Violet Moller

A sweeping survey of where, how and why the centers of knowledge continually migrated from city to city during the 1000 years after the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance to places as far apart as Toledo and Baghdad. Each time a city 'fell' or, in the case of Spain, evicted whole groups of people, much knowledge was lost, although some were saved but removed to a new 'safer' city. The main point is that the role the Islamic Empire played in this dance of preservation has been understated in our Western culture. ****

read for my bookgroup… (more)

There was a program on PBS when I was in middle or high school that was, I think, produced in the UK...like most really good science programs. The program was called Connections and it would take a subject and connect all the historical dots as to how it came about and sometimes the connections between historical figures, objects, cities, places, concepts and moments would be really obscure. Who knew, for example, that there was a connection between the modern concept of credit and Napoleon's problem of feeding a large army and the development of refrigeration.

The Map of Knowledge is like this.

I found myself riveted.

I, and I think many of us in the public school system in the US, got basic world history in high school. This was usually a discrete set of historical moments that were never really connected for you in the classroom except to know that these things happened in chronological order, usually from some arbitrary oldest topic to some point closer to the present day. There was ancient Greece, Rome, the Crusades, the Dark Ages, Rome again and the rise of Christianity, the Renaissance, etc...

But what you didn't know and were never taught, was how these different historical subject areas were connected and what connected them and why they happened. I will bet few of us had any notion that, but for Islam and the Arab world, much of ancient Greek and Roman history might have been lost and the Renaissance in Europe may have been long delayed.

A very interesting book and well worth taking the time to read. Violet Moller did a huge amount of work for this as evidenced by the bibliography and she really opened my eyes to an area of history I knew little about.… (more)

A readable book but from a different perspective. The main characters are not human, but books of ancient learning in science, math and medicine. While the development of the story is historical, it is presented as a map, a two dimensional representation of multi-dimensional ideas. From the vanishing of knowledge during the Dark Ages, to the light of Alexandria, the House of Wisdom in Iraq, the libraries of Cordoba and Toledo in Spain, and the schools of Salerno, Palermo and Venice in Sicily and Italy. It is a wonder that any knowledge survived the centuries of first patronage, then warfare and intolerance, but they did.

At the end of our own second millennium, we have also seen the Nazi and Communist destruction of books and censorship in Western and Eastern Europe, the destruction of Aztec literature in the Americas, the destruction of Chinese literature by Japanese forces in Asia and religious destruction in the Middle East.

While in America we are blessed with history of some tolerance, such as Thomas Jefferson's quote: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man" we also have seen the destruction of books as Nazi Germany strove to wipe out European Jewish culture with the systematic destruction of books and manuscripts. Yet the humanist idea of the "Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge" is still a powerful force, although often unreckoned.

So the survival of books from ancient times to the present is still a modern ideal, but is also an uphill struggle. It is always easier to destroy than to build, and the Map of Knowledge shows the multi-century attempts to preserve and maintain intellectual ideas. Such basic ideas such as the zero, was saved through the years to abruptly change the mathematics of the world.

A good book and I liked it, although it covers a lot of geography and many new names and places from different cultures and languages. Recommended for private collections of the history of science, as well as for larger public and college libraries.… (more)