Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the Axial Age ushered in a new, much more personal approach to understanding the human person and his place in the scheme of things.  The goal of religion had begun to move from propitiation of the gods and influence over nature.  It also had begun to move from a means of insuring stability in society to understanding the person, his potential for growth and his relationships with other persons.

As Karen Armstrong observes, there were many streams of thinking which developed during this brief period of time, concluding that,

 “The fact that they all came up with such profoundly similar solutions by so many different routes suggests that they had indeed discovered something important about the way human beings worked”.

Two of these streams would weave their ways into a common expression which would prove to be a major influence on the human perception of self, the understanding of human relationships and a rebound in the evolution of society.  Today’s post will begin a brief look at this weaving.

The Contribution of the Alphabet

Jonathon Sacks, in his book, The Great Partnership, Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning, sees the path of this weaving as well mapped by the development of the alphabet.

He sees the emergence of Greek thinking as rooted in the evolution from the historic near-Eastern cultures (Hebrew, Canaanite and Phoenician) to the thinking which emerged in Greece between the seventh and fifth centuries BCE.  He credits the major factor in this evolution as the birth and evolution of the alphabet which occurred during this same brief period.

Writing was invented originally in Mesopotamia more than 5000 years ago.  As Sacks sees it,

“The birth of writing was the birth of civilization, because it enabled the growth of knowledge to become cumulative.  Writing enables more information to be handed on from one generation to the next than can be encompassed in a single memory.”

Writing seems to have been invented independently seven times: Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Indus Valley script, the Minoan script known as ‘linear B’, Chinese ideograms and Mayan/Aztecan pictograms.  Writing first appeared in the form of pictograms, simple drawings of what the symbols represented. They evolved into ideograms, which were more abstract, then as syllables as people began to realize that words were not just names for things but also sounds.  The sheer number of symbols in these early forms prevented their wide spread, however, with 900 in cuneiform and 700 in hieroglyphics, for example, and restricted their use to the elite.

In the near-Eastern cultures (Hebrew, Canaanite and Phoenician), about 1800 BCE, the ideographic representation of ideas began to be replaced by the ‘alphabet’, in which the symbol set was reduced to a small enough number to be able to be understood by anyone.

The alphabet seems to have been invented only once.  The first alphabet seems to be the ‘proto-Sinaitic’ more than a thousand years BCE, and was used by the Hebrews, Canaanities and Phoenicians.  It was imported by the Phoenicians to the Greeks about 900 BCE, and became the basis for the Hebrew alphabet.

The Greek Alphabetic Evolution

The first four letters of the Greek alphabet are alpha, beta, gamma and delta, showing its evolution from the Hebrew aleph, bet, gimmel and dalet.  In the move to Greek, over time the Greek alphabet acquired vowels (not found in Hebrew), and evolved in its order of words:

• from the Hebrew order of writing from right-to-left
• through an intermediate order of right-to-left-and-back-again
• finally to left-to-right.

By the fifth century BCE it seems to have completed this evolution.

The inclusion of vowels was an important addition, in that it reflected a change in the way that the language was interpreted:

• Languages without vowels (right-to-left, as in Hebrew) require a greater understanding of the context of each word, and through this ambiguity offer the possibility of many meanings to the written statement.
• Those with vowels (left-to-right, as in Greek, Latin and English) are less ambiguous, and contain their own meaning.

Therefore, as Sacks points out, the significance of this evolution doesn’t lie in the simple physical act of the two different methods, but in the two different mental activities which are paramount in the two types of languages:

• serial mental processing in the vowelled languages
• holistic understanding in the vowell-less languages.

Saks places great importance on this shifted manner of thinking which resulted from the migration of the order of writing and the inclusion of vowels.  He cites the belief of Walter Ong, that “Writing restructures consciousness”, indicating that this shift of writing order either resulted from or precipitated the way that humans made sense of themselves and their environment.  This shift was to open new vistas for thinking, as we shall see.

The Next Post

As we shall see in a later post, this difference in approach to thinking is the result of the activities of the right and left hemispheres of the brain, but in the next post we will take a look at the unprecedented thinking that arose in the Greek culture as a result of this shift.