The invention of writing and the earliest literatures

– 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

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

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,

•Where and how did ancient civilization develop?

• 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

• 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

Phoenician alphabet

• Unlike cuneiform and

hieroglyphic, this ancient writing

system was destined to survive

until the present day (22 signs for

consonantal sounds)

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?

•What is the legacy of the Hebrews?

Legacy of the Hebrews

• Unlike the rulers of the

Tigris-Euphrates 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 masters-

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?

• 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

What is the true legacy of the

Hebrews?

• 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

What is Gilgamesh?

• 2500-1500 B.C.

• First great heroic narrative

of world literature

• Tablets throughout the

Middle East written in

• "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

‘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