Notes: Writing and Power (Background)

• Thoughts could be shaped, codified, and transmitted over both distance and time
• Laws could be written and interpreted or enforced by those who could record or read them
• Writing gave to some the power to bind a people together by giving them a  shared history, common literature, untied world-view and shared cosmology
• Cosmology – branch of philosophy that deals with the origin, process, structure of the universe
• By studying written explanations of creation, historians can come to understand a particular people’s value system, view of itself, and relationship of the people to the world, universe, god or gods
• Beginning about 6,000 y.a. people began to develop more complex and codified forms of written comm…
• 2 types of writing
• Ideographic – thought writing, evolved from using pictures to represent things or thoughts
• Phonetic – writing that only a few signs need to be memorized and signs can be grouped in almost endless number of ways creating new words