Then destructions of civilizations

An article in the New Yorker by John Seabrook about the problems of deciphering scrolls found in a library destroyed in the Herculaneum eruption made me think of the rise and fall of civilizations. Those who excavated the library had hoped that some of the missing volumes of the ancient world would be discovered among these scrolls. I didn't know that none of the works of Epicurus survived, that Livy's hundred and forty two volumes on the History of Rome only thirty-five survived, of the nine volumes of verse of Sapho only one complete poem remains, only a handful of the many plays of the great Greek dramatists, Euripides. Sophocles and Aeschylus remain. Civilizations come and go, they reach their prime, often for only a generation or two, then Barbarians come and irretrievable destroy them. Bernard Lewis pointed out that in Iran, a modern Islamic name for Persia, no one is called Cyrus, Darius or Nebuchadnezzar, prominent figures of the ancient Persian civilization. The great Persian, Parthian and Zoroastrian civilizations of the ancient world are forgotten. Empires that once flourished in Central and Eastern Europe, Dacians, Thacians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Vlachs, Avars, Magyars, and others are only remembered as calls to arms to restore past great glories at the expense of other local people. With terrorist attacks in the heartland of European civilization, not to mention the Middle-East and Africa, civilizations that we take for granted are in danger of going the way the Roman, Greek, Persian and Egyptian Empires went. People who destroy Palmyra have no compunction about destroying Paris, New York, or Moscow.