In this very sentence, lies one of humanity's most transformative innovations.
Do you want to take a guess what it is?
If you ever thought, what makes certain places through the ages the focal point of technology and innovation? Is it capital and public spending? Is it talent concentration? Is it luck? What connects Silicon Valley today, Vienna of the 1850s, and Athens of 500BC?
We can’t be certain where our story unfolded, but it was somewhere close to Athens in 800BC. The Greek, or Hellenic world, was coming out of the dark ages of the previous centuries and an ancient Renaissance was taking place.
Greece was defined not by borders, but by language.
You will have to trust me on this, but for a very long time to be Greek was defined as … to speak Greek.
But while ancient Greeks were capable of advanced mathematical calculations, master navigators, storytellers, astronomers and their language would be spoken from India to Iceland, most Greeks in 800BC could not write.
That was not due to a lack of education, but the hostile design of their language.
For centuries Greeks had used Linear B (pictured below) this was not an alphabet but a syllabarly, as every syllable has to have it’s own sign, much like hieroglyphics. Over 90 characters needed to be memorised, and for the reader to understand it, they would have to identify the cultural context, and many other nuances in order to do so correctly.
Writing was a luxury. A status symbol, a specialist skill only a few could acquire.
Think of it for a second, Homer’s Iliad, sixteen thousand lines long, and Odyssey were epic poems that were sung from traveling artists, not because paper was expensive, but because writing was expensive!
Memories, art and culture were kept mostly in the volatile form of sound waves.
As the Hellenic world is rapidly innovating, faster and better ships, modes of governance that unite people thousands of miles apart, trading, culture, mathematics. They must find a way to communicate more effectively.
The first information revolution is about to begin, and they find the perfect medium by rubbing shoulders with the fabled Phoenician traders. These seafarers from the Levant, introduced to Greece not only their expensive Tyrian blue dyes, glasswork, and craftsmanship, but their alphabet, the abjad.
The abjad is only 22 characters, all of them are consonants.
The Phoenician abjad
But in a twist of fate, as Greeks were adapting to this new form of writing to their language, a single individual made a momentous discovery.
She added vowel sounds to the Phoenician script.
All of a sudden with just 26 or so characters, you could write any sound you wanted.
All of a sudden, anyone could be a writer. This invention, quite literally goes viral.
Phrygians, Etruscans, and the nascent Romans are adapting their scripts with those 5 new inventions, and the writing revolution has begun.
In his book , The Greeks, Roderick Beaton explains the magnificent importance of this discovery.
At places hundreds of miles apart, owners of decorated drinking cups began to scratch messages onto their glazed surfaces. Often it was no more than the owner's name that was written, or a brief phrase of the type 'I belong to Philion'. Even this is revealing. There's no point in writing your name on a treasured possession if nobody but you can read it. Not long after the year 750 BCE, at the trading settlement of Pithecousae on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples, the owner of a high-value painted cup went further and etched into its surface three lines of verse:
Nestor's hearty-drinking cup am I.
He who drinks this cup will soon take fire
with fair-crowned Aphrodite's hot desire."
All of a sudden, the common people were able to establish and mark their property. All of a sudden record keeping, property, transactions, culture and even art could be preserved, and traced back to their owner.
Roderick even goes on to exclaim “Over the next few centuries, the alphabet would bring into existence the forms of communication that we know today as history, philosophy, and literature.”
Because technology (the logic of art) is only able to survive in communities of individuals that can understand each other.
I wanted to start At The Frontier with one of the most underrated stories of invention that I read about a few years ago.
I don’t know what exactly this means to you. Perhaps a “simplify your message” learning is hidden in here, or “democratise knowledge”. But what I do know is that my role as a science and technology journalist is to find a way to make technologies that feel unapproachable understood.
This often requires 3 things:
Being curious about hard and complicated things!
Finding an analogy that most of us can understand. For example:
Epigenetics = scary
Methylation patterns = scary
but “levers that control the expression of your DNA”… not so much.
Being ready to get this wrong and try again 🙂
Thanks for reading the very first episode of At The Frontier.
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Giota