The Lost Mayan Codices

Books from the House of Wisdom

The Gospel of Eve

The Acts of Solomon

It was rumored that carved into the wall above the shelves, a famous inscription read: The place of the cure of the soul.

The first known library of its kind to gather a serious collection of books from beyond its country's borders, the Library at Alexandria was charged with collecting all the world's knowledge.

In 1994, Italian journalist Enza Massa was at the Italian National Library in Rome when she stumbled upon an unusual find. It was a manuscript dating to 1629, titled: Nostradamus Vatinicia Code. Michel de Notredame, the author's name, was on the inside in indelible ink.

This manuscript, never published by Nostradamus, was handed down to the prophet's son and later donated by him to Pope Urban VIII. It did not surface again until now, almost four hundred years later. The cryptic paintings vary from the strange to the bizarre, with images of popes,decapitations and strange creatures. Known as the "Vaticinia Nostradami",this book has often been considered to be Nostradamus' final propheciesregarding the end of the world as we know it.

It was said that Nostradamushad handed the book over to his son who in turn was to donate it to a cardinalat the time who later went on to become Pope Urban VIII; the book eventuallyended up in the library.In both the paintings and the accompanying quatrains within, Nostradamus is saidto have predicted the Nazi Blitzkrieg, the assassination attempt on Pope JohnPaul II, the burning of the oil wells of Kuwait by Iraq, and Boris Yeltsin'srise to power.

Ab urbe condita libri

The work covers the time from the stories of Aeneas, the earliest legendary period from before the city's founding in c. 753 BC, to Livy's own times in the reign of the emperor, Augustus. The Latin-language title can be literally translated as "Books from the city having been founded" but more typically "from the city's founding" or "from the foundation of the city" is used. Less literally it is referred to in English as History of Rome. The last year covered by Livy is 745 AUC, or 9 BC,[1] the death of Drusus. About 25% of the work survives.

Ab urbe condita libri when complete included 142 libri, or "books", with the meaning of "chapters." Thirty-five of these: 1-10 with the Preface and 21-45, still exist in reasonably complete form. Damage to a manuscript of the 5th century AD resulted in large gaps (lacunae) in Books 41 and 43-45 (small lacunae exist elsewhere); that is, the material is not covered in any source of Livy's text.

A fragmentary palimpsest of the 91st book was discovered in the Vatican Library in 1772, containing about a thousand words, and several papyrus fragments of previously unknown material, much smaller, have been found in Egypt since 1900, most recently about forty words from Book 11, unearthed in the 1980s.

Sure, it's "esoteric and demanding" (New York Times), but that quality seems to be The Book of Lost Books' charm. A regular literary critic for Scotland on Sunday, this is Stuart Kelly's first book, a work born from a lifelong fascination with the missing pieces of literary history. The breadth of Kelly's knowledge impressed critics as much as his ability to be both approachable and authoritative, even though his sense of "what counts as 'lost' is engagingly floppy" (Sunday Telegraph). His enthusiasm reminds readers to appreciate the books that have made it this far through human history and reminds them that not all ideas are good ones.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.