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:
“Theory may be deliberate, as in a chapter on chemistry, or it may be second nature, as in the immemorial doctrine of ordinary enduring middle-sized physical objects.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)