![]() ![]() ![]() Whole literatureshave been lost to fire, the sword and the worm, or saved by the accidentof a falling wall. But the Britishofficer in command of the raid on Washington DC of July 22nd 1814, duringwhich the original Library of Congress was set ablaze, later testifiedthat ‘he had not known books were there and that there would have beenno such action if he had known’ (Jackson, Sydney L (1974), Libraries andLibrarianship in the West:A Brief History, McGraw Hill, New York.: 297).The transmission of cultures has always been fragile, piecemeal and contingentupon the unwitting destroyer, the unwitting conservator. The invading Medes and Chaldeans, who cared not a whit for cuneiform,accidentally preserved Assurbanipal’s library of clay tablets, among whichare the only copies of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Mesopotamian creationmyth, when they levelled Nineveh with battering rams in 612 BCE (Johnson,Elmer D and Michael H Harris (1976), History of Libraries in the WesternWorld, 3rd edn., Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, N.J.: 21). ![]()
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