From Akhenaten to Moses by Jan Assmann;

Author:Jan Assmann;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

Writing as an Agent of Change

First of all, we must distinguish between systems and cultures of writing. Writing systems concern differences such as ideographic, logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic scripts. Writing cultures concern functions of writing and forms of its social embedding. The decisive steps in the evolution of writing are due less to changes of writing system than of writing culture.

All the major scripts that are currently in use stem from only two sources: the Chinese script, and the scripts of the ancient Near East such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Sumerian cuneiform. This fact alone gives us an idea of the interconnectedness of cultural phenomena. The invention of writing is indeed an event of axial magnitude, dividing the world into literate and oral societies. But it was not the invention as such that led to axial transformations. This was only the first step, and I will try to show that it was a third step in the process of literacy that definitively changed the world.

Before going into these details concerning the evolution and impact of literacy, however, I would like to start with a remark of a more general character. Writing as a cultural technique may be viewed under two different aspects, one pointing to the future and the other to the past: as an enabling factor, making cultural creations possible which would otherwise never exist, and as a preserving factor, keeping things in memory and accessible to later retrieval that would otherwise vanish and be forgotten. Writing, in short, is a factor of cultural creativity bringing about change and innovation, and a factor of cultural memory keeping the past present and permitting recourse to earlier texts and ideas. It is an agent of both acceleration and retention, of change and of permanence and continuity. Until now, it has always been studied as a factor of progress and evolution, stressing its enabling aspect as a cultural technique. Let me illustrate this point by the example of musical notation.

There are still many traditions of music that are untouched by musical notation and that correspond to what in the domain of language is called orality. They differ mainly in two points from literate musical traditions: in standardization and innovation. ‘Oral’ musical traditions tend to be less standardized and less innovative. They are more complex in their use of features that cannot be rendered in musical notation and in spontaneous improvisation, and they are less complex and innovative in the lack of polyphony and a certain formulaic repetitiveness which is also characteristic of oral literature. The kind of music, however, that develops in the realm of writing shows a breathtaking speed and range of evolution; only consider what happened in the 250 years between Monteverdi and Verdi. This evolution is a matter both of creativity and of memory. Musical notation enables the composer to create music of unprecedented complexity, and it founds a memory that determines the directions of development by intertextual competition. The history of western music would not have been possible without the invention of musical notation.

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