Academic Exercise on the Abstinence of the Early Christians from Reading Profane Books

...was the destruction of profane books. To be sure, ignorant men, seized by this [superstition], destroyed many and indeed most ancient monuments of the Americans when the Spaniards occupied those lands. And because they were inscribed in hieroglyphic characters, those men, being unacquainted with them, regarded such characters as magical; as Morhof teaches these things from the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega v). But scholars vehemently deplore the loss of these monuments, thinking that from them they might have been able to investigate the origin of the entire American race. The same perverse diligence of the monks likewise abolished the Suio-Gothic runes, and with them much memory of our ancestral antiquities. Thus, by the order of some superstitious Caliph, John Leo records in Book 1 of the History of Africa, as attested by Morhof, that books of the Greek and Latin languages were abolished throughout all Africa. And [it was] fatal

v) Polyb. Vol. 1. c. 5. p. m. 42.