The secret
libraries of history
After news emerged about an
underground reading room in Damascus, Fiona Macdonald discovers the places
where writing has been hidden for centuries.
Beneath
the streets of a suburb of Damascus, rows of shelves hold books that have been
rescued from bombed-out buildings. Over the past four years, during the siege
of Darayya, volunteers have collected 14,000 books from shell-damaged homes.
They are held in a location kept secret amid fears that it would be targeted by
government and pro-Assad forces, and visitors have to dodge shells and bullets
to reach the underground reading space.
It’s
been called Syria’s secret
library, and many view it as a vital resource. “In a sense the library gave
me back my life,” one regular user, Abdulbaset Alahmar, told the BBC. “I would
say that just like the body needs food, the soul needs books.”
Religious
or political pressures have meant that books have been hidden throughout
history – whether in secret caches or private collections. One of those is now
known as ‘the Library Cave’.
The
Library Cave
On
the edge of the Gobi Desert in China, part of a network of cave shrines at
Dunhuang called the Thousand Buddha Grottoes, it was sealed for almost 1000
years. In 1900, Taoist monk Wang Yuanlu – an unofficial guardian of the caves –
discovered the hidden door that led to a chamber filled with manuscripts dating
from the fourth to the 11th Centuries.
Provincial
authorities showed little interest in the documents after Wang contacted them;
but news of the cave spread, and Hungarian-born explorer Aurel Stein persuaded
him to sell about 10,000 manuscripts. Delegations from France, Russia and Japan
followed, and most of the ancient texts left the cave. According
to The New Yorker, “By 1910, when the Chinese government ordered the
remaining documents to be transferred to Beijing, only about a fifth of the
original hoard remained.”
Despite
that, many of the original manuscripts can now be seen: an initiative to
digitise the collection was launched in 1994. The
International Dunhuang Project – led by the British Library, with partners
worldwide – means that, as The New Yorker says, “Armchair archive-divers can
now examine the earliest complete star chart in the world, read a prayer
written in Hebrew by a merchant on his way from Babylon to China, inspect a
painting of a Christian saint in the guise of a bodhisattva, examine a contract
drawn up for the sale of a slave girl to cover a silk trader’s debt, or page
through a book on divination written in Turkic runes.”
No
one knows why the cave was sealed: Stein argued that it was a way of storing
manuscripts no longer used but too important to be thrown away, a kind of
‘sacred waste’, while French sinologist Paul Pelliot believed it happened in
1035, when the Xi Xia empire invaded Dunhuang. Chinese scholar Rong Xinjiang has suggested
that the cave was closed off amid fears of an invasion by Islamic
Karakhanids, which never occurred.
Whatever
the reason they were originally hidden, the cave’s contents have altered
history since they were revealed just over a century ago. One of the Dunhuang
documents, the Diamond Sutra, is a key Buddhist sacred work: according
to the British Library, the copy in the cave dates back to 868 and is “the
world's earliest complete survival of a dated printed book”.
It’s
a reminder that paper and printing did not originate in Europe. “Printing began
as a form of prayer,” says
The New Yorker, “the equivalent of turning a prayer wheel or slipping a
note into the Western Wall in Jerusalem, but on an industrial scale.”
A
wing and a prayer
The
location of another hidden stash of religious texts has been known since it was
founded in 1612 – yet that hasn’t stopped it being the subject of conspiracy
theories. The Vatican Secret Archives feature papal correspondences going back
more than 1000 years, and appeared in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, as a
Harvard ‘symbologist’ battled the Illuminati. The
rumoured contents of the collection include alien skulls, documentation of
the bloodline of Jesus and a time machine called the Chronovisor, built by a
Benedictine monk so that he could go back in time and film Jesus’ crucifixion.
In
an attempt to dispel the myths, access
has been opened up in recent years, and there was an exhibition of
documents from the archives at
the Capitoline Museums in Rome. Pope Leo XIII first allowed carefully
vetted scholars to visit in 1881, and now many documents can be viewed by
researchers – although browsing is prohibited. The word ‘secret’ in the name
comes from the Latin ‘secretum’, which is closer to ‘private’; yet areas of the
archives remain off-limits.
Scholars
aren’t allowed to look at any papal papers since 1939, when the controversial
wartime Pontiff Pius XII became Pope, and a section of the archives relating to
the personal affairs of cardinals from 1922 onwards can’t be accessed.
Housed
in a concrete bunker, part of a wing behind St Peter’s Basilica, the archives
are protected by Swiss Guards and officers from the Vatican City’s own police
force. They reinforce the power of the words held within. As well as
correspondence between the Vatican and figures such as Mozart, Erasmus,
Charlemagne, Voltaire and Adolf Hitler, there is King Henry VIII’s request to
annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon: when this was refused by Pope
Clement VII, Henry divorced her and sparked Rome’s break with the Church of
England. The archives also contain Pope Leo X’s 1521 decree excommunicating
Martin Luther, a handwritten transcript of the trial against Galileo for heresy
and a letter from Michelangelo complaining he hadn’t been paid for work on the
Sistine Chapel.
Another
brick in the wall
Not
defended by armed guard but by centuries of forgetting, one collection in Old
Cairo (Fustat), Egypt was left alone until a Romanian Jew recognised its
significance. Jacob Saphir described the stash in an 1874 book – yet it wasn’t
until 1896, when Scottish twin sisters Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson showed
some of its manuscripts to fellow Cambridge University academic Solomon
Schechter, that the trove became widely known.
Hidden
in a wall of the Ben Ezra synagogue were almost 280,000 Jewish manuscript
fragments: what has come to be called the Cairo Genizah. According to Jewish
law, no writings containing the name of God can be thrown away: those that have
fallen out of use are stored in an area of a synagogue or cemetery until they
can be buried. The repository is known as a genizah, which comes from the
Hebrew originally meaning ‘to hide away’, and later known as an ‘archive’.
For
1000 years, the Jewish community in Fustat deposited their texts in the sacred
store. And the Cairo Genizah was left untouched. “Medieval Jews hardly wrote
anything at all – whether personal letters or shopping lists – without
referring to God,” says
The New Yorker. As a result, “we have a frozen postbox of some two hundred
and fifty thousand fragments composing an unparalleled archive of life in Egypt
from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries… No other record as long or as full
exists.”
Ben
Outhwaite, the head of genizah research at Cambridge, told
The New Yorker how important the Cairo Genizah collection is for scholars.
“It is not hyperbole to talk about it as having rewritten what we knew of the
Jews, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages.”
The
fragments reveal that Jewish merchants collaborated with Christians and
Muslims; that Jews were treated more tolerantly than previously assumed, and
anti-Semitism was less common than thought. Their importance is increasingly
being acknowledged. In 2013, the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge Universities
joined together to raise funds to keep the collection intact – the first time
they have worked together in this way.
At
the time, David Abulafia, author of The Great Sea: A Human History of the
Mediterranean, said:
“The Cairo Genizah documents are like a searchlight, illuminating dark corners
of the history of the Mediterranean and shedding a bright light on the social,
economic and religious life of the Jews not just of medieval Egypt but of lands
far away. There is nothing to compare with them as source for the history of
the 10th to 12th Centuries, anywhere in Europe or the Islamic world.”
Between
the lines
In
2013, the Dutch Medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel described ‘a remarkable
discovery’ made by students in a class he taught at Leiden University. “While
students were systematically going through the binding remains in the
library,” he says in a
blog post titled A Hidden Medieval Archive Surfaces, they found “132 notes,
letters and receipts from an unidentified court in the Rhine region, jotted on
little slips of paper. They were hidden inside the binding of a book printed in
1577”.
Rather
than being ‘sacred waste’ too important to throw away, the fragments were
examples of rubbish recycled by bookbinders. “Recycling medieval written
material was a frequent occurrence in the workshop of early-modern (as well as
medieval) binders,” writes Kwakkel. “When a printed book from 1577 was to be
fitted with its binding, the binder grabbed the 132 paper slips from his
equivalent of a blue recycling bin and moulded them, likely wet, into cardboard
boards.”
The
process means that words never intended for posterity can still be read today.
“The slips are first of all remarkable simply because such small written
objects rarely survive from medieval society… There are few places where such
objects can slumber undisturbed for centuries,” he says. “This is when their
long journey to our modern period started, as stowaways hitchhiking on 16th
Century printed matter.”
Including
receipts, requests to servants and shopping lists, it’s a collection that’s
rare for historians. “Messages like these bring us as close to real medieval
society as you can get,” writes Kwakkel. “They are the medieval voices we
normally don’t hear, that tell the story of what happened ‘on the ground’.”
And
it’s a collection that could be far bigger than first thought. Using an X-ray
technology created to look beneath the surface of paintings and detect earlier
stages of composition, Kwakkel has developed a way to see through fragile book
bindings. In October 2015, he began scanning early printed books in Leiden
University Library.
“The
new technique is amazing in that it shows us fragments – medieval text – that
we could otherwise never see because they are hidden behind a layer of parchment
or paper,” wrote Kwakkel in a blog post about his Hidden Library project. While
the technology needs to be improved, it hints at a process that could reveal a
secret library within a library. “We might be able to access a hidden
medieval ‘library’ if we were able to gain access to the thousands of
manuscript fragments hidden in bindings.”
Regards
Pralhad Jadhav
Senior Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
No comments:
Post a Comment