Prologue: The Fragile Sacred
In the spring of 2019, flames devoured the roof of Notre-Dame Cathedral.
As millions watched helplessly, news reports followed the fire's erratic course. Firefighters formed a human chain to rescue relics and artwork, but deep within the Gothic structure, far from the gaze of television cameras, a different battle was unfolding—one not just of flames and hoses, but of bytes and backups.
In the months leading up to the fire, a team of digital preservationists had been working quietly, scanning medieval manuscripts stored in Notre-Dame's archives—music scores, theological treatises, liturgical calendars, fragments of saints' lives.¹ Some had not been opened in centuries. The digital copies weren't yet public. They were incomplete. But they existed.
And in the aftermath of the blaze, they were all that remained.
Half a world away, on an old hard drive in the Himalayas, another miracle was taking shape. A Tibetan archivist, long exiled from his homeland, booted up a dusty laptop and recovered a text once thought lost: a centuries-old commentary on the Prajñāpāramitā, passed down orally for generations but never published.² The only surviving file had been mislabeled, nearly deleted. And now, thanks to a digital whisper, it had a second life.
Two sacred recoveries—one from a burning cathedral, one from a forgotten folder—unfolding almost simultaneously. And they raise a shared question:
What does it take for a sacred text to survive?
We like to think of scripture as timeless, impervious to history. We imagine it chiseled in stone, etched in gold, whispered across millennia in perfect continuity. But the truth is far more human—and far more fragile.
By "sacred texts," we mean words considered holy, authoritative, or central—whether written, sung, performed, or remembered—across all traditions. Sacred texts are vulnerable. They are lost in conquest, burned by inquisitions, neglected by reformers, buried by time. They vanish not just through violence, but through climate, language, economics, and politics. Sometimes they're erased on purpose. Sometimes they simply fade away.
The pattern repeats across continents and centuries: Mayan codices torched by Spanish missionaries in the Americas,³ Ajami manuscripts scattered across West Africa during colonial upheavals,⁴ Aboriginal songlines interrupted by forced relocations in Australia.⁵ The Roman assault on Jewish scripture, the ISIS raids on Mosul's manuscripts,⁶ the slow erosion of oral traditions as elder speakers pass without apprentices.
And yet, something extraordinary happens in the face of loss: people rise to resist it.
A scribe hides a scroll inside a cave wall. A mother passes a prayer from memory to her daughter. A monk buries a Psalter beneath a chapel floor. A survivor of genocide gathers fragments of her people's oral traditions and begins to record them—not for glory, but for continuity. Today, institutions like the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library race to digitize endangered manuscripts worldwide,⁷ while UNESCO's Memory of the World project works to safeguard humanity's documentary heritage.⁸ Local communities use smartphones to preserve disappearing languages, and digital archivists battle obsolescence with the same urgency once reserved for escaping flames.
Loss has always been part of the story. But so has rescue.
This book is about what disappears—and what refuses to die.
Some of the chapters ahead will tell stories of fire and destruction: the Buddhist library at Nalanda, the Roman assault on Jewish scripture, the ISIS raids on Mosul's manuscripts. Others will explore quieter vanishings: texts lost because no one copied them, traditions forgotten as languages shifted or empires fell, oral teachings that died with their last speakers.
Still others look toward the future. What happens to sacred texts when they're stored only in the cloud? What will survive from today's digital scripture apps—or from religious traditions that now rely on commercial servers and social media to transmit their teachings?
We'll meet guardians, rediscoveries, and ongoing threats. We'll hear from scholars, scribes, archivists, and ordinary people who became the unlikely stewards of extraordinary traditions.
And at every turn, we'll face the same paradox: sacredness doesn't guarantee survival. Only attention does.
We are living at a crossroads moment.
Never before has so much sacred literature been digitized, indexed, and shared. Never before have so many communities had the tools to preserve their own scriptures, rituals, and oral traditions. And never before have the threats been so subtle: bit rot, obsolescence, server collapse, censorship by algorithm, data lost to hard drive failure or bureaucratic neglect.
Consider the 2011 closure of GeoCities, which erased millions of personal websites overnight—including digital archives of small religious communities.⁹ Or the ongoing struggle of the Internet Archive to preserve vanishing digital culture against corporate indifference and legal challenges.¹⁰ The most widely used digital Qur'an apps today depend on the same fragile infrastructure that has already claimed countless digital monuments.
In the past, a conquering army burned your library.
Today, you might lose it when a tech company updates its cloud storage terms.
The flame hasn't gone out. It's just changed form.
Sacred texts survive when someone chooses to preserve them.
They endure because someone copies them, memorizes them, protects them. Not because they're indestructible—but because someone believes they're worth the effort. The hand-scrawled Vedas, the palm-leaf sutras, the stitched Qur'anic codices, the underground Torah scrolls—all survived not because they were magical, but because communities refused to let them go.
That responsibility now belongs to us.
This book is a reminder of what we've lost. But more importantly, it's an invitation to remember what we still might save.
Notes
- Andrew Tallon, "Laser scanning reveals cathedral's mysteries," featured in National Geographic documentary; see also Kahleen Farrell and Amy Bunszel, "Autodesk Notre-Dame BIM project," Autodesk; and Roberto Di Giacomo, "Digital preservation and reconstruction efforts," Frontier Enterprise, November 4, 2024. Tallon's pre-fire laser scanning collected over one billion data points from 2015 until his death in 2018, providing crucial architectural data for post-fire restoration efforts.
- Buddhist Digital Resource Center, "Discovery to digitization: amplifying religious text publication in Tibet," July 30, 2024, https://www.bdrc.io/blog/2024/07/30/discovery-to-digitization-amplifying-religious-text-publication-in-tibet/. BDRC documents numerous cases of Tibetan texts recovered from exile communities and digitally preserved, including rare commentaries and manuscripts thought lost during the Cultural Revolution.
- Diego de Landa, Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, c. 1566; see also Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code(New York: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 89-92.
- For Ajami manuscript losses, see Fallou Ngom, Muslims Beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of Ajami and the Muridiyya (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 45-67.
- Lynette Russell, Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 156-178.
- Zainab Bahrani, "The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq and Syria," International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies 11, no. 3 (2017): 135-153.
- Hill Museum & Manuscript Library, "Digital Collections and Preservation Projects," accessed [date], https://www.hmml.org/.
- UNESCO, "Memory of the World Programme," accessed [date], https://en.unesco.org/programme/mow.
- Jason Scott, "The GeoCities Archive: A Report on the Process and The Files," Internet Archive Blog, January 17, 2011, https://blog.archive.org/2011/01/17/the-geocities-archive/.
- Brewster Kahle, "Preserving Digital Information: A Call to Action," D-Lib Magazine 22, no. 9/10 (September/October 2016): doi:10.1045/september2016-kahle.