While I was in Taiwan, I visited the Palace
Museum. It is a very impressive museum
for several reasons. First, like many
museums, the ownership of its collection is contentious. After WWII, China continued its civil war,
and during that time the Kuomintang government - led by Chiang Kai-shek – took
$200,000,000 in gold and currency, plus much of the treasures of the Forbidden
City palace to Taiwan. The treasures of
the Palace are displayed at the museum, hence the name, Palace Museum. Second, the size of the collection is
astounding. It is said to be the world’s
largest collection of Asian artwork with 696,000 objects. With so many pieces, only a mere 1% is on
display at any given time, so you can imagine that what you get to see is the
best of the best. And third, of those
696,000 pieces 609,553 are rare books and documents.
With so many documents, one might think it is
more of a library with an art collection, but even the books are works of art,
and during my visit the museum had a special exhibit focusing on book
binding. The display included some works
written on bamboo strips bound together, but most were paper, but beyond being
bound, they had intricately designed covers and storage boxes made of
wood.
This exhibit reminded me of the
collections I saw at the Library of Congress where they have two bibles on
display side by side. One is
hand-written and the other was printed using a printing press. The hand-written bible begins with impressive
artwork and calligraphy, but these details disappear towards the end. Why?
Because the other bible was printed at the same time the written bible
was completed, and the new technology was making the old art of hand-written
books too expensive and time consuming to continue.
As I continued to look at the rest of the
museums works, the theme of writing continued throughout the collection, from
the calligraphy - as its own art form or on pottery, ironworks and paintings
- to a peace treaty inscribed on a bronze tray. And in another section of the museum, our
guide pointed out some of the pictographic characters of Chinese writing.
This all led me to think even more about
writing in general and its progression through history. There are the forms of writing: from
earliest petroglyphs, to pictographic writing, to logographic writing systems
and the alphabet I’m using today. As
well as the mediums: from stone surfaces, to leather, wood, paper, and now
the paperless writing I’m doing today.
It is quite amazing that I can put my thoughts into words, then I can
write those words in a form others can read, and today those words can be
published and read almost instantly around the world on a e-medium. However, as instantly and widely as they are
electronically published, the lack of a ‘hard-copy’ makes them much less
timeless than the ancient and indecipherable scratchings of cavemen that still
mystify us today.
The development of writing forms is also very
interesting. The earliest forms of
writing initially served the purpose of logging inventories and numbering,
which became important as people transitioned from nomads to settlements of
collective farming efforts. Then as
these settlements grew into larger civilizations, the record keeping grew more
complex and the writing systems did as well.
However, because the writing systems were complex, only the elite
learned to read and write.
Chinese is probably one of the most
interesting written languages because it is one of the earliest written
languages, has pictographic origins, which led to thousands of characters, and
it remains in use today. More recently,
Korea’s Hangul was developed in 1443 to simplify the complex characters of
Chinese into 24 simple phonetic forms.
This made the written language easy to learn, making reading and writing
more accessible to the entire society, rather than being reserved for scholars
and the elite.
To use a biblical reference, when you read the
story of the Ten Commandments, you may not even think twice about the fact that
the commandments were written down.
However, they were written in 1300BC, around the same time as the
Hebrew script was being developed. So the Ten Commandments would have been one
of the first written documents of its kind, and no sooner had they been
written then they were destroyed.
Also, the fact that Moses’ was raised by the elite of Egypt meant that
he was likely one of the only people that could even read them. The rest of the Jews - having just escaped
slavery - would not have been able to read.
Today, literacy rates are used as a measure of
a nation’s development. In Taiwan, the
literacy rate is 98.29 percent, which is pretty amazing when you consider they
are reading one of the most complex languages in the world. Even South Korea falls slightly behind them
at 97.9, and English speaking Australia is only at 96 percent. (However, if we include N. Korea’s reported
literacy of 100 percent, then Korea as a whole would beat Taiwan. But, then we would have to believe that N.
Korea is telling the truth.)
In his book, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea, Thomas Cahill discusses the
Greeks use of written language and their phonetic forms, from which we
derived the word alphabet.
Cahill claims that “the ancient Greek alphabet announces a
civilization of leisure.” No longer was
language just about counting wealth and maintaining control. Instead it was a tool for entertaining. However, this also changed the art of the
entertainer and entertainment. The
storyteller no longer had to memorize all the tales, nor did you need a
storyteller to recount them. Instead,
you could sit at home and read the Iliad or Odyssey alone. The storyteller lost his job, and the society
lost the communal aspects of an oral tradition.
And now,
you are reading a blog on the internet.
You probably gave the act of reading very little thought, but literacy
is pretty amazing. And the fact that
this blog is a paperless medium that could be read by anyone with an internet
connection - except China and other countries that restrict the use of the
internet – is also amazing. And, the
fact that there are 7 billion people on earth, but only about 40 will read this
blog… well what is the opposite of amazing?
We'll just say it makes you part of an elite group of readers. Anyway, most of these thoughts could easily
unravel into doctoral thesis, but I’m not writing a thesis, and I’m guessing
you didn’t come here to read one.
