The technology that became sacred.
How did writing evolve from a technical tool to the backbone of our worldview? How has it reshaped our understanding of authority, authenticity, and knowledge?
“The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence.
It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.”
-Plato, Phaedrus
[Written as a free flow on 18 May 2019*]
Writing is not sacred; it’s merely a technology derived from spoken words. It owes its existence to speech. Without speech, writing is a meaningless collection of symbols. It cannot be understood where there are no spoken words. By itself, it is not able to communicate anything from one person to another.
Spoken words can rule, direct, and unite people. However, the power of speech is limited to the number of people one can reach at a given time.
Before the advent of electronic tools, a leader could address only a few hundred people at most. In such circumstances, a leader would speak to a limited audience, and his words would be relayed by those who heard them firsthand.
The potency of words diminishes the moment they are conveyed by others. This is because a leader who commands such influence must possess an extraordinary gift to sway others with spoken words. If he lacked this ability, he wouldn’t be in a leadership position. It stands to reason that those who relay the leader’s words cannot replicate the same aura.
If, among the conveyors of the leader’s message, there are skilled orators, even if they’ve faithfully echoed the leader’s words, the inherent nature of spoken communication will inevitably alter the final shape of the message. This is due to a fundamental difference between spoken and written communication: written words preserve the message as intended, allowing the audience to engage directly with the original content. Readers can revisit the text to clarify any misunderstandings. Spoken words, in contrast, are inseparable from their deliverer. Their meaning is an amalgamation of the content and the manner in which they are conveyed. Spoken words do not distinguish between content and form.
Written cultures place the utmost importance on the “authenticity” of a message because a written account can be cross-referenced with the original. Conversely, perfectionism is always constrained by what is achievable. Pre-literate cultures did not adhere to such a perfectionist stance. Any event relayed to them from the past was irretrievably lost in its original form. The recounting of that event also vanished the moment it was narrated, subject to the interpretations and alterations in the minds of its listeners. Neither the storyteller nor the audience could replay the narration or the event to verify the accuracy of details. It was assumed that the recounted event had been relayed through multiple intermediaries and had undergone numerous modifications before reaching them. The inability to access the original led to a general acceptance of inevitable deviations from the source.
Furthermore, any recounting of an event was either shaped by a single individual’s psychologically and geometrically limited perspective or pieced together from multiple individuals who witnessed the event with similar constraints, each influenced by their unique mental states and perceptions. This meant that any event became a distorted version of itself the moment it was communicated orally.
As a result, the question, “Was this event recounted exactly as it occurred?” held little relevance for oral cultures. The primary objective of narrating an event was to convey the foundational values of that culture to listeners (and their descendants) through an engaging, memorable tale. No one would object if Homer, for instance, embellished a skirmish involving 300 warriors by adding a thousand more to his narrative. The audience’s focus was on the underlying message, such as the idea that “even if you were immersed in the river of immortality, you would still possess a vulnerability.”
Thus, political and religious institutions prior to the advent of writing relied on malleable renditions of events. However, with the onset of agriculture, a challenge arose that couldn’t be addressed with such flexibility: ensuring sufficient food production for the community. Anecdotal accounts couldn’t be trusted for recording storage quantities or knowledge about natural phenomena influencing production. Accuracy couldn’t be compromised for the sake of a moral lesson, especially when there was no moral undertone. The emphasis wasn’t on the narrative but on the precise amount of grain stored. Records had to be maintained in a universally consistent manner, ensuring clear and error-free comprehension.
The rise of writing as a technology that responded to this demand influenced the structure of political authority. In an age where communication between people was limited to the speed of walking (or at best, horse-riding), writing endowed the spoken word with the persistence needed to form an organization larger than a tribe and lasting beyond a generation.
When the spoken word was captured in writing, a leader’s words could extend over a broader area with minimum alterations. This technology conveyed “letter by letter” information to representatives in various cities, relaying commands from a king they might never have seen. For the first time, state governance became something that could oversee vast lands ruled by an organization of people who were strangers to each other, all under a leader who might not have notable charisma or strength, perhaps with a soft voice or an unusual appearance (The myth of King Midas with donkey ears).
When the spoken word was captured in writing, a leader’s words could extend over a broader area with minimal alterations. This technology delivered “letter by letter” information to representatives in various cities, relaying commands from a king they might never have seen. For the first time, state governance became something that could oversee vast lands filled with people who were strangers to each other, all under a leader who might possess a timid voice, lack charisma or strength, or even have a laughable appearance (as in the myth of King Midas with donkey ears).
Being a leader in an oral community required physical presence, charisma, oratory skills, and the direct influence an individual derived from these attributes. The advent of written organization shifted these priorities. Leaders who could better nourish their people by issuing more effective directives and establishing a more streamlined organization for their representatives achieved superior and more consistent outcomes than those who were personally present, riding their horses. With this shift, the state evolved into a conduit for information flow rather than a cult centered around a leader.
Such a structure did not necessitate a literate populace for governance. Viewing this through today’s lens might lead one to perceive it as the dominion of “a literate elite who intentionally kept the masses uninformed.” However, this would be an anachronistic perspective. For a significant duration post the invention of writing, there was no correlation between illiteracy and ignorance. During this era, writing was a novel, technical instrument. For an average farmer in the city of Ur, literacy was as essential as coding skills are for the typical individual today. Moreover, there was little to read. The sole group that required literacy during this period were the merchants, as they needed to document debts.
This created a twofold mode of life where the rulers organized the state with writing, while the ruled still relied on the pre-literate culture of oral stories. Moreover, the state grew to need stories more than ever: even though the political leader could rule a larger land thanks to written directives, he lacked the transportation technology that would allow him to be visible to the people he governed. Even if he had such means, he might not possess the qualities to leave a charismatic impression on them face-to-face. Thus, the leader, who governed an ever-expanding territory thanks to writing, needed stories to captivate his illiterate subjects.
The most effective way to achieve this was not to invent entirely new stories, but to incorporate the political leader into the religious narratives that already existed as powerful tales among the people. The bards, who had successfully passed down practical solutions and moral guidelines from one generation to the next for millennia, also became the primary medium for showcasing the magnificence and achievements of the political leader. (e.g., Gilgamesh)
If an organization is centered around a single individual, its vulnerability increases with its size. The Achilles’ heel of such an organization is its information flow. The primary factor determining the vulnerability of the information flow is the tool upon which it relies. The vulnerabilities of the tool dictate those of the information flow, and the vulnerabilities of the information flow, in turn, influence those of the organization.
In a vast organization, information doesn’t simply flow between two points; it traverses a chain composed of several nodes. A seamless flow of information requires minimal loss between the starting point and the endpoint. The efficiency between these two points can be no greater than that of the weakest link in this chain. This system cannot afford any level of incompetence in the utilization of the information tool at any stage of this flow.
A written directive issued from the capital city, intended for execution 600 kilometers away, establishes a chain that begins with the interaction between the pharaoh and his scribe and concludes with the priest in a distant town. There must be no information loss at any stage of this chain, as this organization doesn’t offer an alternative to the communication facilitated between the leader and the executor by the written directive.
A single line omitted from the writing can cause the city to store 10 units of wheat instead of 100 units, deplete the storage prematurely, and lead to a famine. The only way to prevent this is to standardize writing under strict rules and ensure that the literate are thoroughly versed in these rules. In such a world, officials cannot afford to have local variations of writing. Regional differences are undesirable and are eliminated as thoroughly as possible.
In this era, where political and religious organizations are intertwined, all directives are communicated in writing, and written words are pivotal to the flow of information, writing naturally assumes a crucial role for the educated. Altering a written text is perceived as equivalent to substituting the leader’s directive with one’s own interpretation. For a leader whose sole presence in his cities is manifested through written directives, this poses a grave threat and is seen as betrayal. The writing system must be preserved and safeguarded at all costs.
To illustrate how a technology can acquire sanctity from such dependency, let’s use an allegory: Imagine if Earth had colonies on other planets and traveling to those colonies took months. If we had a single communication station for these colonies that had been in use for many generations, we would invest all our resources into protecting that station. Our commitment wouldn’t just be to the station’s physical existence; we would also strive to preserve all the technical details ensuring its functionality, the supply chain providing spare parts for its machinery, the personnel with the technical expertise, and the software language that powers the system. This effort wouldn’t be confined to Earth’s inhabitants; settlers on the Moon would contribute as well.
This mechanism is precisely what elevated writing from a mere technical tool to a sacred entity for both the state and the educated. For millennia, every state that sought to endure treated this sanctity with utmost seriousness, given that there were no alternatives to writing for long-distance communications until the early 20th century. Even the telegram was fundamentally a written means of communication.
For both the Roman Empire and the British Empire, which governed several continents two thousand years later, two elements were paramount to harness the power of writing in maintaining state cohesion: educational institutions (where individuals learned to read) and the literate class (who conveyed the state’s directives from the center to the periphery). These elements held even greater significance for the British Empire than for the Romans. In the end, while writing remained the primary mode of communication for much of history, transportation technologies advanced exponentially. As I have mentioned before, the more expansive a centralized organization becomes, the more vulnerable it is.
*Endnote:
I have been thinking, writing and publishing little pieces on Digital Culture since 2005.
In 2019, while I was trying to turn those ideas into a book project, this seemingly irrelevant piece practically wrote itself in free flow. Although I never completed it, and it says almost nothing about digital, it created an unexpected framework to the rest of my work.
Now that I’m closer to publishing the whole collection, it feels right to share this piece with you — the exact text written back then.
