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

OlsensThe 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?

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
Assurbanipals 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