The Information by James Gleick Read Free Book Online

found buried on tablets and stone, descend from the same original ancestor, which arose near the eastern littoral of the Mediterranean Sea, sometime not much before 1500 BCE, in a region that became a politically unstable crossroads of culture, covering Palestine, Phoenicia, and Assyria. To the east lay the great civilization of Mesopotamia, with its cuneiform script already a millennium old; down the shoreline to the southwest lay Egypt, where hieroglyphics developed simultaneously and independently. Traders traveled, too, from Cyprus and Crete, bringing their own incompatible systems. With glyphs from Minoan, Hittite, and Anatolian, it made for a symbolic stew. The ruling priestly classes were invested in their writing systems. Whoever owned the scripts owned the laws and the rites. But self-preservation had to compete with the desire for rapid communication. The scripts wereconservative; the new technology was pragmatic. A stripped-down symbol system, just twenty-two signs, was the innovation of Semitic peoples in or near Palestine. Scholars naturally look to Kiriath-sepher, translatable as “city of the book,” and Byblos, “city of papyrus,” but no one knows exactly, and no one can know. The paleographer has a unique bootstrap problem. It is only writing that makes its own history possible. The foremost twentieth-century authority on the alphabet, David Diringer, quoted an earlier scholar: “There never was a man who could sit down and say: ‘Now I am going to be the first man to write.’ ” ♦
    The alphabet spread by contagion. The new technology was both the virus and the vector of transmission. It could not be monopolized, and it could not be suppressed. Even children could learn these few, lightweight, semantically empty letters. Divergent routes led to alphabets of the Arab world and of northern Africa; to Hebrew and Phoenician; across central Asia, to Brahmi and related Indian script; and to Greece. The new civilization arising there brought the alphabet to a high degree of perfection. Among others, the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets followed along.
    Greece had not needed the alphabet to create literature—a fact that scholars realized only grudgingly, beginning in the 1930s. That was when Milman Parry, a structural linguist who studied the living tradition of oral epic poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina, proposed that the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
not only could have been but must have been composed and sung without benefit of writing. The meter, the formulaic redundancy, in effect the very poetry of the great works served first and foremost to aid memory. Its incantatory power made of the verse a time capsule, able to transmit a virtual encyclopedia of culture across generations. His argument was first controversial and then overwhelmingly persuasive—but only because the poems
were
written down, sometime in the sixth or seventh century BCE. This act—the transcribing of the Homeric epics—echoes through the ages. “It was something like a thunder-clap in human history, which the bias of familiarity has converted into the rustle of papers on a desk,” ♦ said EricHavelock, a British classical scholar who followed Parry. “It constituted an intrusion into culture, with results that proved irreversible. It laid the basis for the destruction of the oral way of life and the oral modes of thought.”
    The transcription of Homer converted this great poetry into a new medium and made of it something unplanned: from a momentary string of words created every time anew by the rhapsode and fading again even as it echoed in the listener’s ear, to a fixed but portable line on a papyrus sheet. Whether this alien, dry mode would suit the creation of poetry and song remained to be seen. In the meantime the written word helped more mundane forms of discourse: petitions to the gods, statements of law, and economic agreements. Writing also gave rise to discourse about discourse. Written texts became objects of a new