It's so painful to think about tbh. Written language only ever independently developed four times: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica. We've almost entirely lost that last branch. That whole writing system of glyphs, all the culture around it, intentionally destroyed. Barbarism to the highest degree.

This is an annoying thing to say, but I think about how much creativity, color, and culture comes from South America. A non-brutalized (I know less about central America but I assume) Central America would have done some shit like compete in the realm of anime. That's a disgusting amount of lore, stories, etc. lost to the sands of time.

cattle, so no

Absolutely not, and if they were forced to acknowledge the truth about the colonization of the "new world" they would say it was conquest and thus it is cool and good because the white man deserved to do it. After all, they were stronger and superior, and might makes right (Ignore the fact that white people didn't even know not to shit in the same rivers they drank from).

I haven't done a deep dive on it but from my understanding:

• It has been greatly exaggerated

• It is framed in a very propagandistic way and it could just as easily be said that during the Spanish Inquisition there was the widespread superstitious practice of ritually torturing and executing people as human sacrifices to their God, if you wanted to use that same sort of framing

• Like always, this is used to divert attention away from the brutality of the settler-colonists and as a justification ("Well they were doing it too!!"/"We had to be brutal or otherwise they would have slaughtered us all!!") This trope inevitably gets brought up with regards to native American peoples participating in slavery or scalping or acts of retribution and so on.

I mean no, the human sacrifice stuff is very well documented in both extant Mayan art on surviving buildings, various Mayan poems that have survived into the modern era, and detailed in the Madrid codex, one of the four surviving codices mentioned in this post.

It is guilt. When they attacks killed people it was part of a grand tradion to honor the gods and protect the earth. When the Spanish killed people it is because they wanted silver so they could make fun of the French about it. So it feels cheap in comparison

Researchers have long thought that Maya cities were largely isolated and self-sustaining

I wonder how anyone really thought that's possible. There's no case that I know of, in any civilization ever, of cities being sustainable by themselves without vast rural areas providing the necessary agricultural produce. Don't archaeologists simply run the numbers of "ok, these many people lived here, that would require X hectares of agricultural produce comparing to similar agricultural development in these past civilisations"?

We humans

That sort of generalization lets the monsters off easy and pointlessly demonizes everyone. Throwing "we" around like that only makes excuses for the worst people around.

Bet you tankoids never considered that it was human nature to be genocidal conquerors

You can add Nalanda Mahavihara to that list.

The destruction of Nalanda is a contentious topic because it is sorta the epicentre of Buddhist anti-Islamic sentiment.

It's held among scholars that the Muslim empires that displaced Buddhism from Pakistan and Afghanistan (Gandhara, one of the most important civilisations to Buddhism, straddled Pakistan and Afghanistan and there's the famous Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan that were partially destroyed by the Taliban) as well as the destruction of Nalanda Mahavihara and northern India coming under Muslim rule that directly influenced Buddhist eschatology and specifically the Kalachakra Tantra. (Also the Tibetan empire spanned all the way to Kabul in Afghanistan briefly before they got pushed back by the Abbasid caliphate.)

The Kalachakra Tantra has a lot in it but there's the prophesied end times, where "barbarians" (guess who) with their "false dharma" will lay waste to all of Buddhism (what's the Buddhist analogue of the word Christendom?) and then the king of the fabled kingdom of Shambhala will ride out with a massive army to repel the barbarians and restore peace and justice and Buddhism to the world, ushering in a global Buddhist golden age.

(The Kalachakra Tantra puts lots of the big Abrahamic prophets on blast, referring to figures like Abraham, Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and the Islamic eschatological figure Mahdi [who also serves a similar role to the king of Shambhala to Muslims in Islamic teachings] as being demonic, but it positions Islam squarely as the primary antagonist.)

The Kalachalra Tantra became a largely Tibetan Buddhist thing over time and it is of central importance to the Jonang school of Tibetan Buddhism, ironically it was a previous Dalai Lama and his Gelug school that suppressed the Jonang school and banned their writings and practices, and much of the Jonang school survived in Western China outside the reach of the Dalai Lama and (again ironically) the Jonang school was sheltered in post-revolutionary China. The larger ironic twist here is that the current Dalai Lama has himself brought the Kalachalra Tantra to forefront of Tibetan Buddhism, riding on a wave of sinophobic red terror sentiment and the post-9/11 islamophobic war or terror sentiment in the west.

I'm trying to avoid any particular heavy-handed bias here, besides calling the "Tibetan Buddhism is all peace, love, and understanding" trope to account because it's important to understand that the Dalai Lama pitches a lot of stuff specifically to the west in order to curry favour. It's also important to understand that, while the Dalai Lama claims to be a simple monk, his actions are very much rooted in political manoeuvres and there are things like him fostering interfaith dialogue at events where he is teaching Kalachakra Tantra, which is pretty ironic to do when you are spreading teachings that assert that Abrahamic religions are demonic. But this was also at time when those other religious leaders were in the region to commemorate the anniversary of the execution of the (sorta) last Sikh guru at the hands of the (Muslim) Mughal Emperor, so if you know your Buddhist theology and your North Indian history then it casts this interfaith dialogue in a very different, very political light.

It's quite a can of worms.

My best advice would be to avoid falling into simplistic narratives of the noble underdog when it comes to talking about things like the destruction of ancient libraries - it definitely sucks that these libraries were destroyed and it represents a huge loss to humanity but at the same time if you extrapolate out too far you end up seeing history through the lens of the Muslim barbarians vs the sympathetic underdog Buddhists who barbarically suppressed the sympathetic underdog Jonang school who promulgated the Kalachakra Tantra which barbarically vilifies the sympathetic underdog Muslims who barbarically destroyed the Nalanda Mahavihara, which was a major centre of learning and culture for the sympathetic underdog Buddhists... you get the idea.

(On the other hand, what the Europeans did in the Americas was one of the absolute worst atrocities that the world has ever witnessed so maybe adopting a partisan angle isn't always the worst thing to do.)

The burning of the Library of Alexandria was accidental and though the sacking of Rome caused cultural destruction (and to a much greater extent, human misery), I don't think there was even the faintest attempt of the systematic obliteration of a culture, they were just looting shit and incidentally breaking things (and kidnapping women, which is the human misery part). The Nazis are the only historical comparison that actually holds up, because their bibliocausts were very similar in character to the cultural genocide in the OP.

I'm mad about the Internet Archive stuff too, but I need to say that it's again a completely inappropriate comparison. The archive is being attacked over opposition to freedom of information and, even if it gets effectively taken down and everything on it wiped, the real cultural destruction involved will be purely incidental to the real capitalist purpose of protecting intellectual property sovereignty. They aren't aiming to erase any information, they are just completely apathetic to such a thing happening.

No connection between these ideologies and systems, nope! It's all just huMaN NatURe

the library of alexandria didn't go down like that lol.