Visitors visit a replica parts of the Mogao Cave during the Dunhuang Art Exhibition in Beijing on February 20, 2008. The exhibition displays collections mostly from the Dunhuang Grottoes which were constructed between the 4th and the 14th century, including recovered antres, original painted sculptures and their replicas from Library Cave of Dunhuang. Dunhuang, located in Jiuquan of Northwest China’s Gansu province along the historic Silk Road, is in danger of being swallowed by sands of the adjacent Kumtag desert, which are creeping closer at a rate of up to four metres (13 feet) a year. (Photo credit TEH ENG KOON/AFP/Getty Images)
We tend to avoid topics pertaining to religion, spirituality or related highly personal matters that sometimes can lead to misunderstandings, misapprehensions, or worse; but our love of libraries, of archives, of discoveries are all satisfied in one fell swoop of a blog post, and we are particularly impressed to learn that Gutenberg may not be the only key to understanding the history of printing:
Just over a thousand years ago, someone sealed up a chamber in a cave outside the oasis town of Dunhuang, on the edge of the Gobi Desert in western China. The chamber was filled with more than five hundred cubic feet of bundled manuscripts. They sat there, hidden, for the next nine hundred years. When the room, which came to be known as the Dunhuang Library, was finally opened in 1900, it was hailed as one of the great archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, on par with Tutankhamun’s tomb and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Continue reading →
Caleb Crain‘s book review of this biography will no doubt be of interest to any of our readers who follow Seth’s work on the history of environmentalism. Subscription to the New Yorker is required, and worth it, but here is the blurb available to all prior to passing the pay wall:
Organikos 