by Peter Watson
This aspect of the alphabet had further knock-on effects. As it lost its elitist associations, writing was used for more and more different activities: it is another reason why, in places like Greece, philosophy, theatre and history writing flourished: as more people could read, so there was an increasingly bigger market for the production of written material. By the same token, the sheer simplicity of the alphabet allowed people to systematise knowledge and this too benefited a wider range of citizens. Information, knowledge, was easier to store and easier to retrieve.
The alphabet also encouraged abstract thinking. Because its signs were totally removed from the entities they represented (unlike cunei-form, for example), the alphabet encouraged people to see beyond what was particular in nature and to seek out what was the ‘essence’ or universal.20 And, as Leonard Shlain has pointed out, divining the laws that unite seemingly disparate events is the essence of theoretical science. This aided the investigation – and understanding – of nature. In other words, the arrival of the alphabet occasioned a subtle but profound change in human thinking.
Nor was this the only change. The introduction of alphabetic literacy had a profound impact on religion, so that the alphabet provides a link between this chapter and the last, which concerned the spiritual changes that overcame mankind in the Old World during the Axial Age. Alphabetic literacy, according to some scholars, encouraged men and women to turn away from the worship of idols and animal totems that represented the images of nature, and begin paying homage to the much more abstract logos.21
Ernest Gellner, in his celebrated book, Plough, Sword and Book: The Structure of Human History (1988), argued that the transcendent is born at this point ‘for meaning now lives without speaker or listener’.22 The concept of the ‘other’ acquires a genuine independence; concepts that had once been ‘danced out’, as he puts it, ‘and thus tied to a community’, now came to be written out in doctrine, available to all and binding, independent of community. Metaphysics was born and made to underwrite culture, ‘a new situation altogether’.23
There is some dispute over the earliest alphabet. Traditionally the Phoenicians were credited with this achievement, based mainly on the account of Herodotus, who in the fifth century BC wrote that they had introduced a number of accomplishments into Greece, of which the most important, he said, was the art of writing. Later, archaeologists uncovered evidence for an earlier alphabet in Canaan around 1600 BC.* But if that is true, it was an uncommonly long time before its use became widespread and, given its undoubted usefulness, this seems unlikely. Added to that, Phoenicia and Canaan do not seem – on the face of it – to be the type of cultures in which an alphabet might be conceived. The Phoenicians were not an agricultural people – their land rarely stretched more than ten miles inland – and their trading cities were dotted around the Mediterranean, a good distance from each other. They never excelled culturally, save for naval design, and their only literary legacy appears to be the alphabet itself and the word for book, derived from the city of Byblos.
The most vivid account of the Phoenicians comes not from themselves but from the Romans, who famously laid siege to the important Phoenician outpost of Carthage in North Africa. Because their deity, Moloch, could only be appeased by human sacrifice, they threw several hundred children – drawn from the finest families – on to their sacrificial fires. This is apparently confirmed by the great number of funerary urns found at Carthage containing the bones and ashes of children.
Another indirect piece of evidence is that the Phoenicians instituted no religious reforms and yet, as we shall see, the introduction of alphabet literacy had a profound effect on religion. Their gods, instead, were the harsh Storm-Ruler-God and the fierce Warrior-Sexual-God, similar to other cultures throughout the Middle East at that time.24
Nor does Canaan suggest itself as a place of origin. Many letters written by Canaanites were discovered at Tel el Amarna, dating to 1450 BC, but they are all in cuneiform. There are a few Canaanite inscriptions in alphabetic script but their contents do not suggest a high level of literacy or advanced thought. In Egypt the alphabet does not appear until much later.
Another theory, no less plausible, is that alphabetic writing first surfaced in the Sinai. This, known as Proto-Siniatic, was first discovered in 1905 at the Serabit al Khadem temple, in the Sinai itself, and is thought to have been left by the Seirites, who worked in the copper mines for the Egyptians. They are known in the bible as Kenites and Midianites and are the people with whom Moses ‘sojourned’ in the desert when he was exiled from Egypt. The first two letters of the Semitic alphabet are aleph and bet, the Semitic words for, significantly, ‘oxhead’ and ‘house’. These theories have been challenged by more recent discoveries in Palestine and Ras Shamra in northern Syria.26
And the addition of vowels and word breaks was not made first in Phoenicia but in Hebrew and Aramaic and greatly refined and improved by the Greeks (the earliest Greek inscription dates from the eighth century BC). The addition of vowels, to create a phonetic alphabet, allows a one-to-one correspondence between the written and spoken language.27
Robert K. Logan, in his book, The Alphabet Effect, says that the alphabet encouraged the development of mathematics, codified law, and deductive logic, all of which made possible the development of modern, Western, abstract science. He argues that because phonetic alphabets allow closer parallels between the spoken and written language, this encouraged the development of prose and therefore of narratives, which in turn made possible a new and more accurate account of history. This, he says, would have been especially important to nomadic people like the Hebrews who, moving on all the time, with little sense of place, would have benefited from setting down a written history. Logan further argues that the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament comprise three separate innovations in the life of the Israelites:
The first use of an alphabet script
The first adherence to a codified system of law and morality (no mention of law is made in the Torah until we encounter Moses)
The first acceptance of a complete form of monotheism
As a result, the word of God becomes a revelation.
Moreover, alphabetic literacy places a stress on linearity and uniformity, and in so doing, Logan says, encourages the centralisation of social functions.28 The fact that the alphabet could be – and was – taught to young children encouraged the development of religions of the book, where the beliefs set down in the book characterised the religion, rather than some other form of religious identity, such as birthplace or the practice of ritual. This would in time give rise to the notion of religious intolerance and the possibility of conversion, neither of which features had characterised earlier religions.
Apart from this, Logan says, the most striking aspect of the alphabet effect was the proliferation of abstract thought that it brought about, the new abstractions it provoked, seen most notably in the Greek world and the flowering of philosophy, drama and science, for which classical Greece is so famous. The alphabet also allowed knowledge to be systematised as never before. Abstraction and systematisation led directly to the development of logic and to ever more sophisticated analysis. Analysis and logic led to re-systematisation, which encouraged more reflective observation and that led to the discovery (and exploration) of nature. The narrative quality of prose likewise led to linear notions of cause and effect, another central ingredient of incipient science.29
Is it possible, some scholars have asked, that it was the Hebrews who invented the alphabet and is that why the mysterious origin of the Ten Commandments is so important to what was to become the first religion of the book – the Old Testament being the first book written in an alphabet? And does the alphabet play a part in the development of monotheism, a more abstract, more internalised form of religion in which – again for the first time – a book plays a most important part?
COMPETITIONS IN WISDOM
If politics – democracy – is the most famous Greek idea that ha
s come down to us, it is closely followed by science (scientia = knowledge, originally), which was to produce a quite radical concept of nature. Quite a lot of scholarship recently has explored early concepts of nature. The most important point, alluded to several times already, is that the existence of domesticated animals, in particular herding mammals, encouraged a relationship of dominance between human beings and other forms of life, a relationship especially set down in the bible where humankind is given (by God) ‘dominion’ over the animals. This is in contrast to hunter-gatherer ideas of nature, where humankind is fully a part of nature, which, as Tim Ingold has shown, is perceived as filled by personages of which humans are but one kind.30 In this way, humans became separated and apart from nature. This separation, in turn, helped the Greeks look upon ‘nature’ as ‘out there’, and it was this ‘out there-ness’ which, with the aid of the systematisation encouraged by the alphabet, gave rise to science.
This most profitable area of human activity is generally reckoned to have begun at Ionia, the western fringe of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the islands off the coast. According to Erwin Schrödinger, there are three main reasons why science began there. First, the region did not belong to a powerful state, which are usually hostile to free thinking. Second, the Ionians were a seafaring people, interposed between East and West, with strong trading links. Mercantile exchange is always the principal force in the exchange of ideas, which often stem from the solving of practical problems – navigation, means of transport, water supply, handicraft techniques. Third, the area was not ‘priest-ridden’; there was not, as in Babylon or Egypt, a hereditary, privileged, priestly caste with a vested interest in the status quo.31
In their comparison of early science in ancient Greece and China, Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin argue that the Greek philosopher/ scientists enjoyed much less patronage than their contemporaries in China, who were employed by the emperor, and often charged with looking after the calendar, which was a state concern (as was also true, to an extent, of the Mesoamerican civilisations). This had the effect of making Chinese scientists much more circumspect in their views, and in embracing new concepts: they had much more to lose than their counterparts in Greece, with the result that they seldom argued as the Greeks argued. Instead, new ideas in China were invariably incorporated into existing theories, producing a ‘cascade’ of meanings; new notions never had to battle it out with old ones. In Greece on the other hand there was a ‘competition in wisdom’, just as in sports contests (sport was itself seen as a form of wisdom). Lloyd argues that there are far more first-person-singular statements in Greek science than in Chinese, much more egotism, individuals describe their mistakes more often, confess their uncertainties more and criticise themselves more. Greek plays poked fun at scientists and even this served a useful purpose.32
What these Ionians grasped was that the world was something that could be understood, if one took the trouble to observe it properly. It was not a playground of the gods who acted arbitrarily on the spur of the moment, moved by grand passions of love, wrath or revenge. The Ionians were astonished by this (it is often said that the Greeks ‘discovered’ nature) and, as Schrödinger also remarked, ‘this was a complete novelty.’ The Babylonians and the Egyptians knew a lot about the orbits of the heavenly bodies but regarded them as religious secrets.
Mott T. Greene, in his analysis of Hesiod’s treatment of volcanoes in the Theogony, has shown how the author achieved early on a sort of half-way stage in natural knowledge. While still referring to volcanoes as gods, his powers of observation, and his descriptions so carefully based on those observations, allow him to be well aware that there were different types of volcano. Hesiod’s gods differed in their natural properties.33
The very first scientist, in the sixth century BC, was Thales of Miletus, a city on the Ionian coast. However, science is a modern word first used as we use it in the early nineteenth century, and the ancient Greeks would not have recognised it; they knew no boundaries between science and other fields of knowledge, and in fact they asked the questions out of which both science and philosophy emerged. Thales was not the first ancient figure to speculate about the origin and nature of the universe but he was the first ‘who expressed his ideas in logical and not mythological terms, who substituted natural causes for mythical ones.34 As a merchant who had travelled to Egypt, he had picked up enough mathematics and Babylonian astronomy to be able to predict a total eclipse of the sun in the year 585 BC, which duly occurred, on the day we call 29 May. (For Aristotle, writing two centuries later, this was the moment when Greek philosophy began.) But Thales is more often remembered for the basic scientific-philosophical question that he asked: What is the world made of? The answer he gave – water – was wrong, but the very act of asking so fundamental a question was itself an innovation. His answer was also new because it implied that the world consists not of many things (as it so obviously does) but, underneath it all, one thing. In other words, the universe is not only rational, and therefore knowable, but also simple. Before Thales, the world was made by the gods, whose purpose could only be known indirectly, through myths, or – if the Israelites were to be believed – not at all. This was an epochal change in thought (though to begin with it affected only a tiny number of people).
Thales’ immediate successor was another Ionian, Anaximander. He argued that the ultimate physical reality of the universe cannot be a recognisable physical substance (a concept not so far from the truth, as it turned out much later). Instead of water, he substituted an ‘undefined something’ with no chemical properties as we would recognise them, though he did identify what he called ‘oppositions’ – hotness and coldness, wetness and dryness, for example. This could be seen as a step towards the general concept of ‘matter’. Anaximander also had a theory of evolution. He rejected the idea that human beings had derived indirectly from the gods and the Titans (the children of Uranus, a family of giants) but thought that all living creatures arose first in the water, ‘covered with spiny shells’. Then, as part of the sea dried up, some of these creatures emerged on land, their shells cracked and released new kinds of animal. In this way, Anaximander thought ‘that man was originally a fish’, that species could transform themselves into others. Here too it is difficult to overstate the epochal change in thinking that was taking place – the rejection of gods and myths as ways to explain everything (or anything) and the beginnings of observation as a basis for reason. That man should be descended from other animals, not gods, was as great a break with past thinking as could be imagined.35
Anaximander was fascinated by the present order in the world (which implies some dissatisfaction with it) and was fascinated too by how the present order was established. By analogy with embryology he concluded that the current order had developed and had not always been that way. This was a crucial collective achievement of Ionian positivism, that humans can change and in so doing affect their future. Interestingly, Anaximander wrote in prose, not verse, to underline the break with mythical thinking and he formed the view that the universe and the earth had mathematical and geometric qualities. He thought the heavenly bodies were like chariot wheels – arranged in a circular formation and that there was nothing divine about them. Possibly he got the idea of the circularity of the universe from the shape of the agora, where men sat in a circle as an egalitarian arrangement where everyone could be heard equally.
For Anaximenes, the third of the Ionians, aer was the primary substance, which varied in interesting ways. It was a form of mist whose density varied. ‘When most uniform,’ he said, ‘it is invisible to the eye . . . Winds arise when the aer is dense, and moves under pressure. When it becomes denser still, clouds are formed, and so it changes into water. Hail occurs when the water descending from the clouds solidifies, and snow when it solidifies in a wetter condition.’ There is not much wrong with this reasoning, which was to lead, a hundred years later, to the atomic theory of Demokritos.36
Before Demokritos, however,
came Pythagoras, another Ionian. He grew up on Samos, an island to the north of Miletus, off the Turkish coast, but emigrated to Kroton, in Greek Italy because, it is said, the pirate king, Polykrates, despite luring poets and artists to Samos, and building impressive walls, headed a dissolute court that Pythagoras, a deeply religious – not to say mystical – man, hated. All his life, Pythagoras was a paradoxical soul. He taught a wide number of superstitions – for example, that you do not poke a fire with a knife (you might hurt the fire, which would seek revenge). But Pythagoras’s fame rests on the theorem named after him. This particular theorem (about how to obtain a right angle), we should never forget, was not merely an abstraction: obtaining an absolute upright was essential in building. This interest in mathematics led on to a fascination with music and with numbers. It was Pythagoras who discovered that, by stopping a lyre-string at three-quarters, two-thirds or half its length, the fourth, fifth and octave of a note may be obtained, and that these notes, suitably arranged, ‘may move us to tears’. This phenomenon convinced Pythagoras that numbers held the secret of the universe, that number – rather than water or any other substance – was the basic ‘element’. This mystical concern with harmony persuaded Pythagoras and his followers that there was a beauty in numbers, but it was a fascination that also led Pythagoras to what we now call numerology, a belief in the mystical meaning of numbers and an elaborate dead-end.37
