Writing
- History Fix Podcast
- 7 hours ago
- 23 min read
Episode 148: How the Written Word Quietly Shaped Civilization
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(Not an exact transcription!) I’d tell you my name, but you already know it. Even if you haven’t heard it spoken aloud yet. You may not know how to pronounce it, it’s not an easy one. But even if you can’t say it correctly, you know it. These symbols on the screen behind me tell you my name. These 12 symbols. Each one represents a sound that we can make with our mouths, our tongues, our larynx and lungs. And when you make the sound of each symbol you say my name: Shea LaFountaine. Those sounds, represented by those 12 symbols on the screen. That’s who I am. And I’m here today to tell you a story, the story of how Shea LaFountaine became those 12 symbols, the story of how writing changed the world. Because while it seems so normal to us now, most of you probably sat down and read that with ease and thought, oh, her name is Shea LaFountaine, that’s you taking for granted a system that took millennia to develop. A system you probably don’t know that much about. Like, did you know that writing was invented independently three separate times in human history? Did you know that it shaped empires? Begat religions? We often take the written word for granted, this technology that we use without even really thinking about it. But, in reality, none of this, none of this world you live in, this society would exist without it. Let’s fix that.
As I said, my name is Shea LaFountaine and I am the host of History Fix podcast where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Welcome to my first ever live History Fix live show, I am beyond grateful that you are here. A quick introduction for those of you who don’t know me. I was born and raised in Kill Devil Hills just down the road here. I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 2010 with a degree in elementary education and went on to teach 4th grade at First Flight Elementary school for eight years. I left teaching in 2021 to raise my children and pursue a career in curriculum development and, in all of my free time, that was sarcasm, I started a history podcast. I genuinely love teaching, I love to educate, and to me history is one of the greatest areas of need. There are so many misconceptions about our past, these really damaging misconceptions that quite often affect the present. And a lot of that is due to a lack of education. A lot of that is due to ignorance, because people have not cared to learn history. History’s boring right, it’s just dates and portraits of old men in powdered wigs. Well, no it’s not. It’s actually really really interesting. It’s these super interesting true stories of amazing feats and incredible people. And so by telling these stories, I hope to help people realize that history isn’t boring at all.
But another reason why there are so many misconceptions is because, since the invention of writing, that’s really when history begins after all. Since the invention of writing, history has been told only by those select few who were privileged enough to record it, to write it down for future generations to read. So who might that be? Well it was almost exclusively men. And generally, in the west at least, it was white men. So we have this story told almost exclusively by one small group, a minority really, white men. And so what that means is that the stories of women and the stories of other marginalized groups, people of color, have been omitted from our historical record, or they’ve been recorded incorrectly in many cases. And so that’s the other goal of History Fix. I want to make history interesting, I want people to get their story, their fix. But I also want to correct, or fix, the narrative. I want to set the record straight.
The record I’m hoping to set straight today is a long and convoluted one, but it’s also very interesting: the history of writing. What’s really interesting about writing, the development of a system for writing or recording information, is that it seems to have developed separately in three different times and places. The oldest form of writing, or pre-writing really, that we know of, dates back to Mesopotamia from over 10,000 years ago. Around 8 or 9 thousand years ago the origins of Chinese writing emerged, likely independently of what was happening in Mesopotamia. Most experts think Chinese writing was developed completely separately, although you know, just geographically I think it’s possible there was some overlap, some sharing of ideas. But then, around 3,000 years ago, probably starting with the Olmecs in Central America and definitely transferring to the Maya, Mesoamerican writing was invented. And that we know was independent of both Mesopotamia and China. They had no contact with each other.
Now, we don’t know all that much about the origins of Chinese or Mesoamerican writing unfortunately. But we do know a good bit about where our writing, the latin alphabet came from. It traces back to Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago. But it didn’t look like this, like these 26 letters and it certainly didn’t work like it does now, with each letter symbol representing a sound that we can make with our mouths. When it first started 10,000 years ago, it looked like this.
We’ll call these tokens. They were typically made out of clay and they were all different shapes: spheres, cones, cylinders, discs, whatever. These tokens represented goods that people could own. For example a cone stood for a large measure of grain. A sphere stood for a small measure of grain. Oval shapes represented jars of oil. So these shapes were used for accounting, for keeping track of how much grain someone owned, for example. They were used all over the middle east in areas that we know spoke different languages. So they weren’t based on phonetics. A cone wasn’t because the word cone sounded like the word grain because the word grain was different in all these different places and they were all still using a cone. Plurality was shown by including more of that token. For example, to show 5 jars of oil, you’d need 5 oval shaped tokens.
Eventually, they started storing these tokens in envelopes. Archaeologists call them envelopes but they’re really nothing like envelopes, they’re more like these spherical clay jars. If someone owed you, for example, for 3 jars of oil. You would put 3 oval shaped tokens into this envelope to keep track of that debt. Now, it got to be a pain though, going through all these jars, these envelopes to see what people owed what. So, to make that easier, they started pressing the token itself into the front of the envelope to make an impression on it while the clay was still soft. Then the token went into the envelope. But, now you don’t have to dig through to see what’s in there. You can have the envelope sitting on a tall shelf and tell with a quick glance just by looking at the markings on it what’s in there. These markings made by pressing the various shaped tokens into the clay envelope, were the first signs of writing. We’ve now gone from 3 dimensional objects to 2 dimensional markings.
By about 3200 BC, they realized, “hey you know what, we don’t even need to keep the tokens in the envelope. The front of the envelope tells us what’s in there, we don’t need to hold on to the tokens. The markings are enough.” They stopped using envelopes, these round clay jar things and they started using clay tablets. They laid flat. They were easier to store. They pressed the tokens into the clay tablets now. This represents three large measures of grain and two small measures of grain.
About a hundred years later this had evolved further. They started using a stylus, instead of the tokens, to draw the shapes into the clay tablets. We also see numbers emerge to show quantity. Here we have a clay tablet from Iran that shows a carving representing jars of oil and then it has 3 circular impressions and 3 cone shaped impressions. The circles represent tens and the cones represent ones. So this is recording 33 jars of oil. You’ll notice the shapes for tens and ones are very similar to the shapes for grain. They essentially repurposed them into numbers once they started drawing with a stylus to represent the objects.
By 3000 BC another need arose. They needed a way to record the names of people. They needed names with these accounts of grain and oil and whatnot. Who owns 33 jars of oil? Who? Here, for the first time, we see symbols that represent sounds. They would draw a picture of something that sounded kind of like that person’s name.
So it’s like, if your name is Jack, you might draw a jack like the little metal things you play with. If your name is Neal, you’d draw someone kneeling. Shea, I don’t know what you’d draw, shade… something that sounds similar. From this, drawing symbols to represent objects and sounds, Sumerian Cuneiform writing emerged, the earliest writing system, where they are using reeds to carve these wedge shaped symbols into clay tablets. It’s a mix of symbols that represent objects and symbols that represent sounds. So who of note was using cuneiform? Here’s our first story.
There’s a city mentioned in the Bible around 19 times called Nineveh. People didn’t know Nineveh was a real place, because there was no evidence that it actually existed. A lot of people thought it was a fictional, made up place, a myth. Kind of like Troy, people used to think Troy was just a myth too. Turns out Troy was a real place and so was Ninevah. It was discovered in the 1800s in modern day Iraq. And when they found the ruins of Nineveh they were very surprised to find a library. A room absolutely full of clay tablets with this cuneiform writing. Many of the tablets had been smashed and broken but this was clearly, at one point a library, likely the first library in human history, the Library of Ashurbanipal.
Ashurbanipal was one of the last Assyrian kings. At the time of his reign Assyria was the largest empire in the world and Nineveh was its capital. So, at this point Greece is in its infancy and Rome is just a small settlement. Sumer, where Assyria adopted a lot of its culture and its writing from, is long gone. Assyria is this massive empire ruled by Ashurbanipal who is defeating enemies left and right, including his own brother who was the King of Babylon.
Ashurbanipal hunted lions and he sieged and raided and slaughtered his enemies but he also fancied a good book. Bit of a book worm, a tablet worm, if you will. He could read and write which was quite rare for kings at the time. In those days, only the scribes could read and write, people who were employed to record things in writing and make copies of writing. But Ashurbanipal, the king, could read and write. He was a scribal king which was quite rare. He saw writing as a form of power.
He wanted to collect all of the writing there was, all of the clay tablets in existence, what we might call books now, he wanted them all. He gathered them up from all over and collected them in this library. He hoped to use this library like an artificial memory to become the most knowledgeable, and therefore most powerful, human on earth. He really bought into the idea that knowledge is power. We don’t really know what happened to Ashurbanipal, but we do know that shortly after his death, the Assyrian empire fell and his library was buried under the burnt remains of his palace for 2,000 years. Once discovered, we learned a tremendous amount about the world of ancient Assyria. It was all there on the tablets. We also discovered what is believed to be the first ever piece of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh.
But let’s go back now to well before Ashurbanipal, user of Sumerian cuneiform. Because well before his library was assembled in Nineveh, early cuneiform writing had spread from Sumer to surrounding areas, for example Egypt. In Egypt they began using symbols, little drawings, what we call hieroglyphics, that also represented objects or sounds. The concept was the same but the symbols were different because Egyptians spoke a different language than Sumerians.
Now, if you’re drawing a flea to represent a flea, fine, that might look the same in both languages. But if you’re drawing a flea to represent the word flee, to run away, well that word is totally different in Egyptian than in Sumerian. It sounds different so the symbol is different.
There was a bit of an issue with these early forms of writing though. There were lots and lots of symbols in both Sumerian Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Cuneiform ended up with some 400 symbols and the Egyptians had something like 1,000 or more different symbols. Not super efficient.
By about 1,500 BC near present-day Lebanon, these systems evolved into something much more like an alphabet, with just 22 symbols thanks to the Canaanite people. They didn’t have any vowels, they just had symbols to represent consonant sounds. And the way they came up with these symbols was to draw something that starts with the same sound. So, for example, Phoenician, the language they spoke, the word for house was bet, a B sound. So they drew a house for the B sound, and so on.
This is called the Phoenician alphabet. It would eventually evolve into our alphabet. We’ll get there soon. This Phoenician alphabet spread and evolved into similar alphabets in other languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic. Still no vowel sounds though. So who of note is using Hebrew and Aramaic?
Ezra. Ezra was a Jewish priest and scribe living in exile in Babylon with a lot of other Jewish people who had been pushed out of their homeland of Jerusalem. During his lifetime, the Jews were able to return to Jerusalem. That exile ended and he led them back to Jerusalem. But when they returned, Ezra was horrified to find Jerusalem essentially in ruins and the people no longer following the Jewish religion. Ezra pulled out all these scrolls that he had transcribed in Hebrew, scrolls telling the stories of the Torah or Old Testament, the scriptures, but no one knew how to read them. No one understood. The people didn’t read Hebrew. They spoke Aramaic. So Ezra rewrote the Hebrew scriptures using Aramiac script, the common tongue, so that it could be understood by the common man. And in doing this he essentially revived Judaism after exile, using writing.
Still no vowels though, still no vowels which is a problem for the Greeks. The Phoenician alphabet had spread and evolved all over into all these other alphabets that used the same system but with their own symbols that represented the sounds in their own languages. The Greeks latched on as well but the consonant only thing wasn’t working for them. What that meant was, if you wrote the word bull, people reading it would have no way of knowing if it said bull, bell, ball, or bill. They’d have to use context clues to figure it out. Other languages were cool with that but the Greeks needed written language for a very particular purpose.
They wanted to record their highly coveted epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Yes, these were so important to the Greeks that they formed their own alphabet in order to record them. Traditionally these epics had been told orally, passed down orally, sung really. They’re credited to Homer, an ancient Greek bard. But it’s likely Homer didn’t actually write them. They probably evolved from centuries of oral tradition, a collective cultural work. But here’s the thing, you needed vowels to record the Iliad and the Odyssey, to record the dactylic hexameter this poetic style they were in. It was all about the vowel sounds. The vowel sounds gave them their distinctive rhythm.
So to capture that, the Greeks invented symbols for vowel sounds and the Greek alphabet was born. So who of significance used the Greek alphabet? Another great lover of books. No pun intended. Alexander the Great was another huge historical bookworm. He was known to carry around a copy of the Iliad as he attempted to conquer the world. He fancied himself a 4th century BC Achilles. Just like Ashurbanipal, he was so inspired by writing and the power that he felt it gave him, he also set the groundwork for establishing a great library. He built the city of Alexandria in a newly conquered Egypt where his successors later built the Library of Alexandria. The Greek alphabet evolved into the Etruscan alphabet which was adopted by the Romans who tweaked it a bit. And the Romans spread it all over the place because the Roman empire was massive. The Roman alphabet, also called the Latin alphabet, is our alphabet. So we really have the Iliad and the Odyssey to thank for the invention of our modern alphabet. That’s how important they were to the Greeks.
Some of the most powerful writing we have from these ancient times come from great philosophers and religious leaders like Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus Christ. But the ironic thing is that none of those great thought leaders ever actually wrote any of their teachings down. Their teachings were all spoken. We only have their ideas in writing today because their followers recorded them in writing later. But these written recordings, these transcriptions, have shaped religion and politics worldwide for millenia because the technology existed at the time to record them.
I told you before we don’t know a ton about the origins of Chinese writing but we do know it goes way back to symbols carved into bone, oracle bone script, and that this evolved into modern Chinese writing which is still not truly phonetic. The Chinese have resisted the shift from symbols representing objects to symbols representing sounds this entire time. A lot of really important technologies have come from China, 4 that really changed the world: the compass, gunpowder, paper, and printing. Two of these have to do with writing. I know you’re like printing? What about Gutenberg, we’ll get to that.
We know writing in Japan was influenced by China and it’s Japan where the first novel emerges: “The Tale of Genji.” What’s really remarkable about this book, this first novel, is that it was written by a woman, a lady in waiting in the Japanese Imperial Court around the year 1,000. We don’t actually know her name but we call her Murasaki Shikibu because Murasaki was the name of the female protagonist in her book and Shikibu was her father’s position in the imperial court. So, it’s a bit of a pen name, because it wasn’t exactly normal for women to be authors in this time and place. We think Murasaki secretly taught herself to read and write and was able to write The Tale of Genji after her husband died but it was all very hush hush because of gender norms.
So, 1000 we have the first novel coming out of Japan by a female author. Let’s go back to Europe though, 1400s Germany, for our next story. It’s 1439 and a man named Johannes Gutenberg is eagerly awaiting the fair that is to take place at a nearby cathedral. It’s 1439 and a man named Johannes Gutenberg is eagerly awaiting the fair that is to take place at a nearby cathedral. During this fair, relics are displayed for the public to see, the swaddling clothes of Jesus, the shroud of St. John the Baptist, that sort of thing. And it was believed that if you saw these relics, if you got near them, you would be forgiven of all your sins. So pilgrims from all over flocked to this fair to be near the relics and be forgiven of their sins. Gutenberg was not one of these pilgrims. He’s interested in the fair for a different reason: money. You see, the fair would get so crowded that it was difficult for people to get close enough to the relics so they could buy what were called pilgrims mirrors, these pressed tin depictions of holy figures that they could use to sort of catch the reflection of the relic and get some of that forgiveness of sins power. Gutenberg is an inventor, not a pilgrim. He had invented a press to mass produce these tin pilgrims mirrors and he’s looking forward to selling them at the fair. But then the fair is postponed for a year, probably because of the plague. Gutenberg is super bummed. He was looking forward to using this new invention and making all this money. Now he has a year to sit and wait. He decides to repurpose his invention, this press, in the meantime.
Ultimately, long story short this leads to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press. Now, to be clear, Gutenberg did not fully invent the printing press. I know, right? He borrowed the idea from China. They were already using individual moveable letters, woodblocks, to print text, you know, you arrange the letters, slap some ink on it, press it on paper, there you go, print. Gutenberg invented a way to mass produce this, to do this on a much larger scale. He just tweaked what they were doing in China and made the whole system more efficient. But of course, in our Eurocentric western world, he invented the printing press. It was hugely significant though, don’t get me wrong. Because, before this, all books were written by hand. Can you imagine that? Scribes copied books by hand, very labor intensive, and so this meant that books were very expensive and hard to come by. Only the elite had books, until the printing press. The printing press made it possible to mass produce books which made them available to the masses.
The printing press had another unintended side effect too less than a century later when a German monk named Martin Luther used it to mass distribute his ideas. Martin Luther was a monk, he was part of the Catholic church which was the only church at the time. But he was not happy with the way the church was operating, mainly the selling of indulgences. People could buy these indulgences from the church. They were essentially certificates that would allow them to avoid punishment for their sins. Martin Luther thought this practice was very corrupt. The church was making money and people wealthy enough to buy indulgences, were sinning freely as they pleased without consequence. He wrote his 95 theses, this paper, because he wanted to let the people know about this corruption in the church. He nailed it to the door of a church in Germany. And every time they took one down he’d slap another another copy up there. He also had them mass produced using the printing press and distributed to the public. The church is trying to gather them all up and burn them but, thanks to Gutenberg, Martin Luther is able to print them faster than they can be burnt. And so, in this way, using the printing press, Martin Luther’s dissatisfaction from within the Catholic church was made known and spread through the people like wildfire and the protestant reformation was born. Martin Luther also translated the bible from Latin into German so that the common man could read it. He wanted to give the people some control over their own religion so they didn’t have to rely on the church which he viewed as corrupt.
And so now we have writing once again sparking religious change which almost always comes with political change and upheaval. We have countries all over Europe choosing sides, sticking with the Pope, breaking from the Pope, fighting each other over it and we have around this time
the colonization of the Americas, much of that for religious reasons and because of competition between these Catholic and protestant countries, namely Spain and England.
Remember how I said we don’t know that much about Mesoamerican written language? Well now I’ll tell you why. Because of this guy, Diego de Landa. Landa was a Spanish priest living on the Yucatan peninsula in the mid 1500s who regularly tortured and abused Mayan people. He was a lot more sympathetic towards them at first. He really admired their writing, their books which they showed him because they could tell that he was into books, he carried around a bible and whatnot. But then Landa discovered evidence of human sacrifice in a cave containing sacred Maya statues and he completely turned on them. This cultural difference was way too much. He began to see the Maya as evil, godless, devil worshippers and their books were of course works of the devil. He rounded up all the Mayan books he could get his hands on and burnt them. And so thanks to Landa we really don’t know much about Mesoamerican writing. He was later removed from his position and tried in Spain for extreme and excessive brutality against the Maya. But then they sent him right back a few years later of course to continue torturing people. He did write this sort of interpretation of the Maya alphabet which was discovered in the mid 19th century and we’ve been able to use it to decipher Maya written language finally after losing it for four centuries. We can now read around 80 to 90% of Mayan texts still in existence.
In the British American colonies by the late 1700s we see writing used once again as a weapon for a cause, Independence. Writing exploded in colonial America. Letters, pamphlets, encyclopedias, and newspapers all led to a sort of enlightenment that opened colonists eyes to the oppression they were under. They were not free. They were controlled by a king across an ocean. A king who was, side note, incredibly mentally unstable. A king who was levying tremendous taxes on them, unfair taxes, taxes on paper, taxes on stamps, he was taxing their writing, he was taxing their enlightenment. And for what? They got nothing in return. And so there was nothing left to do but to weaponize the writing that had ushered in this enlightenment. Calls for action went out all over the colonies in letters and newspapers, in Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” pamphlet which Benjamin Franklin helped print, in the Halifax Resolves signed right here in North Carolina, in the Declaration of Independence. Without writing, it’s likely this country we’re in right now wouldn’t even exist.
And it doesn’t stop there. The Communist Manifesto written in the mid 1800s by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, no other text in the history of the world has had such a big impact in so short a time. It inspired communist leaders all over the world to rise up, ushering in a significant political shift that led to most of the wars of the last century: the Russian Revolution, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, all of these conflicts have ties to the Communist Manifesto, which would not exist without writing.
t’s hard to even put into words how much writing influences us today. It’s absolutely everywhere. There’s no way to quantify its impact. In my pocket right now I have access to almost everything ever written. Everything, every idea known to man, is in here. That is dangerously powerful. Ashurbanipal, the ancient Greeks, they built these libraries as a source of power, an artificial memory. Knowledge is power. But we can’t possibly keep it all in our heads at the same time and so we write it down. Writing, the written word, is power.
But, it’s a power that has had an unequal effect on humanity. It’s a power that has been wielded almost entirely by men. You may have noticed that, as I told you these stories, only one person I mentioned out of 15 people was a woman and we don’t even know her name. We call her Murasaki after the main character from the book she wrote, the first ever novel, and Shikibu after her father’s position at the imperial court but we don’t know her actual name and that’s very telling. As writing emerged and evolved over time, one culture adopting and adding on to what another had developed, it undeniably became a very male thing. Scribes were almost always male. Most girls throughout history, except for the very elite, were not taught to read and write. Reading and writing came to be seen as downright dangerous for females in some times and places.
In fact, this list of reasons why women were admitted to the Trans-Alleghany Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia between 1864 and 1889 lists and I quote “mental excitement,” “novel reading,” “over action of the mind,” “over study of religion,” and “over taxing mental powers” all as reasons why women were admitted to this mental institution. It was the belief at the time that if women exerted themselves too much mentally by, for example reading and writing, thinking too much, it could lead to hysteria which would put them in an asylum. It could also affect their fertility. In the 1800s they believed that educated women struggled with infertility because of a conflict between the brain and the womb. Now we know this is obviously not true but it reflects a very real attempt by a patriarchal society to suppress the education of women, reading and writing.
Writing was a very male thing. Some historians have even argued that the emergence of writing, the written word, is what created our patriarchal society to begin with. That before writing, men and women were much more equal, they played more of an equal role in society. It wasn’t so overwhelmingly male dominated.
Leonard Schlain argues this in his book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. He takes it all the way back to hunter gatherer societies, well before writing. Typically hunters were men and gatherers were women. These were very different roles. Hunters scan the horizon for prey in what is a very strategic and methodical way. Gatherers walk and wander in groups chatting and stopping to pick nuts and berries leisurely as they go. Schlain compares hunters and gatherers to left brain and right brain, this idea that there are two ways of thinking and operating and that some people lean more in one direction than the other. The left brain is more logical, analytical, quantitative and the right brain is more creative, intuitive, qualitative. Schlain argues that hunting is very left brained and gathering is very right brained and because men were in these roles as hunters, likely because of their biologically superior physical strength and agility they tended towards left brain thinking and because women were sort of by default the gatherers, they tended more towards right brained thinking. But that’s fine, before writing. They’re both equally important in society. They are fulfilling their roles, men as hunters and protectors, women as gatherers and nurturers. It’s all necessary. But then, Schlain argues, when writing emerges, it’s a very left brained thing. Writing is a system, it’s a series of symbols that follow rules, it’s very analytical and concrete. It’s very left brain. Schlain argues that with the emergence of writing, that left brained way of thinking and being became dominant, men became dominant, and the patriarchy was born. But let’s look at that dynamic, that male female dynamic before writing. Was it different then? If Schlain’s theory is correct then it should have been different then. Society should be much less patriarchal before writing.
I’ve often been a bit confused by the Greeks. The Greeks lived in this very patriarchal society, in fact it’s the society on which our modern society was modeled here in the US. In ancient Greece, women had no rights. They could not vote or own property. They were essentially the property of their fathers that was transferred to their husbands. But, then when you look at Greek mythology, when you look at their religion, it’s not very patriarchal at all.
Greek mythology is littered with powerful female goddesses: Athena goddess of wisdom and war, Artemis goddess of the hunt, Hera Queen of the Gods. There are powerful mortal women in Greek mythology too: Medea, Antigone, Elektra. So there’s a disconnect here. They’re telling stories about these defiant powerful women while very systematically oppressing real Greek women to prevent defiance and power. Where do the goddesses come from if women have no power? Well, the short answer is, they came from a time before writing. Greek myths were originally told orally, just like the Iliad and the Odyssey. They were passed down for centuries by story telling bards before they were ever written down. If you remember I said a big motivation for creating the Greek alphabet, for adopting writing in Greece, was to record these stories, these myths. The goddesses predate writing. They come from a time before the patriarchy when male and female roles in society were more balanced.
Schlain points out other examples writing quote “Anthropological studies of non-literate agricultural societies show that, for the majority, relations between men and women have been more egalitarian than in more developed societies. Researchers have never proven beyond dispute that there were ever societies in which women had power and influence greater than or even equal to that of men. Yet, a diverse variety of preliterate agrarian cultures—the Iroquois and the Hopi in North America, the inhabitants of Polynesia, the African !Kung, and numerous others around the world—had and continue to have considerable harmony between the sexes,” end quote.
The Cherokee who once lived in the Appalachian mountains are another good example. Cherokee women were essentially equal to the men. They owned property. They participated in politics. In fact, the Cherokee clan system, these 7 clans they were organized into, it was matrilineal. You belonged to your mother’s clan, not your father’s. Now there is a written Cherokee language but that was not developed until the 1800s as an attempt to assimilate and appease white Americans and avoid being forced west off of their land which tragically happened anyway during the trail of tears, writing or no writing. But, before that, there was no written Cherokee language and women were more or less equal to men.
It’s an interesting observation, this idea that the invention of writing led to the rise of the patriarchy but it’s hard to prove with any certainty, of course. There are too many factors at play, too many variables. I think we can say with certainty, though, that the invention of writing changed absolutely everything.
When accountants in ancient Mesopotamia started pressing these tokens into the sides of their clay envelopes, there’s no way they could have known where that simple action would lead. That by turning concrete things, objects, a sack of grain, a jar of oil, into a symbol, they were ushering in a new era. They were ushering in a new technology that would lead to new countries, new religions, new ideas. It would lead to literature, to education, to competition, to warfare. It would shape from the ground up the world we live in today. An artificial memory, a dangerous and powerful thing: writing.
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