The invention of writing and the
earliest literatures
How was oral traditional literature
preserved?
The invention of writing
• Long before people learned to write, they made up stories
• People had to develop an accurate memory
• Stories could be preserved in their original form; they
could be improved or expanded
• Can such oral literature be preserved?
• If it is not transferred to a written medium, it can be
irrevocably lost
• E.g. a sudden catastrophic break in the life of the
community-foreign conquests might easily, through
massacre, enslavement, and mass deportation, wipe out the
memory of what had been a shared inheritance
Olsen’s“The Invention of Writing”
• Why and how was
writing invented?
Invention of writing
• The earliest written
documents are records of
the first advanced,
centralized civilizations,
those that emerged in the
area we know as the
Middle East
• These documents contain
commercial,
administrative, political,
and legal information
• Where and how did
ancient civilization
develop?
Origins of civilization
• It was based on agriculture
• It flourished in regions
where the soil gave rich
rewards:
• Valley of the Nile –annual
floods under the Egyptian
sun
• Valleys of the Euphrates
and Tigris rivers, which
flowed through the Fertile
Crescent, a region
centered on modern Iraq
• How did cities come
into being?
Development of cities
• Civilization begins with cities; the word itself is
derived from a Latin word that means “citizen”
• Thebes, Memphis in Egypt
• Babylon, Nineveh in the Fertile Crescent
• Cities were centers for the administration of the
irrigated fields
• Centers for government, religion, and culture
• How did civilization
begin?
The beginning of civilization
• Writing and cities
• 3000 B.C. – the pharaohs of Egypt began to build
their pyramids as well as to record their political
acts and religious beliefs in hieroglyphic script
• The Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians
began to build the temples of Babylon and record
their laws in cuneiform script on clay tablets
Where was writing first developed?
• Region of the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers
• 3300 B.C. –earliest texts
• Characters were inscribed on
tablets of wet clay with a
pointed stick
• The characters were
pictographic –ox
• 2800 B.C. scribes began to use
the wedge-shape end of the
stick to make marks – the
resulting script is known as
cuneiform, from the Latin
word cuneus, a wedge
Cuneiform
• Efficient
• It stayed in use through the
vicissitudes of two millennia
(Akkadians, Babylonians, etc)
• It was on clay tablets and in
cuneiform script that the great
Sumerian epic poem
Gilgamesh was written down –
totally forgotten until modern
excavators discovered the
tablets and deciphered the script
Phoenician alphabet
•
Unlike cuneiform and
hieroglyphic, this ancient writing
system was destined to survive
until the present day (22 signs for
consonantal sounds)
• Who developed the script?
• Phoenicians, the Semitic peoples
of the Palestine coast
• The Phoenicians have left us no
literary texts, but the Hebrews,
another Semitic people, used the
system to record their history in
what Christians call the Old
Testament
What is the Old Testament?
Sorrows and triumphs of the Hebrews
Concept of a single God, unique in
the polytheistic ancient world
• What is the legacy of
the Hebrews?
Legacy of the Hebrews
• Unlike the rulers of the TigrisEuphrates and Nile valleys, the
Hebrews, located in Palestine,
did not control territory of
economic or military
importance
• From their beginnings as a
pastoral tribe to their high
point as a kingdom with a
capital in Jerusalem, they
accomplished little in the
political or military spheres
• Later history- unsuccessful
struggle for freedom against a
series of foreign mastersBabylonian, Greek, and
Roman
Religious legacy of the Hebrews
• After the period of expansion and prosperity under the great kings
David and Solomon (1005-925 B.C.), the kingdom fell apart into
warring factions, which called in outside powers.
• Internal and external struggle resulted in the destruction of the cities
and the deportation of the population to Babylon (586 B.C.)
• The period of exile (ended in 539 B.C. when Cyrus,the Persion
conqueror of Babylon, released the Hebrews from bondage) was a
formative period for Hebrew religious thought
• The return to Palestine was crowned by the rebuilding of the
Temple and the creation of the Torah –the first five books of the
Bible
• How did the Hebrews
become the people of
the Diaspora?
Diaspora
• The independent state of Israel was not destined to last long
• By 300 BC. –the Macedonian successors of Alexander the Great had
encroached on its borders
• Israel became part of a Hellenistic Greek-speaking kingdom
• Finally, Israel was absorbed by the Roman empire
• Revolt against Rome was crushed by emperor Titus in A.D. 70
• A second revolt against the emperor Hadrian resulted in the final
extermination and removal from Palestine of the Hebrew people
• Henceforward, they were the people of the Diaspora, the
“scattering”: religious communities in the ancient world who
maintained local cohesion and religious solidarity but who were
stateless, as they were to be all through centuries until the creation of
the state of Israel in the mid-twentieth century
What is the true legacy of the
Hebrews?
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Political history - a series of disasters
No painting, sculpture or secular literature
What they did leave us is a religious literature which is informed by an
attitude different from that of any other nation of the ancient world.
It is founded on the idea of one God, all-powerful and just – a conception of
the divine essence so simple that it seems obvious to us.
However, in its time it was so revolutionary that it made the Hebrews a
nation apart, sometimes laughed at, sometimes feared, but always alien
The consonantal script in which their literary legacy was handed down to us
was a great step forward from the hieroglyphic and cuneiform systems
But the absence of the notation for the vowels made for ambiguity and
misreading
What were the vowel sounds in the sacred name of God? YHWH
Traditional English version: Jehovah
Signs for the vowels were needed: contribution of the Greeks who adopted the
Phoenician script for their own language
What is Gilgamesh?
• 2500-1500 B.C.
• First great heroic narrative
of world literature
• Tablets throughout the
Middle East written in
cuneiform characters
• Assurbanipal’s synthetic
version –Standard Version
• Written on twelve
hardened clay tablets in
Akkadian, a Semitic
language
Gilgamesh
• "Gilgamesh: Fame haunts the man who visits Hell, who lives to tell my
entire tale identically. So like a sage, a trickster or saint, GILGAMESH
was a hero who knew secrets and saw forbidden places." The Bible is
best understood by knowing the background to the myths of ancient
Mesopotamia. Gilgamesh may be one of the oldest epics.
Gilgamesh
• Why does the story of
Gilgamesh speak to
modern readers with
astonishing immediacy?
‘The Art of Fiction’
• “Art lives upon discussion, upon
experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of
attempt, upon exchange of views, and the
comparison of standpoints.” –Henry James