What changed everything was the printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440. when Caesar chased Pompey to Egypt and when Caliph Omar invaded Alexandria in 640 A.D. The famed building had its contents and structure burned during multiple periods of political upheaval, including in 48 B.C. Just look at one of the most famous examples of burning, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. “A lot of ancient book burning was a function of conquest,” Knuth says. Hillerbrand writes that the executioner charged with killing heretics like Bruno and Hus was often the same person who put flame to their books.īut for Rebecca Knuth, author of Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century and Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction, Qin and religious leaders like him are only a small part of the early book-burning equation.

In Livy’s History of Rome, finished in the 1st century A.D., he describes past rulers who ordered books containing the predictions of oracles and details about celebrations like the Bacchanalia be outlawed and burned to prevent disorder and the spread of foreign customs philosophers Giordano Bruno and Jan Hus both took positions counter to the Catholic church, the former for his work on Copernican cosmology, the latter for attacking church practices like indulgences.

Qin was only one in a long line of ancient rulers who felt threatened enough by the ideas expressed in written form to advocate arson. Although the exact amount of information lost is unknown, Chan writes that the history genre suffered the greatest loss. According to historian Lois Mai Chan, “His basic objective was not so much to wipe out these schools of thought completely as to place them under governmental control.” Books of poetry, philosophy and history were specifically targeted, so that the new emperor couldn’t be compared to more virtuous or successful rulers of the past. In 213 B.C., Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang (more widely remembered for his terracotta army in Xian) ordered a bonfire of books as a way of consolidating power in his new empire. It was a remarkable victory in the long history of books threatened by would-be arsonists-and a relatively rare one at that.īooks and libraries have been targeted by people of all backgrounds for thousands of years, sometimes intentionally and sometimes as a side-effect of war. He and others succeeded in smuggling out 350,000 manuscripts, proving not only how much the books were valued, but also the lengths to which ordinary people were willing to go to save them. But the damage could’ve been much worse if not for men like Abdel Kader Haidara, who risked their lives to protect the medieval works. When al-Qaida Islamists invaded Mali, and then Timbuktu in 2012, among their targets were priceless manuscripts-books that needed to be burned.

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