Chapter 3. Babylonia: The Origins of Writing
In this chapter, Innis outlines the history of the world's first civilizations in Mesopotamia. He starts with the fertile plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but as the history unfolds, his discussion extends to large parts of the modern Middle East. Biographer Paul Heyer's warning that Innis's work can be challenging applies to this three thousand year history. Innis's condensed, elliptical prose demands careful reading as he traces the origins of writing from clay tablet and cuneiform script to the efficient Phoenician alphabet written on parchment and papyrus. Along the way, Innis comments on many aspects of the ancient Middle Eastern empires, including power struggles between priests and kings, the evolution of military technologies and the development of the Hebrew Bible.
Read more about this topic: Empire And Communications
Famous quotes containing the words chapter, origins and/or writing:
“When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“Nine-tenths of the value of a sense of humor in writing is not in the things it makes one write but in the things it keeps one from writing. It is especially valuable in this respect in serious writing, and no one without a sense of humor should ever write seriously. For without knowing what is funny, one is constantly in danger of being funny without knowing it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)