List of book-burning incidents

Notable book burnings have taken place throughout history.

Destruction of Ebla 2240 BC, then in 1600 BC.

Destruction of Mari in 1765 BC.

Destruction of Alalakh circa 1200 BC.

Destruction of Ugarit 1180 BC.

In 612 BC the Assyrian capital Nineveh was destroyed by a coalition of Babylonians, Scythians and Medes. During the burning of the Royal Palace, a great fire ravaged the Library of Ashurbanipal where the scholar King Ashurbanipal had amassed a great number of texts and tablets from various countries. Modern historians believe the library may have contained a considerable number of texts written on such mediums as leather scrolls, wax boards, and possibly papyri – all of them vulnerable to fire. However, the considerable number of clay cuneiform tablets became partially baked. Thus, ironically, this potentially destructive event helped preserve the tablets, which lay in the earth and were eventually found by 19th century archaeologists.

About 600 BC, Jeremiah of Anathoth wrote that the King of Babylon would destroy the land of Judah. As recounted in Jeremiah 36, Jeremiah's scroll was read before Jehoiakim, King of Judah, in the presence of important officials; King Jehoiakim destroyed the scroll in a fire, and then sought to have Jeremiah arrested.

The Classical Greek philosopher Protagoras (c. 490 - c. 420 BC) was a proponent of agnosticism, writing in a now lost work entitled On the Gods: "Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be, because of the obscurity of the subject, and the brevity of human life. According to Diogenes Laertius, the above outspoken Agnostic position taken by Protagoras aroused anger, causing the Athenians to expel him from their city, where the authorities ordered all copies of the book to be collected and burned in the marketplace. The same story is also mentioned by Cicero. However, the Classicist John Burnet doubts this account, as both Diogenes Laertius and Cicero wrote hundreds of years later and no such persecution of Protagoras is mentioned by contemporaries who make extensive references to this philosopher. Burnet notes that even if some copies of Protagoras' book were burned, enough of them survived to be known and discussed in the following century.

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