The invention of the alphabet, about 1700 B.C., fell to the relatively unlettered Semitic people in the Sinai and Canaan of modern Israel, perhaps the Midianites or Kenites of the Bible. A simplified rendering of the diffi- cult Egyptian writing for their own spoken language, it transcribed their spoken lan- guage so efficiently that it was adopted by one tribe after another, each modifying what they received to suit the sounds of their own languagel7
A version of the Canaanite alphabet was adopted by the Phoenicians, living along what are now the coastal strips of Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.18 Famous as seagoing traders, their ships plied the Mediterranean, estab- lishing colonies in Greece and at Carthage on the North African coast. It should not seem at all odd that such a wide-ranging and commercially active people would formulate a unified language system, for the alphabet met the needs of trade. Nor is it surprising that such an advance came from this rela- tively free society on the Mediterranean coast instead of the controlled and centralized empire of Persia, or that other equally con- trolled empire spreading from the banks of the Nile.
With the alphabet, speech itself could be stored. Human communication was now no longer restricted to the temporary sound of a voice. Additionally, the alphabet's simplicity permitted more of the populace to figure out how to use it.1°
Organized religion that was founded upon written scriptures set, for the societies that
accepted them, enduring values, but underly- ing many of the religions, an oral culture breathed. The stories of the Old and New Testaments were told and retold for centuries before someone committed them to writing.
So were the god-drenched stories of the Tro- jan War, which was fought 500 years before someone set down on papyrus the Homeric version of the events.
As the use of the alphabet widened, it was copied and inevitably changed. Derived from the Phcenician alphabet were the Hebrew alphabet, beginning aleph, bet, and the Greek alphabet, beginning alpha, beta. To a Phoeni- cian, aleph and bet meant, respectively, ox and house. Invert a capital A and you may see the face of an ox. The original bet was in the shape of a square, a typical house.
Robert Logan has argued that "the phonetic alphabet, monotheism, and codified law were introduced for the first time to the Israelites by Moses at Mount Sinai in the form of the Ten Commandments."2° This hypothesis, startling in its breadth, falls in line with a basic argument of this book, that for an information revolution to succeed, there must be new communication technology reaching people who are in the midst of profound change. For the illiterate slaves who followed Moses out of Egypt, these conditions were certainly met by laws written "with the finger of God."21 And that their history, their myths, and their monotheistic beliefs would be documented in book after book of what would become the Bible, certainly meets any test of an informa- tion revolution that succeeded.
of nature as something separate, an entity worthy of study, and that increasingly meant committing to papyrus as well as communicating orally.
Out of the Dark Ages
The gathering of knowledge in a way that might be characterized as an information revolution had its faint beginnings in the Hellenic world during the eighth century B.C., when the Phcenician alphabet took root in Aegean soil. It was the period after the Greek emergence out of the Dark Ages.
Because of the alphabetic script and the availability of papyrus, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the epic poems of Homer, recalled and repeated orally for the previous four centuries by storytellers, were at last writ- ten down.
The information revolution gathered strength over the next century as the first readers came into being.25 During the fol- lowing three centuries, there would be an outpouring of intellectual, artistic, and po- litical ideas such as the world had never seen before and has scarcely known since.
By the seventh century B.C., the Greeks
WRITING 9
must have had papyrus.26 Throughout the Mediterranean world, words on papyrus led to a knowledge explosion as scrolls reached isolated scholars. Aristotle could not have gathered the body of known knowledge without the means of creating a permanent record on a storable medium.
Science and medicine could not have ad- vanced as they did without ideas, conclu- sions, and reports of experiments written on a transportable medium. By the time of Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., the Greeks, especially the Athenians, had a reading public, some collections of books, and of libraries.
The burst of Greek lyric poetry has been attributed to cheap papyrus.27 Access to supplies of papyrus brought the copying of books and perhaps the first private collec- tions. By the fifth century B.C., in Greece a book market existed.28 In the cities, free people could read and write. Athens cre- ated a public depository of books in 330 B.C., during the lifetime of Aristotle, who according to the Greek historian Strabo, was the first book collector; it was Aristotle who taught the kings of Egypt to set up proper libraries instead of mere collections of books, and it is from his collections that we have the word museum.29
With Aristotle the Greek world passed from oral instruction to the habit of read- ing.8° Aristotle classified as much of the world's knowledge as he could acquire. (He also observed that writing was useful for making money and managing house- holds.)31 Others made great strides in mathematics, medicine, astronomy, geog- raphy, and biology. Style was introduced to written and spoken communication. After Aristotle, the Hellenic world had a new reality, a written culture functioning along- side its oral culture.32 Life would no longer be the same. In a sense, the first informa- tion revolution had ended, and had been a success, although virtually by definition a successful revolution never ends.
Not everything the Greeks did was per- fect by any means. The principal weakness in Greek thought was a reliance on deduc- tively derived logical conclusions in prefer- ence to observation, experimentation, and
inductive reasoning. It left them trying to explain a static world existing under an unchanging heaven. Pure deduction based upon incorrect premises would hamper Western science past the Middle Ages.
Yet, written symbols to objectify speech and codify information aided the Greeks and eventually other peoples to govern themselves, to trade, and to express a reli- gious faith. Fixing the spoken word changed the human condition.33 Writing added to humankind's ability to think ab- stractly.
The invention of written language devel- oped over a period of centuries, advancing sporadically in different locations toward modern alphabetic systems. Creating an additional mode of communication, writ- ing came out of practical need, probably with little experimentation.
Examination of most communication technologies shows a pattern of slow pro- gress that is illuminated occasionally by a sudden sharp advance. Early Greek civili- zation advanced in a similar manner, a laborious crawl that exploded in revolu- tionary political, social, and economic changes, interlinked changes in virtually every field of life, of which the information revolution was a small but integral part.
It is reasonable to assume that the diffu- sion of writing sped through society be- cause it was a sensible way to communicate and archive information. A slave bore or- ders from a ruler to a provincial governor, a fellow slave carried messages of eternal affection between a general in the field and his mistress, and a third slave ran between two merchants clutching orders to sell at a certain price, with the written instructions remaining as a record of the transaction.
Commerce beyond the village would come to rely heavily on the diffusion of writing.
And government officials surely learned early to love written documents, a love that has withstood the erosion of the centuries.
The Greek city-state evolved over sev- eral centuries to the limited democracy that was Athens, limited because only a portion of its residents could become citi- zens.34 Writing and political freedom were the roots for the extraordinary growth of
10 A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
what Hegel has called the civil society, a domain distinct from government. The spread of democracy may have owed some- thing to the spread of literacy that soon.
Even to ostracize (banish) an undesirable person from Athens for ten years was only possible if 6,000 men each wrote his name, simultaneously, on individual pieces of os- traca (potsherd). Writing, far from being a (semi-) secret art practiced by a specially trained elite, was an essential element of Greek democracy.35
"We who dwell between the Phasis River and the Pillars of Heracles," wrote Plato quoting Socrates, inhabit a small portion of the earth, "living around the sea like ants or frogs around a marsh."' The Greeks dwelt mostly in coastal communities stretching from the eastern edges of Asia Minor and the Black Sea to the western edges of the Mediterranean, where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. Athens may have been a leader of culture, but by no means was it the only center. Away from Athens, in the thousand colonies that constituted the Hel- lenic civilization, were born Greek poetry and prose, history, philosophy, mathemat- ics, and oratory.'
Importantly, the Greeks shared a lan- guage, both spoken and written, that re- mained stable for a thousand years.38 To appreciate what this means, consider how much English has changed in the six cen- turies between us and Chaucer, or even the four centuries since Shakespeare. Al- though Greece never had an empire like those of Egypt, Persia, or Rome, there was a far-flung Hellenic world traversed by ships on the Mediterranean Sea, the high- way of a remarkable people. For the knowl- edge that it carried on papyrus and in the heads of travelers, the Mediterranean de- serves to be recognized as the world's first information highway.
After schooling in the academies of Ath- ens and other cities, students returned to the corners of that wider Hellenic world.
The amount of communication that contin- ued among them can only be guessed at.
Most Greek scientists worked in isolation.39 That they maintained some written con- tacts and read each other's books seems obvious, for the alphabet was known to them and papyrus was available. It seems natural that they corresponded.49 Greek scholars wrote extensively and their writ- ing was meant to be read by their contem- poraries or to be read aloud in public.41
With democracy in Hellenic society came a growth in schools for freeborn boys and girls.42 Learning was by rote, but it led to a widening basic literacy. That led in turn to a greater capacity to acquire infor- mation, and the inescapable thrust toward egalitarianism that accompanies commu- nication.
A Time of Turmoil
As with all revolutions, the seeds of infor- mation revolutions, when they are scat- tered in disturbed soil, plant roots most deeply to send forth both their flowers and their weeds. So it was in Athens, the first among the Greek cities, for its economy and politics suitably churned the ground of ancient Attica centuries before the height of Greek civilization.
The landowners, the aristocratic Eupa- trids, were citizens who took power into their own hands and reduced the king to a figurehead. These oligarchs, living in lux- ury in town, sent freedmen and slaves to till their fields. Next in wealth, a middle class of professionals, craftsmen, traders, and other free men were pushed down by the aristocrats and, in turn, pushed down the poorest free laborers. At bottom were the slaves.
Add to this feudal mix the hard scrabble harvests of the stony Greek soil. Coinage was introduced to replace barter, which proved a great calamity for many. It pre- cipitated an economic revolution.43 Money shook up the Aegean world. Commerce offered an effective means to disturb the feudal society, much as it would prove ef- fective nearly two millennia later in feudal Europe. The bread one earned by trade has
WRITING 11
always tasted richer than the bread earned by sweat. Commerce freed men from de- pendence on the land of the nobility, on herding and farming. Across cultures and centuries, people have ventured into un- known lands to better their lives. No matter what their luck, those who survived re- turned home more worldly. If they had not actually moved toward democracy, they had at least taken steps toward leveling the aristocrat's advantage.
Commerce by sea and land over long distances promoted the use of writing. It could not have been the case that all wealthy merchants accompanied all the goods they traded to distant ports. Inevita- bly, partnerships formed, goods were con- signed, and documents were drawn up to keep traders relatively honest.
Sending men off to fight added to the economic dislocations. Sporadic wars erupted among the city-states and with the powerful empire of Persia to the east. From the late seventh century to the late sixth century, five great empires collapsed, those of Assyria, Medea, Babylonia, Lydia, and Egypt, plus several Greek tyrannies. At home, there was the cruelty of Draco's code, which brought the word draconian into the language. The reforms of Solon pointed the way toward the democracy that was established by Cleisthenes in Athens in 507 B.C., and later in other cities.44 A clue that literacy entered into the managing of affairs was the Athenian requirement a century later that magistrates could not apply "an unwritten law."45
Sparta refused to embrace written com- munication with the enthusiasm that Ath- ens showed, contending that literacy by itself guarantees no cultural superiority.
Lycurgus, reputed founder of the Spartan constitution, among his reforms actually forbade writing. He had his reasons.
The long history of its praise in the Western tradition is the self-interested product of those who write, but there has always been a party, less audible by the nature of its doc- trine, opposed to writing. The Spartan be- lieved that the unrecorded good behavior of citizens, though lost to history, was worth a book full of unrealized ideals."
Supplementing an Oral Culture
Pre-literate societies preserved their histo- ries in what Eric Havelock called "the living memories of successive living people who are young and then old and then die."' They did so through their oral culture, en- riching their lives and enhancing memory with the verbal and metrical patterns of epic poetry, story, and song.
Because they did not require such a tech- nology as writing, many oral cultures did not adopt it, as Durant pointed out:
Simple tribes living for the most part in comparative isolation, and knowing the hap- piness of having no history, felt little need for writing. Their memories were all the stronger from having no written aids; they learned and retained, and passed on to their children by recitation, whatever seemed necessary in the way of historical record and cultural transmission."
Writing supplemented, but by no means supplanted, the predominantly oral Greek culture. The early writing in the new Greek alphabet was meant not to be read but to be heard, either sung or spoken to the accom- paniment of the lyre and other musical instruments.' Rhetoric, so important to po- litical affairs, was taught as a spoken art.
Reciting on public occasions was common- place. It is true that Plato wrote his Dia- logues, but they were, after all, written as conversations. How much the Greeks learned orally and how much from written sources is not clear. We are certain only that much knowledge was, for the first time, written, and therefore it was meant to be read by contemporaries. Writing encour- aged reflection and critical thinking, unlike memorization, which the rhythms of po- etry served well.' Recitation was suited to poetry, writing to prose.
In the Greek historians, we see the shift from oral to written communication.
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, preferring spoken eyewitness accounts to documents, used only a few written sources, but they themselves wrote their accounts. Thucydides was able to tran- scribe some letters, inscriptions and trea-
12 A HISTORY OF MASS COMMUNICATION
ties, but, like Herodotus, preferred oral to written evidence.51
The Warning of Socrates
Legend has it that when the ibis-headed god of magic, Thoth, told the Egyptian pharaoh Thamos of Thoth's invention of writing, Thamos denounced it because students,
"now that they possessed a means of storing up knowledge without trouble, would cease to apply themselves, and would neglect to exercise their memories."' Recalling this venerable tale, Socrates, the old conserva- tive, used it to bemoan writing:
For your invention will produce forgetful- ness in the souls of those who have learned it, through lack of practice at using their memory, as through reliance on writing they are reminded from outside by alien marks, not from inside, themselves by them- selves: you have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding. lb your students you give an appearance of wisdom, not the reality of it; having heard much, in the ab- sence of teaching, they will appear to know much when for the most part they know nothing, and they will be difficult to get along with, because they have acquired the appearance of wisdom
instead of wisdom itself.53
Socrates correctly foresaw that memory would be weakened by our reliance on writ- ing. Many oral-aural societies, past and pre- sent, nourish memory skills that are beyond our technological cultures.' For the Greeks, there occurred, besides mem- ory skill losses, some reduction in the oral tradition itself. Disseminated across the educated populace of the Hellenic world, writing gradually sent the oral tradition into a decline that affected everything, even the tellers of tales and the schools of rhetoric. Nevertheless, although the Greeks are credited with inventing literacy and the literate basis of modern thinking, their tra- dition remained predominantly oral.
From Greece to Rome
Spoken thoughts hover about the speaker.
The words never quite leave their source.
Writing, on the other hand, stands apart
from the writer. Through writing the Greeks fashioned the idea of objectivity, the separation of the knower from what is known. It was the beginning of objective thinking, of the scientific method.'
The Greek language would be the lan- guage of education, diplomacy, literature, and science in the eastern Mediterranean for another thousand years. Romans con- quered the Greek city-states, but adopted their culture. Rome replaced the Greeks in power and eminence, building a large standing army and a large bureaucracy.
They ruled a dominion beyond the dreams of any Greek city-state tyrant. Caesar's con- quest of Egypt assured a steady supply of papyrus for the administration needed to run their empire.56 Romans wrote things down and kept records.
... And what was that mechanism of (Ro- man) law and administration based upon?
Paper, or more exactly, papyrus... Engrav- ing in stone is for the priests; they have an affinity for spanning eras. But soldiers are no-nonsense managers. They need to deal with the here and now. The alphabet and pa- per create armies, or rather the bureaucra- cies which run armies. Paper creates self-contained kingdoms at a distance.57
After the population attains a certain size, for example, government cannot expand without written records. Human messengers, relying only upon their mem- ory, impose a severe limit on the power of the state. Only so much of resources can be allocated to communication before military and economic sectors begin to suffer.58
The First Libraries
Ancient Egyptian temples held collections of writing principally about religion, lit- urgy, and rituals. The temple libraries were called houses of life. What little we know of their holdings we learn principally from Greek writers.' These were archives, not true libraries.' The Egyptians did not con- sider literacy a part of general education, but rather specialized training for govern- ment or temple bureaucracy.' Temple priests had a monopoly on papyrus, but some of the writing may have been on parchment, too. Nothing remains.