Three Great Book Burnings in Iranian History and Their Historical Effects on Iranian Heritage and Culture How can one think about the immense body of knowledge lost in the three great book burnings of Iranian history without being overwhelmed by regret and sorrow? The First Book Burning In the first catastrophe of book burning, according to the Denkard, written in Middle Persian Pahlavi, Alexander burned all the nasks and books of the Magi except those concerning medicine and astronomy, translated what remained into Greek, and transferred them to the Library of Alexandria. The Bundahishn, which survives in Pahlavi and is devoted to explaining the metaphysical outlook of the Zoroastrian tradition, likewise refers to this great book burning by Alexander. The Arda Viraf Namag, written in Pahlavi in the third century CE, refers to Alexander’s destruction of all the manuscripts kept in the royal library, as well as the Avesta and the Zand, all of which had been written in gold ink on cowhide. In the tenth century CE, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni again recorded this event in his writings on the history of nations, together with his grief at the loss of such a valuable treasury. Whenever I encounter the word “Great” beside Alexander’s name, I think: if history had been reversed, and an Iranian king in the third century BCE had destroyed all the surviving books from Thales to Plato and transferred only a selection of them to Pasargadae, by what name would the Western world remember that conqueror? The Second Book Burning Existing historical accounts suggest that even after the first burning, the selection Alexander transferred to Alexandria remained a valuable treasury. Hermippus, the Greek philosopher from Smyrna in the third century BCE, had, according to Pliny—the celebrated Roman historian of the first century CE—conducted a very detailed study of Zoroastrian texts. Pliny states that these amounted to more than two million lines, or the equivalent of 800 rolls, consisting of writings attributed to the Magi as well as to Zarathustra himself, preserved in a separate section of the Library of Alexandria. Hermippus believed that Greek philosophy and thought had their roots in the knowledge and rites of the Magi. Pliny also mentions one of Hermippus’s pupils, Callimachus, who compiled an exact list of all these books and placed it in the Library of Alexandria. Both that catalogue and Hermippus’s book are now among the lost works of history, destroyed with the Library of Alexandria. Diogenes Laertius, writing in the third century CE in Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, states in relation to Hermippus that he also composed a multi-volume work entitled Peri Magon, On the Magi. This book too is today one of history’s lost works. Finally, the great catastrophe of the burning of the Library of Alexandria by Julius Caesar in 48 BCE destroyed the remaining texts that had survived from Iran before Alexander’s invasion. In 2004, a Polish-Egyptian team of archaeologists announced that they had succeeded in discovering remains of the legendary Library of Alexandria. It was news that Iranians should have considered important to follow, yet one could scarcely find even a passing reference to it among the news reports, because few people were aware even of the historical relationship between this library and the historical heritage of the Iranian lands. The Third Book Burning According to Ibn Khaldun’s account in the Muqaddimah, after the Muslim conquest of Iran, Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas wrote to Umar to say that vast collections of manuscripts had been discovered and asked him what should be done with them. Umar ibn al-Khattab is said to have replied: throw them all into the water, because if they contain truth, we possess something better than it, and if they contain unbelief and error, it is better that they should all be destroyed. And so, it is said, all those books were either cast into the water or given to the flames. Regarding the Arabs’ burning of books in Khwarazm alone, Abu Rayhan al-Biruni writes in al-Athar al-Baqiya 'an al-Qurun al-Khaliya, pages 35, 36, and 48: “When Qutayba ibn Muslim, the commander of Hajjaj, went to Khwarazm for a second time and reconquered it, he put mercilessly to the sword everyone who wrote the Khwarazmian script and possessed knowledge of its history, sciences, and accounts of the past. He destroyed all the mobads and hirbads of the people, and burned and ruined all their books.” And now we look at the ghost of our history, imagining that the ruins of civilization are the only inheritance of our past repeatedly burned in the fires of invaders. Yet what has happened to the heritage of thought and culture of the Iranian lands has, in my view, been experienced by no other land, civilization, or culture throughout history. After all this, the Western historian asks Iranians: where is the written evidence of your civilization? If there was a civilization, why have so few books survived? What many of us Iranians do not know is that, because of Iran’s historical wars first with Greece and later with Rome, the Western world—which understands its own civilization as Greco-Roman—has always regarded Iran as an Eastern stranger and even an enemy. Over the past forty years, relations between Iran and the West have provided an additional motive for this perspective among Western researchers of history and philosophy. My own experience in Australian universities has been that, out of every hundred doctoral projects in history, ninety concern Greece and Rome and the other ten are devoted to the Far East. Research on Iranian history attracts the least interest because there are very few academics working in the area, and their number diminishes each year. My effort in these years has been to recover missing lines and articulate a philosophical tradition that began with Mazdayasnian thought and, after Islam, was reborn in the philosophy of Illumination and Iranian mysticism. Suhrawardi believed—and says so in the introduction to Hikmat al-Ishraq as well as in his Talwihat—that there exists an eternal wisdom he calls Hikmat-e Khosravani: a wisdom that began with Zarathustra, travelled through Pythagoras to Greece and through Hermes to Egypt, and was ultimately continued in Plato and the Platonists throughout history. Suhrawardi himself travelled to Syria in search of the historical traces of this wisdom and was killed in Aleppo on charges of heresy. Amid the painful destruction of our historical heritage, I search through books for the missing lines of this perennial wisdom: in history, to recover its lost route and the historical evidence for it, and in the world of thought. This search takes me from Zarathustra to Plato and the Neoplatonists and to all the Platonic philosophers of history, continuing into the tradition of German Idealism and ultimately existentialism. My aim is not only to articulate historical evidence for this perennial wisdom, but also to express what it might mean for the rebirth of an Iranian philosophy capable of becoming part of the substance from which the civilization of our future is born and built. Whether I succeed in this work or not, I am certain that a drop of truth cast into an ocean of lies will one day destroy the lie, and that this torch, which has reached me from the hand of Suhrawardi, will pass into the hands of Iran’s future children and travel with them into the future. Aydin Areta