In response to Brandon Gaudet's post "Catechism and Documentation" (March 30, 2012):
As well as documenting religious beliefs, writing can document culture. Codes of law, constitutions, instruction manuals, and other documents often describe many of the most important aspects of a culture. This is one reason why the destruction of documents is such a tragedy in many cases - even if a culture is destroyed, it can be recreated from its documentation, but that is gone then the culture also is all too often gone forever.
Perhaps the best-known example of this is the Spanish destruction of a vast portion of the Aztec culture's written works. While, after much effort, archaeologists have discovered a few remaining documents, as well as stone carvings which record part of Aztec culture, there are still many aspects of the culture which remain unknown to modern researchers, and will probably always remain so.
In contrast, cultures which conquered other cultures but retained the conquered cultures' written documentation are often responsible for greatly improving modern society's knowledge of the past. Cultures are intertwined, so preserving the documents of one culture frequently affects later knowledge of others.
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