The Evolution Of Writing (Part 1)
The story of scribes, resistance and the birth of a new idea
Hello reader,
What you’re reading is a newsletter/blog article that I just typed out with my fingers and it barely took much effort to get this to you. Even the 37 typos I committed (including misspelling the word ‘it’, which was a new low for me) were gracefully rectified by the God-like technology called Grammarly.
But the communication and transfer of ideas have never been so simple. Writing and literature have a deep, fabled history that started with demoniacally powerful scribes and took numerous leaps to get to where we are today: an era of shitposting and Twitter threads that are longer than the pathway to Pluto.
Our language continues to hold various clues about the earliest forms of writing and communication. We stare at tablets all day- a word that literally means clay tablets on which scribes wrote. We endlessly scroll, which is a reference for the papyrus scrolls that were used before paper ended its predominance.
Our methods today are outgrowths of this fascinating past. So in today’s piece, I want to cover the arc of this trajectory from its very beginnings and the numerous events and milestones that were party to the evolution of writing.
Scribes
As readers of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens may already know, the earliest forms of writing didn’t come from poets praising the vivacious curves of sexy women. It actually came from some boring-ass attempts by accountants to keep track of taxes that people owed to the state. Who would’ve guessed that the beautiful technology of writing emerged to cater to our obsessive need to oppress?
There's evidence of these tax calculations from 5000 years ago. Back in the day, writing on clay tablets was an extremely difficult task- consider it to be the ancient equivalent of rocket science. Only a select few were able to master it, and there were scribal schools to train people at it. These scribes became advisers to kings (who were themselves illiterate) and began to hoard power. Suddenly, it was possible to transfer instructions at a distance and wage war much more efficiently.
Oral Traditions
Even after scribes got to work, humans continued to tell stories orally. After all, we’d spent half a million years gossiping in the jungle about who stole an extra banana and who slept with the cousin’s wife. The challengers continued the same oral trend- arguably one of the most important people in our history.
Gautama the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Lao Tzu- all of them taught orally and never wrote a word of what they preached. All of these great figures came within 20 years of each other at a time known as the Axial age, which saw a philosophical flourishing, unlike any other moment in the history of ideas. It was their students who later wrote down their ideas and spread them through their respective geographies (and in the case of the Buddha, far beyond where they originated). Interestingly, some of the intellectuals in this era purposely chose not to write.
Resistance to writing
Brahmins preserved the oral tradition so they could control the narrative. Writing it down would expose it to distortions and could pass power into the hands of those who could modify the scriptures for their own purposes. Socrates, too, resisted writing. He felt that it’d move people away from deep thinking and prevent the author from editing his mistakes. In thinking that way, he was 2500 years ahead of Elon Musk in imagining the need for an edit button. He also felt that it was very one-sided, which is why whatever Plato wrote about him is in the form of dialogues.
In India, there was a lot of emphasis on memorizing the Vedas and other texts end-to-end. If that's not enough to give you an anxiety attack, this was to be done in 5 different ways- remembering each word of the texts, remembering the text in combination with 2 words, and so on. And forgetting what was written in these texts was considered a grave crime. Just thinking about the effort involved caused a major migraine.
It’s rather surprising that some of the wisest thinkers were dead against writing. But that didn’t stop the spread of this technology. Adoption was accelerated when paper, a Chinese invention, spread worldwide. As the story goes, some Chinese soldiers were captured in a war against the Arabs. Luckily, those prisoners knew how to make paper, and eventually, the technique found its way to Europe.
Early Tales
This led to the flourishing of Arabic writing as one of the first libraries got built in Baghdad, and texts like the Panchatantra were reproduced in Arabic. Even the eternally famous 1001 Arabian Nights was a product of this era. When the translation of the book hit Europe, the crowds went nuts. They lapped it up faster than what the Koreans did with Squid Games (for those who don’t remember, their marathon-watching sessions blasted data cables of local telco firms into outer space last year).
Entertained and addicted, the crowd just couldn’t wait for the next batch of stories- so much so that they mobbed the author to release the subsequent one when he was done with the translation and had nothing more to publish. Apparently, this led him to invent Alladin and Ali Baba out of thin air- no references to those characters are found in the original texts!
Writing eventually spread but there still wasn’t a way for written works to reach the masses. It became possible only after Gutenberg’s incredibly important invention that changed the story completely. The process of printing had already been invented in China at a much earlier period, but it was Gutenberg’s invention that ultimately went ‘viral’, and led to a completely new era of writing.
But this invention also posed a deadly challenge to the existing power structures of society, and the ramifications impacted the entire world. It’s a wholly different story with many plot twists- something that will be covered soon.
I hope you enjoyed learning some new things about the story of writing. Share it with someone who’s too busy scrolling so they can take a step back and appreciate where all of this has come from. And if you enjoy learning new things, join the community: