WRITING (1500BC)
“Writing unlocks the future, not just the past.”
In prehistoric times knowledge had to be memorized and transferred from person to person. This requires such much effort that there was little room for innovation. Oral cultures are traditional: “the truth is not new and novelty is not true”. But writing is going to change this. On the one hand writing instead of speaking does impoverish communication. On the other hand, it also enriches because it enables novelty in four ways: more external memory, more communication even with people who live far way or with later generations, more objective knowledge and finally a new sense of time.
Writing developed across a period of thousands of years, from symbols to fiches, to cuneiform or hieroglyphs and pictograms. The first phonetic writing comes from the Midianites, a Semitic tribe that lived around 1700BC in Sinai. A slave in the copper mines or a merchant in Egypt wanted to simplify those difficult hieroglyphs and came up with perhaps one of the greatest inventions ever: letters! Meaningless sounds denoted in abstract symbols. It seems so cumbersome but is in fact extremely efficient, because one needs to learn just 20 or so signs to write any possible word and sentence. Later the Hebrew and Phoenicians adopted this consonant script. And later still around 700BC the Greek added vowels, thus completing the alphabet.
Why does writing promote objectivity? Just look at the difference between listening and reading. If you truly want to listen, you need to temporarily entrust your mind to the guidance of the speaker. Listening means participating. With reading it is different as you have more distance from author and text. You read as long as- and as fast as you want. You scroll backward or forward. With reading you have a choice: participate, observe or reflect!
Writing means distance and reflection. And this influenced human thinking in a major way. Most importantly it facilitated the transition from a cyclical sense of time to a linear sense of time. It is not surprising that the Jew were the first, because the consonant script was invented in their region.
Natural peoples and oral traditions live with the cycle of the seasons and also their history was conceived as a cycle. The past comes back. Essentially nothing changes. But with reading and writing one follows the lines. Each text has a beginning and an end. The Jews started thinking ‘along lines’ and even started to take history as a line with direction and future, not as a circle. God leads his people through the ages. Tension instead of resignation. Human life matters. Everything matters!
Writing brings life to history, not just by documenting historic events but primarily by raising awareness of change and the future.