Who Is Missing From This Archive

This archive now contains a hundred essays. This is the last of them, and it is an audit rather than an argument.

The material is heavily weighted toward the Mediterranean, the Near East and Europe, with a Philippine series and a transmission series that reaches into Persia and Baghdad. That leaves out a great deal, and the omissions are not random.

China appears twice: the Terracotta Army and the Qin book burning, both as instances of state power. The Daoist internal alchemical tradition, which has a technical literature comparable in scale and precision to anything in this archive, does not appear at all. Neither does the Chinese medical corpus, nor the mathematical tradition that had negative numbers and solutions to systems of equations centuries before Europe.

India appears only through vocabulary in the Philippine essays. The Nyaya school developed a logic and epistemology of considerable sophistication. Nagarjuna's argument structure is as rigorous as anything in Greek philosophy. The Kerala school worked out infinite series for trigonometric functions two centuries before Newton and Leibniz. None of it is here.

Africa south of the Sahara is absent entirely. Ifá divination is a formal system with two hundred and fifty-six configurations, each attached to a large corpus of verses held in memory by trained practitioners, and it is a serious information system by any standard. The Ethiopian manuscript tradition is one of the longest continuous ones in the world, and it is the reason the Book of Enoch survives at all, which this archive noted in passing and did not follow.

The Americas appear once, through what de Landa burned. Andean khipu, the knotted cords that encoded administrative and possibly narrative information, are the subject of active decipherment work now.

Some of these absences have defensible reasons. Writing about a tradition requires reading enough to avoid producing tourism, and there is a real difference between an essay built on primary and specialist literature and one assembled from encyclopaedia entries. This archive has tried to stay on the right side of that line, and staying there means writing less.

But the pattern of what got written first is not neutral, and stating the reason does not dissolve it. The material closest to the author's own reading came first, that reading was formed in a particular educational tradition, and the tradition has a shape. The archive reproduces the shape of the library it was built from, which is exactly the mechanism the entry on transmission described.

That is the point of putting this at the end rather than filing it as a note. Every one of the suppression mechanisms catalogued here operates through selection made by people who were not thinking about selection. An archive about that which does not audit its own selection is not applying its own argument.

So this is the standing list of what is missing, published rather than privately noted, and it should be treated as a set of commitments rather than an apology. The Daoist alchemical corpus. Nyaya epistemology. The Kerala series. Ifá as a formal system. The Ethiopian manuscript tradition. Khipu.

A hundred essays is a beginning that looks like a conclusion, which is the most dangerous shape a body of work can take.