Burned Libraries Make Iraq's History a War Casualty


Amid the shock over the plunder of priceless artworks from Iraq's National Museum of Antiquities, relatively little attention has been paid to the burning last week of Iraq's libraries. While the extent of the loss is not yet fully known, two great libraries, with priceless ancient collections, have been burned, and at least two others looted.

''In many respects, what has happened is the complete destruction of history,'' says Traianos Gagos, head archivist of the University of Michigan Papyrus Collection. ''Manuscripts are the main materials we use to write history - it is the evidence. Books published in the last 30 years can be replaced. But rare manuscripts can never be replaced.''

''The looting and burning of virtually all these collections,'' says Andras Riedlmayer, bibliographer in Islamic art at Harvard's Fine Arts Library and a specialist in cultural heritage threatened by war, ''is an incalculable and largely irreplaceable loss. Just imagine the Library of Congress and National Archive pillaged and burned.''

The rest of the article appears in yesterday's Boston Globe here. You're reading the blog of someone whose home is overwhelmed with books. The den has floor to ceiling shelves on every wall; my long-suffering wife even allows one wall of the bedroom to be covered with bookshelves. And there are still more books stacked on the floor in this office. No, all books are not created equal. But a story like this still reads to me like a species of sacrilege.

[Thanks, Kirk, for the reference.]