Juan Cole / Informed Comment
_Egypt Scientific Institute up in Flames_
(http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/juancole/ymbn/~3/ELPIBQOm204/egypt-scientific-institute-up-in-flames.html?utm
_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email)
Posted: 20 Dec 2011 08:21 AM PST
_The Scientific Institute in Cairo has been burned_
(http://arabnews.com/middleeast/article550955.ece) . It was the second oldest
such institute
outside Europe, after the one in Philadelphia. Some 200,000 rare books and
manuscripts are abruptly gone. The military government of Egypt allegedly
stationed snipers atop the building, who fired on demonstrators, putting the
Scientific Institute in the crossfire of Egypt’s current political struggle.
I discussed this institute, founded by Gen. Napoleon Bonaparte, in my
book, _Napoleon’s Egypt_
(http://www.amazon.com/Napoleons-Egypt-Invading-Middle-East/dp/B0068EQA42/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324397176&sr=8-1)
.
The loss of all these historical materials points to the dire need for the
digitization of such collections without delay. Google is doing large
scale digitization of printed books, but most of them exist in multiple copies
in various repositories. It is hand written manuscripts that need to be
digitized, since often there are only one or two copies surviving and they are
easily lost.
We lost much of the intellectual history of Najaf, Iraq, during the savage
attack on that Shiite holy city by Saddam Hussein’s forces in spring of
1991. We lost much of the 20th century history of Iraq when the cabinet
papers were burned during the Bush invasion, when SecDef Donald Rumsfeld
declined to stop the looting, a crime I called cliocide.
When I was working in the Egyptian Archives and the Egyptian National
Library in the 1980s, I pleaded with the American University in Cairo
librarian
to find a way to get more rare materials microfilmed, but he couldn’t see
how that was AUC’s responsibility. It isn’t, but it is not as if the
Mubarak family was interested in manuscript preservation, so who else would do
it?
The Egyptian government has moved the country’s archives to a building on
the Nile near the television station. This move was most unwise, since the
building is not air conditioned and that area is very humid. They had been
held up at the Citadel, which was drier and better. Moreover, that building
is also worryingly near some of the violence that has occurred. In any
case, the documents desperately need to be digitized. Some are already
deteriorating, being eaten by pests or even rats.
Organizations interested in the world’s historical heritage need to drop
everything and promote large scale digitization of these collections. It
wouldn’t be that expensive and nowadays can be done quickly.
We are all diminished, we human beings, when a good book winks forever out
of existence, or when a large swathe of human experience is irrevocably
lost.
--
Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
