Like most communication technologies, the postal system was not invented by any indi- vidual, but changed over time, with the un- enviable distinction of backsliding during the Dark Ages. The European merchant in 1400 probably did not feel as safe in entrusting a dispatch to the mails as an Assyrian mer- chant did some four thousand years earlier.
The history of postal service describes not an information revolution, but a slow, erratic information evolution as old as writing itself.
Yet, postal service shows a history of im- provements that have widened public access, a definite trend toward equality of access to information. Speed of delivery also improved despite setbacks. Today, with fax and E-mail, both of them existing outside of government- managed service, the delivery of letters is virtually instantaneous. The Post Office sys- tem, managed by governments in every na- tion, is dismissed as snail mail.
For most of recorded time, the history of communication was a history of transporta- tion, with postal service serving as a common carrier of writing. Since transmission before the telegraph required physically carrying
the written page, the quality of communica- tion remained a function of the available transportation technology. When what was being mailed was a newspaper, magazine, or book, the mails were transmitting forms of mass communication, just as they were when the parcel being mailed was a news story, a manuscript, or photographs destined for pub- lication. Only by improving transportation did the information get out more quickly to more people at greater distances and at less cost.
The postman through history followed two trails, the path of the government and the path of the private citizen. In only the past few centuries, a fraction of postal history, have they merged.
The beginnings of communication by post are lost in the fog of antiquity. It is useless to ask, "Who wrote the first letter?" Like lan- guage, postal service was not invented. It grew.71 Letters are extant in ancient Egyptian characters and there is reference to a regular postal service; in an ancient papyrus some- one advised, "Write to me by the letter-carrier."
Continued
WRITING 15
Carrying the Message (continued) The Egyptians had a relay system that helped maintain central control of their empire. Mu- seums also have letters from the kingdoms of Babylon and Ninevah. Both the Old and New Testaments contain ample references to let- ters, such as King David's letter to the battle- field that sealed the fate of Bathsheba's unlucky husband and Paul's letter to the Romans.
In China an organized postal service ex- isted in the tenth century B.C. Probably all such services until recent centuries were for government use, although no doubt business correspondence and love letters were carried along. Japan's postal system was limited to government use until a private courier serv- ice began in the seventeenth century.
In the New World, lacking horses, Incas and Mayas employed relay stations of run- ners. Perhaps at the same time in the Old World the Assyrians allowed merchants to send letters by government post. These were small clay tablets encased in clay envelopes bearing addresses.
Persians under Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes established relay stations of horses throughout the empire. They could not have been popular because the public was forbidden to use the service, yet nearby communities were forced to support each station with horses, food, and labor. It was said that the burden of supporting the larger stations was so crushing that people fled nearby farms and villages. It was of the Persian postal service that Herodotus wrote, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."72
Ancient Greeks employed runners. The most famous, we know, was the youth who ran so hard to carry the news of the victory at Marathon that he fell dead after delivering the
message "Nike!"—"victory." His feat is cele- brated in the modern marathon races. Private messenger services also existed in the Greek city states. Using homing pigeons to carry messages may have begun either in Greece or China. Both literatures refer to them.
The Romans, rulers of the Mediterranean World south into Africa and north to the Brit- ish Isles, ran a much larger postal system, the cursus publicus, for papyrus and parchment letters. Those famous Roman roads have been credited, in part, to the wish to improve the mails. Roman emperors wanted to receive intelligence and send out orders quickly. A simple alphabet written on easily transport- able papyrus and parchment encouraged communication, which was later discouraged by the walled towns and city-states that rose as Rome fell.73 Walled towns would flourish during the Dark Ages when literacy and writ- ing were at their nadir.
By the fourth century A.D., the Roman postal service included officials called curiosi, whose duties included keeping an eye out for fraud involving the posts and also govern- ment spying, probably including opening let- ters. In the Phillipics, Cicero rails against spying on private letters. So indeed, 1,500 years later, would Martin Luther, who wrote,
"There is no greater forger of letters than he who intercepts a letter."
Ordinary citizens of the Roman Empire, forbidden to use the government cursus pub- licus, devised their own means of communi- cation. For long journeys, the writer had to rely upon traders and ship captains. Over short distances, private messengers or ser- vants, usually slaves, carried letters. It was a dangerous duty, for a slave risked loss of limb or life if he was caught by his master's ene- mies but, if he failed to deliver the letters promptly, faced a similar fate at home.
16 A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
Notes
1 Denise Schmandt-Besserat, Before Writing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 178+.
2 Schmandt-Besserat, 198.
3 Schmandt-Besserat, 128.
4 G.R. Driver, Semitic Writing: From Pictograph to Alphabet (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), 196.
5 Robert K. Logan, The Alphabet Effect: The Impact of the Phonetic Alphabet on the Develop- ment of Western Civilization (New York:
William Morrow and Co., 1986), 73.
6 Leonard Cottrell, The Quest for Sumer (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1965), 86.
7 Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, vol. 1 of The Story of Civilization (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1935), 171.
8 Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, rev.
ed., 1972), 15.
9 Innis, 19.
10 Innis, 16.
11 Innis, 7.
12 Innis's arguments on communication, dense with historical references, are not always easy to follow, but The Bias of Communica- tion and Empire of Communication reward the patient reader. For a lucid exposition of Innis's main points, as well as those of Mar- shall McLuhan, see James Carey, "Harold Adams Innis and Marshall McLuhan," The Antioch Review 27 (1967): 5-39.
13 Albertine Gaur, A History of Writing (Lon- don: The British Library, 1987), 150.
14 Durant, 161.
15 Diego de Landa, of the Monastery of Izamal, Yucatan. Reported in Dard Hunter, Paper- making: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (New York: Dover Publications, 1978), 26.
16 McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media:
The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1964), 100.
17 Logan, 33-36.
18 W.M. Flinders Petrie, The Formation of the Alphabet (London: MacMillan & Co., 1912), 5.
19 Jack Goody, Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 3.
20 Logan, 82.
21 Exodus 31:18.
22 Herodotus, The History 5:58.
23 William A. Mason, A History of the Art of Writ- ing (New York: Macmillan Co., 1920), 343.
24 Herodotus 5:57ff.
25 Will Durant, The Life of Greece, vol. 2 of The Story of Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939), 206.
26 Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 46.
27 Innis, 7.
28 M.I. Finley, ed., The Legacy of Greece (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 16.
29 Goody, 55.
30 Frederic G. Kenyon, Books and Readers in Ancient Greece and Rome, 2nd ed. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1951), 25.
31 Aristotle, Politics viii.3.1338a 15-17.
32 Innis, 58.
33 Schmandt-Besserat, 1.
34 Chester G. Starr, The Origins of Greek Civiliza- tion: 1100 - 650 B.C. (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1961), 337.
35 Albertine Gaur, A History of Writing (Lon- don: The British Library, 1987), 156.
36 Plato, Phaedo, 109B-C, trans. & ed. David Gallop (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 69.
37 Durant, 174.
38 Finley, 3.
39 Lloyd, G.E.R., "Science and Mathematics," in Finley, 262.
40 William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 56.
41 For example: "Herodotus's Histories were composed in writing to be read in public."
Kathryn Payne, "Information Collection and Transmission in Classical Greece," Libri 43.4 (1993): 278.
42 Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 69.
43 Bush, Wendell T., "An Impression of Greek Political Philosophy," Studies in the History of Ideas, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1918), 52-53.
44 Durant, 109-24.
45 Marti Lu Allen, The Beginning of Under- standing: Writing in the Ancient World (Ann Arbor: Kelsey Museum of Archaeology), 4.
46 Robert Pattison, On Literacy (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1982), 57.
47 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cam- bridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963), 42.
48 Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, 76.
49 Starr, 263.
50 Gaur, 14.
51 Arnaldo Momigliano, "History and Biogra- phy," in Finley, 160.
52 Gaston Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization:
Egypt and Chaldcea, trans. M.L. McClure (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1922), 220.
WRITING 17
53 Plato, Phaedrus, 275, trans. C.J. Rowe, 2nd 61 Steven Shubert, "The Oriental Origins of the (corrected) ed. (Warminster, England: Aris & Alexandrian Library," Libri 43. 2(1993): 163.
Rowe, 1988), 123. 62 Samuel Kramer, From the Tablets of Sumer 54 Walter S. Ong, The Presence of the Word:
Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious
(Indian Hills, CO: Falcon's Wing Press, 1956), 254.
History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 63 Thompson, 11.
1967), 23. 64 Alfred Hessel, A History of Libraries, trans.
55 Logan, 107. Reuben Peiss (New Brunswick, N.J.: The
56 Innis, 7. Scarecrow Press, 1955), 2.
57 Marshall McLuhan and Bruce Powers, The 65 Shubert, 163.
Global Village (New York: Oxford University 66 Thompson, 17.
Press, 1989), 137. 67 Durant, The Life of Greece, 600.
58 Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Post- 68 Shubert, 143.
structuralism and Social Context (The Univer- 69 Thompson, 23.
sity of Chicago Press, 1990), 7. 70 Harris, 46.
59 James W. Thompson, Ancient Libraries 71 Alvin F. Harlow, Old Post Bags (New York:
(Berkeley: University of California Press,
1940), 2. 72
D. Appleton, 1938), 7.
Herodotus, The History 8:98.
60 Thompson, 15. 73 McLuhan, 90.
2
The Second Revolution
Printing
Turbulent Europe
Despair is the mother of renewal. The Dark Ages of European civilization had lasted for almost a thousand years, but by the middle of the fourteenth century, changes were clearly afoot. A Little Ice Age began at the start of the century. It reduced crops and left the population prey to starvation and disease. Gossip spread of people taking the flesh of hanged corpses for food and even eating their own children.
Starting in India or China, the bubonic plague swept across Asia and into Europe.
Black swellings the size of an egg appeared in armpits and groins, oozing blood and pus, followed by spreading boils and black blotches, fever, much pain and, within five days, death. Between 1348 and 1350, the Black Death killed an estimated one person in three. Perhaps 20 million people died in Europe alone, but no one can ever know.
As the death carts rumbled by, the cities emptied. Paris, Florence, and Vienna had the most victims. Entire villages were wiped out. Almost everyone expected to die.
The stunned survivors fell into social and economic turbulence, bedeviled by all the deadly sins that sloth, avarice, and de- bauchery could assemble. The bubonic plague was borne by the omnipresent rats
and fleas, but ignorant of this, the survivors reached for other explanations. The Devil was blamed and, as usual, the Jews. Massa- cres followed, unchecked by the few rea- soned voices who pointed out that all were dying of the plague together. Then, as if the slaughter of the previous Crusades and the devastation of the plague were not enough, Europe embarked on the Hundred Years War and still another failed Crusade.
There was more. Food ran short. So did ore deposits from easily worked mines. A money economy was replacing the old feu- dal service arrangements, which worsened economic conditions for many. Across France and Italy, lawless bands of knights spread terror. A decade after the first wave of the bubonic plague subsided, a second wave followed, less deadly but no less dreadful. It suffused Europe with a pro- found sense of doom. A third wave of plague began in 1373.
A schism saw rival popes in Avignon and Rome. The Vatican was weakened by cor- ruption that reached from the papacy to monasteries with a reputation for promis- cuity. The licentious behavior of priests and nuns led to the closing of convents in England and to scandals elsewhere.' This
18
PRINTING 19
was also the century of the fanatical Flag- ellants, the Peasants Revolt in England, and the oddity of a dancing mania that led peo- ple in the Rhineland, Holland, and Flan- ders to dance themselves into exhaustion accompanied by leaps and screams and religious visions. Everything seemed to be falling apart.
The ills and disorders of the fourteenth century could not be without consequence.
Times were to grow worse over the next fifty-odd years until at some imperceptible moment, by some mysterious chemistry, energies were refreshed, ideas broke out of the mold of the Middle Ages into new realms, and humanity found itself redirected.2
In fourteenth century England, John Wyclif preached man's direct communication with God, and his Lollard disciples pains- takingly copied and recopied an English translation of the Bible, knowing they risked the cruel death meted out to here- tics.3 Not long into the next century came the voices heard by Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who combined the old religious fervor with the new force of national patriotism and strength on the battlefield that shook France. The Holy Roman Empire was declin- ing, to be replaced eventually by nation- states.
Pope Boniface VIII issued a papal bull,
"It is necessary to salvation that every hu- man creature be subject to the Roman pon- tiff."4 In smaller territories, many nobles were no less arrogant in asserting their own primacy over the Third Estate, which con- sisted of everyone who was not a member of the clergy or nobility.
But commerce was beginning to demand attention and there were stirrings in the establishment of towns, cities, and univer- sities, in banking and invention, and in brave ships that ventured into unknown seas. The Mongol horde sweeping to the eastern gates of Europe opened a window to China that had been blocked by Arab and Persian middlemen who had always taken their cut of trade.
At home, nobles built themselves houses with a new feature to replace the simple
hole in the roof for escaping smoke. Chim- neys along the walls opened onto fireplaces in private rooms. For the first time, the noble family members separated them- selves from their servants in the common hall, where all had come together to be warm. It was a small, early step to meet a human desire for privacy. For most people, privacy was unknown.
Sources of News
News from afar came at third and fourth hand from itinerant monks, soldiers, ped- dlers, couriers, and the pardoners who trav- eled from town to town selling absolution from sin. For the most part, people neither knew nor cared how the rest of the world fared. For the few common men who were fortunate enough to be literate, not much was available to be read, and what literacy existed was held in low regard. Most nobles, even kings, could neither read nor write.
Medieval bishops encouraged civil illiter- acy.5 The Bible could not be translated into the vernacular, and only the clergy could possess copies, in Latin. Yet, the ranks of those with some measure of education had expanded.
Most information reached the brain through the ear, via gossip, morality plays, sermons, narrative ballads and tales, but here, too, technology was bringing change.
Cheap, locally produced paper was replac- ing papyrus. The invention of spectacles aided old and weary eyes to read more.
By the end of the century, literacy was being considered a test for intelligence.
Limited as it was, the mass of writing had multiplied considerably.6 For the scholar, there were, in addition to the Bible, books on the various arts and sciences, plus ro- mances and other diverting topics. The mo- nastic rotula, the university couriers, the merchants' messenger services, and the new Tasso family postal system planted the roots of European mail services.
Centuries of struggle between Christian and Moslem forces deeply affected the spread of knowledge, not always negatively.
The fall of Toledo, a center of Moorish and Jewish culture, to El Cid in the eleventh century had opened its libraries to western
20 A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
Europe. In the fourteenth century, the Ot- toman Turks overwhelmed Byzantine rule in Gallipoli, a vestige of the Roman Empire, and stood poised at the doorway of Europe.
They would capture Constantinople itself at about the same time that Gutenberg was printing the 42-line Bible. Fearing Ottoman control even more than they disliked Roman orthodoxy, Byzantine scholars brought out classical Greek and Roman manuscripts of whose existence Western European schol- ars had been largely unaware. This began a search through lands under Byzantine control for manuscripts, statues, and other artifacts of the ancient cultures. The church supported the hunt for ancient treasures provided that any report about classical learning would be written in Latin or Greek, languages that were meaningless to the common people.'
In the fourteenth century, Dante wrote The Divine Comedy. Petrarch showed the Latin and Greek classics to a new age. The age of humanism is said to have been born in 1348 when Petrarch discovered letters written by Cicero, writings unknown in all the inter- vening centuries.' Boccaccio's tales laid the foundation for modern literature.
Reformation and Renaissance
Here was fertile ground for change, for the reform of the church, Reformation, and for rebirth, Renaissance, sparked by discovery
of classical Greek and Roman manuscripts.
This is not to say that they went hand in hand. They did not. Martin Luther de- nounced Desiderius Erasmus, the most brilliant humanist of his age, as a dreamer.
The humanists, while they favored reform- ing the church, saw the Protestants, with their talk of hell, as reactionaries bent on a return to medievalism.'
Their quarrel continued for many centu- ries under many names, and continues to- day between secular humanism and religious fundamentalism. With all of this and more, the medieval world crumbled.
Not since Rome fell had change been so deep, so complete. Princes who wished to attract humanists to their entourage scooped up precious manuscripts from abandoned monasteries and anywhere else they could be found to create libraries. All viewpoints would turn to Gutenberg's invention for their expression and dissemination.
Printing had not disturbed the monolithic Chinese empire. The introduction of print- ing in mid-fifteenth century Europe might also have made little headway if Europe were not ripe for change. As it turned out, because fifteenth century Europe was what it was, the ingenious system devised by the German goldsmith acted as a catalyst for forces that staggered the world. The world's second information revolution was printing.
A Gift from China
Paper is the most common, the most homely of things, hardly worth mentioning alongside the computer, digital compact discs, and satellites in geostationary orbit.
Yet, with all these electronic wonders at our command, to imagine a world suddenly without paper is to plunge us into the midst of the Dark Ages, when the head of the Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne, who never learned to write, and surely had never heard of paper, standardized writing to secure his empire.
Paper dispersed the Renaissance through Europe. Paper fueled the flames of the Ref- ormation and the Counter-Reformation and every religious, political, and social upheaval since.
To understand paper's impact is to be aware of the force that communication technology exerts on our lives. It would take an effort to consider what the econ- omy, religion, or our personal lives would be like without it, let alone what education, science, or medicine would be today. Paper