Page 47 - Encyclopedia Of World History

communication—overview 397

Papyrus, one of the eariest plants
used to make a writing surface
that could be preserved for
future reference.

have been based on Olmec systems willing to take a letter to its destination.
dating back to the mid-second millen- Only in the seventeenth century were
nium BCE. postal services open to the public, at a very
Today, most of the world uses alpha- high cost. It was railroads, introduced in
betic scripts.The first alphabet was devised by Britain in the 1830s and spreading to the
Semitic people in Egypt around 1800 BCE rest of the world during the nineteenth
and spread from there to Palestine and be- century, that transformed postal systems
yond. Semitic alphabets such as Hebrew and from the exclusive privilege of the wealthy
Arabic include only consonants.Vowels are indicated and powerful to the rapid, reliable, and cheap means
by marks above the letters, but only in religious texts and of communication we are familiar with today.
in readings for children.When the Greeks adopted alpha-
betic writing from the Phoenicians in the eighth century Paper and Printing
BCE, they added vowels, which were necessary to express Writing needed only simple artifacts and touched only a
the Greek language. The Latin and Cyrillic (Russian) minority of people. To reach more people, communica-
alphabets, used by a majority of the world’s people tion had to be mediated by technology. The first in a
today, are derived from the Greek. series of ever more powerful communications media
Writing has been used for many different purposes: were paper and printing. Both were Chinese inventions.
simple business documents, personal messages, monu- The earliest paper, made from hemp and ramie fibers,
mental inscriptions, sacred texts like the Bible and the dates to the first century BCE. China was an extensive
Quran, and works of literature and philosophy. For cen- empire with a large literate elite that valued ancient texts
turies, only a small minority—upper-class men, specially and the art of calligraphy, and therefore used a great deal
trained scribes, and a very few women—could read and of paper. By the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) there was
write.Ancient economies were too limited to need much an active trade in how-to manuals, novels, religious texts,
writing, and writing materials (except for clay) were too and other books. The craft of papermaking spread from
costly for most people. More widespread literacy had to China to the Middle East in the eighth century and to
await the invention of paper and printing during the sec- Europe after the twelfth century.
ond millennium CE. What made paper truly useful was the invention of
printing.Woodblock printing, in which a text was carved
Postal Systems into a block of wood, originated in China in the eighth
Early writing systems were invented or adopted by gov- century CE and was used to print tracts, engravings, and
ernment officials to keep records and communicate infor- paper money. Movable type made of ceramic appeared in
mation and orders. Small states used messengers, but the eleventh century, followed by metal type in the thir-
larger kingdoms and empires needed more reliable teenth. It was more widely used in Korea than in China,
means of staying in touch with distant provinces.The Per- where woodblock predominated until the nineteenth cen-
sians built the Royal Road from Susa, their capital in tury. Movable metal type was reinvented in Europe by
western Iran, to Ephesus on the Black Sea. Along it they Johannes Gutenberg (between 1390 and 1400–1468),
established relay posts with fresh horses for royal mes- who printed a Bible in 1453, and soon used to print all
sengers. The Romans built many roads and created an sorts of books, pamphlets, maps, posters, newspapers,
imperial messenger service, the cursus publicus.The Chi- playing cards, and much else, and contributed greatly to
nese, the Inca, and other empires found the same solu- the expansion of literacy in theWest as well as in East Asia.
tion to the problem of administration at a distance. Among the means of communication that printing
Members of the public, however, had to find a traveler permitted, the press became the most popular and