Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by belovelife

wasn't in leonardos time a huge return of phylosophy books like socrates an plato and stuff that were burned throughout europe in the crusades
and in the mid 1400's people from china brought them back since they had copies from the great library of alexandria

I think you’re referring to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

This happened about 1000 years before Leonardo’s time and the Renaissance in general (about 1450-1750 AD). Much of and some of the most important activity of the Renaissance involved the spread of Latin as a “universal scholarly language”, the discovery of documents in Latin, Greek, Arabic, and other classical languages, and often, their translation into Latin. This was a period of voracious acquisition of knowledge, some of it about China, but to the best of my knowledge, classical documents found in China didn’t play a significant part in it.

Works such as those by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, were so popular in their time (about 400-300 BC) that they were widely copied and distributed, making them fairly “library burning-proof”. To this day, hardest hit when museums and libraries are destroyed are not ancient and modern “bestsellers”, but obscure stuff consisting of a single or a few copies. One can argue that very obscure works are made only a little more obscure by their destruction, but still the loss of such works means the possible loss of some obscure but vital connecting, collaborating, or contradicting data with the potential to greatly expand and improve our understanding of history.

Burning libraries is bad.