You're reading this, and that is amazing

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.