The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. James Gleick

completed the distinction: “The written symbol extends infinitely, as regards time and space, the range within which one mind can communicate with another; it gives the writer’s mind a life limited by the duration of ink, paper, and readers, as against that of his flesh and blood body.”

      But the new channel does more than extend the previous channel. It enables reuse and “re-collection”—new modes. It permits whole new architectures of information. Among them are history, law, business, mathematics, and logic. Apart from their content, these categories represent new techniques. The power lies not just in the knowledge, preserved and passed forward, valuable as it is, but in the methodology: encoded visual indications, the act of transference, substituting signs for things. And then, later, signs for signs.

      Paleolithic people began at least 30,000 years ago to scratch and paint shapes that recalled to the eye images of horses, fishes, and hunters. These signs in clay and on cave walls served purposes of art or magic, and historians are loath to call them writing, but they began the recording of mental states in external media. In another way, knots in cords and notches in sticks served as aids to memory. These could be carried as messages. Marks in pottery and masonry could signify ownership. Marks, images, pictographs, petroglyphs—as these forms grew stylized, conventional, and thus increasingly abstract, they approached what we understand as writing, but one more transition was crucial, from the representation of things to the representation of spoken language: that is, representation twice removed. There is a progression from pictographic, writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then logographic, writing the word.

      Chinese script began this transition between 4,500 and 8,000 years ago: signs that began as pictures came to represent meaningful units of sound. Because the basic unit was the word, thousands of distinct symbols were required. This is efficient in one way, inefficient in another. Chinese unifies an array of distinct spoken languages: people who cannot speak to one another can write to one another. It employs at least fifty thousand symbols, about six thousand commonly used and known to most literate Chinese. In swift diagrammatic strokes they encode multidimensional semantic relationships. One device is simple repetition: tree + tree + tree = forest; more abstractly, sun + moon = brightness and east + east = everywhere. The process of compounding creates surprises: grain + knife = profit; hand + eye = look. Characters can be transformed in meaning by reorienting their elements: child to childbirth and man to corpse. Some elements are phonetic; some even punning. The entirety is the richest and most complex writing system that humanity has ever evolved. Considering scripts in terms of how many symbols are required and how much meaning each individual symbol conveys, Chinese thus became an extreme case: the largest set of symbols, and the most meaningful individually. Writing systems could take alternative paths: fewer symbols, each carrying less information. An intermediate stage is the syllabary, a phonetic writing system using individual characters to represent syllables, which may or may not be meaningful. A few hundred characters can serve a language.

      The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts.

      In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto,

,

). The alphabet was invented only once. All known alphabets, used today or 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 were conservative; 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 Eric Havelock, 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 sort of interest.

      But how was one to speak about them? The words to describe the elements of this discourse did not exist in the lexicon of Homer. The language of an oral culture had to be wrenched into new forms; thus a new vocabulary emerged. Poems were seen to have topics—the word previously meaning “place.” They possessed structure, by analogy with buildings. They were made of plot and diction. Aristotle could now see the works of the bards as “representations of life,” born of the natural impulse toward imitation that begins in childhood. But he had also to account for other writing with other purposes—the Socratic dialogues, for example, and medical or scientific treatises—and this general type of work, including, presumably, his own, “happens, up to the present day, to have no name.” Under construction was a whole realm of abstraction, forcibly divorced from the concrete. Havelock described it as cultural warfare, a new consciousness and a new language at war with the old consciousness and the old language: “Their conflict produced essential and permanent contributions to the vocabulary of all abstract thought. Body and space, matter and motion, permanence and change, quality and quantity, combination and separation, are among the counters of common currency now available.”

      Aristotle