Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mythusmage" data-source="post: 1904320" data-attributes="member: 571">On WritingYou go back far enough in history and you'll learn that writing was developed as a way to keep track of things. For inventory and other records. Highfalutin stuff like literature came later. In the case of Middle East it all started with pictures, progressed to ideograms, then some cultures took it to syllabaries and finally to an alphabet.The impression writing was used primarily for art is just that, an impression. One gained through our tendency to focus on the interesting stuff. Agricultural data aren't interesting, soap operas are. So we tend to translate the interesting stuff and ignore the boring stuff.Literally millions of baked clay tablets were found in the ruins of the Assyrian cities of Asshur and Nineveh. The vast majority were records. Annual reports and the like. The fiction section was a small part of the whole.In the case of Greek writing what we have is what survived up to today. Which is most often what people were interested in preserving. Namely, the soap operas and other intellectually vital stuff. Agricultural records etc. got the short end of the stick, because people tended to see no value in them. Which is a shame, because comprehensive annual records of production can tell a lot about how a society is faring. If grain production drops off by [sup]2[/sup]/[sub]3[/sub] after a period of great plenty, you know something's going on.Much of our view of the past is shaped by what people considered important enough to save. And that, we are in the process of learning, can give us a very skewed view of our history.</blockquote>

Verification