers?

Destruction of the Mayan codices wasn't done by illiterates out of ignorance, it was a deliberate, systematic policy by Franciscan missionaries to eradicate the Mayan religion by destroying any writing which might support, reference, or communicate it in any way.

> there libraries were filled with empire justification nonsense

> Your utopia is in another castle, Mario.

This clearly follows the strawman fallacy. Nobody was suggesting otherwise. I was merely pointing out they did have writing.

(Nearly) your entire post is unsupported speculation and dismantling a straw man that wasn't present in this conversation. It is well-supported that mayans were often brutal to their neighbors. The rest is ahistorical.

So what? Doesn’t make the conquistadors any less genocidal.

When we manage to get people on Mars, I wonder what current items will sell for huge sums as historical documents in the future?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com