By Henri-Jean Martin
Cultural background on a grand scale, this immensely readable book—the summation of a long time of research by way of one of many world's nice students of the book—is the tale of writing from its very beginnings to its fresh changes via technology.Traversing 4 millennia, Martin bargains a chronicle of writing as a cultural process, a way of verbal exchange, and a heritage of applied sciences. He indicates how the written be aware originated, the way it unfold, and the way it figured within the evolution of civilization. utilizing as his middle the position of printing in making the written mind set dominant, Martin examines the interactions of people and cultures to provide new types of "writing" within the many senses of authorship, language rendition, and script.Martin appears to be like at how a lot the advance of writing owed to useful necessity, and what sort of to non secular and social structures of symbols. He describes the precursors to writing and divulges their position in early civilization as mnemonic units in provider of the spoken observe. The tenacity of the oral culture performs an incredibly very important half during this tale, Martin notes, or even as overdue because the eighteenth century informed contributors have been proficient in classical rhetoric and most well-liked to depend on the humanities of reminiscence. eventually, Martin discusses the alterations to writing wrought via the digital revolution, providing worthwhile insights into the impact those new applied sciences have had on little ones born into the pc age.
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Extra resources for The History and Power of Writing
Sample text
In any event one thing is quite clear. Initially an instrument of power in the hands of small groups of priests, soothsayers, and scribes serving a deified monarch, writing was above all a means to domination and to the establishment of hierarchy, hence it was the expression of the ideology of a limited elite. Whether it also served what is conveniently called "progress" remains to be seen. The question is as ambiguous as the term "progress" itself, but it is one that we will have to attempt to answer.
Presumably, the Hellenes who invaded Crete in the fifteenth century had the writing of the place adapted to their speech. If we add that all these unbaked clay tablets were not made to be conserved and have only come down to us by accident and thanks to luck, we can deduce that this graphic system was widely diffused. Another essential part of the picture comes from Cyprus, which was famous in antiquity for its copper mines and its commercial activity. The writing system used there toward the end of the second millennium remains undeciphered but seems related to Cretan.
The most obvious of these concerns the first appearance of writing. If we are to believe the Mesopotamian documents, writing arose in Sumer out of a need to keep business accounts. This is a response that the Western historian immediately finds satisfactory, but the absence of tablets of other sorts does not mean that from the outset the Sumerians did not also write for other purposes and in ways that would give us better insight into how the social symbolization employed in the signs that figure on the tablets was constituted.
