The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

by Martin Puchner

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth; and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said: “Let there be light” and there was light. And God saw the light, and that it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness. Then Lovell read: And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters. And let it divide the waters from the waters.” And God made the firmament and divided the waters which were under the firmament and the waters which were above the firmament, and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven.

And the evening and the morning were the second day. Now it was Borman’s turn, but he had his hands full. “Can you hold this camera?” he asked Lovell. Borman, his hands now free, grabbed the piece of paper: And God said, “let the waters under the heaven be gathered together into one place and let the dry land appear,” and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

But while the human Apollo crew might not have contributed much to science, it did contribute to literature.

that it was done by people without literary training who found themselves in an unusual situation and who used their own words, as well as the words of an ancient text, to express that experience.

It was only when storytelling intersected with writing that literature was born.

The alphabet revolution, begun in the Middle East and Greece, made writing easier to master and helped increase literacy rates. The paper revolution, begun in China and continued in the Middle East, lowered the cost of literature and thereby changed its nature. It also set the stage for the print revolution, which first occurred in East Asia and then, hundreds of years later, in northern Europe.

Until now. Clearly, our current technological revolution is throwing at us every year new forms of writing, from email and e-readers to blogs and Twitter, changing not only how literature is distributed and read but also how it is written, as authors adjust to these new realities.

Alexander of Macedonia is called the Great because he managed to unify the proud Greek city-states, conquer every kingdom between Greece and Egypt, defeat the mighty Persian army, and create an empire that stretched all the way to India—in less than thirteen years. People have wondered ever since how a ruler from a minor Greek kingdom could accomplish such a feat. But there was always a second question, more intriguing to me, which was why Alexander wanted to conquer Asia in the first place. In contemplating this question, I found myself focusing on three objects that Alexander carried with him throughout his military campaign and that he put under his pillow every night, three objects that summed up the way he saw his campaign. The first was a dagger. Next to his dagger, Alexander kept a box. And inside the box, he placed the most precious of the three objects: a copy of his favorite text, the Iliad.

Alexander the Great is well-known as a larger-than-life king. It turns out that he was also a larger-than-life reader.

The most striking image of them all was of course the Trojan horse with Greek soldiers hidden inside its belly, although I realized, to my surprise, once I read more accurate translations, that the last part of the war was actually not recounted in the Iliad and only briefly in the Odyssey.

The copy of the Iliad that Alexander put under his pillow every night was annotated by his teacher, Aristotle. The first thing Alexander

The Iliad originated not as literature but as a tradition of oral storytelling. The story was set in the Bronze Age, around 1200 B.C.E., in a world before the modern warfare used by Alexander—and before writing.

Greece became the most literate society the world had known, witnessing an extraordinary explosion of literature, drama, and philosophy.

THE TETRADRACHM COIN BROUGHT THE IMAGE OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT AND GREEK WRITING TO THE OUTER REACHES OF HIS EMPIRE. Credit 6

Greek became a world language,

after a night of drinking, Alexander became ill and died a few days later, of unknown causes. Perhaps he was assassinated

In contrast to the old Egyptian cities, which were inland, Alexandria was situated by the sea and designed for seafaring and trade. It contained a large natural harbor on one side and a lake and canals, fed by the Nile, on the other, with plenty of sites for docks. At its center stood the imposing buildings that expressed the ideals of Greek culture. There was a school, where pupils would learn Greek by studying Homer. Next to the school was a gymnasium, with a colonnade allegedly measuring over six hundred feet, for exercise and conversation. And, of course, there was a large theater.

Alexandria boasted all of these institutions, but another was more consequential in making Egypt Greek: the library. The strategic location of the city, which quickly became a major port, was crucial for the library’s success. When ships arrived to do business in Alexandria, they were told that they must first share with the library whatever literature they had on board. The library employed an army of copyists to preserve it all, creating the largest collection of scrolls anywhere in the world, aiming to include all existing tools, an ambition recently rekindled by Google’s plan to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. The library also boasted intellectuals and philosophers who pioneered the study of literary texts. At the center of the library were the epics of Homer, which were copied, edited, and annotated with a painstaking intensity otherwise reserved for scripture.

Alexandria became the largest Greek city in the world,

There was one writing culture that was even older than Egyptian hieroglyphics: Sumerian cuneiform. This writing system, too, was displaced by Alexander’s alphabetic writing and forgotten entirely. It was rediscovered only by chance in the nineteenth century. The story of that discovery takes us to the very origin of writing and to the first great foundational text in human history.

The invention of writing divides human evolution into a time that is all but inaccessible to us and one in which we have access to the minds of others.

Textual fundamentalism rests on two contradictory assumptions. The first is that texts are unchanging and fixed. The second acknowledges that texts need to be interpreted but restricts the authority to interpret them to an exclusive group.

It was only in the course of trying to understand the story of literature that I noticed a striking pattern in the teachings of the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus. Living within a span of a few hundred years but without knowing of one another, these teachers revolutionized the world of ideas. Many of today’s philosophical and religious schools—Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, Western philosophy, and Christianity—were shaped by these charismatic teachers.

Yet what these new teachers had in common was that they did not write. Instead, they insisted on gathering students around them and teaching them through dialogue, talking face-to-face.

THE BUDDHA FIFTH CENTURY B.C.E., NORTHEAST INDIA One of the earliest teachers was a prince living in the northeast of India. His dates are disputed, but his life became a legend, and as a legend it became the source of a powerful movement. His awakening began when he heard lovely things about the forest near his father’s palace. Trees as far as the eye could see, giving shelter from the sun, and ponds adorned with the prettiest lotus flowers, surrounded by a carpet of tender grass. He himself could barely imagine such wonders. His chambers, exquisitely decorated, were hidden away in the interior of the sprawling palace. Everything he needed was brought to him by an army of servants or by his beloved wife. Except that now the prince didn’t want anything brought to him; he wasn’t asking that someone go to the forest and fetch him a lotus flower from one of the ponds. He wanted to go and see for himself.

Finally wielding the technology, Buddhist scribes produced texts that captured as vividly as possible the life of the Buddha. Often they showed the Buddha in dialogue with students or adversaries, explaining rules for conduct and observations about the world. All the accounts of the Buddha we have today are based on texts written hundreds of years after his death, texts that would ultimately acquire the status of sacred scripture. (And once Buddhist scripture had been established, poets imagined the life of the Buddha; the biography of the Buddha I sketched is based on an early such account by the poet Ashvaghosha, who lived in the early second century C.E.) The Buddha’s charisma, his effect on his listeners, his every word and deed were the product of a new type of literature, teachers’ literature, which captured the appeal of a charismatic master who was long dead but whose life and teachings had finally intersected with writing technologies. CONFUCIUS FIFTH CENTURY B.C.E., NORTHERN CHINA Around the year 500 B.C.E., news of an unusual teacher was spreading in the East, in the region where Mount Tai rises boldly from the northern plains of China. Forests had been cut down to create large fields, and over these fields the north wind raged. Below the imposing peak, leaders of rival states and clans made sacrifices to ensure victory in their constant internal wars. Even though the state was supposed to

Master Kong had worked for one of the families and become embroiled in the wrangling. He had advised younger functionaries how to navigate this tricky terrain until he felt that he could no longer reconcile his service with his conscience, whereupon he withdrew from government service and went into exile. There his teachings took on a more universal character and attracted more students, until he became a famous teacher, who would be known

in the West by the Latin name Confucius.

The students didn’t just listen to Kong’s words. His every deed, the way he lived, was fascinating to them. He ate in moderation, they observed, but particularly enjoyed ginger. He always made sure that his bamboo mat was exactly straight. He loved order in all things. Even though he himself had withdrawn from government service, he considered stability and good governance central and impressed these values on his students.

The Chinese writing system itself was certainly unique. Words were not divided into single sounds, as in alphabetic writing; rather, concepts and things received their own signs, which grew in complexity and number. Today’s Chinese writing is directly derived from this ancient origin, resisting the spread of alphabetic writing to this day.

But soon after his death, students began to write down his words, capturing dialogues and scenes of teaching, questions and answers, from which emerged what we now call Confucianism.

SOCRATES 399 B.C.E., ATHENS The deaths of the Buddha and Confucius had been traumatic for their students. In the case of Socrates and Jesus, the deaths of these teachers turned them into martyrs.

Socrates’ most intense teaching moment occurred just before his death, in 399 B.C.E., in prison, when he told his students that philosophy was nothing other than a preparation for dying.

You know about swan songs, he would ask them, when swans sing most beautifully just before dying? Swans sing that way because they are looking forward to dying, celebrating their death. The students may well have thought that the swans didn’t sound so celebratory—they may even have realized that they were hearing their teacher’s own swan song—but they tried to hide their tears because they knew that he wanted them to be happy about his death, and they wanted him to be proud of them and regard them as fellow philosophers.

Then abruptly, before it was time, Socrates called in the prison guard and asked for the poison to be brought. The guard returned with a cup and handed it to Socrates. He took it, calmly, and emptied it in one gulp. He kept talking to his students, who were no longer able to say anything, providing them with an account of how the poison was making its way through his body. First his legs went numb, and he had to lie down. Then the poison crept upward; he became increasingly paralyzed, but he was still talking to them. Finally, the poison reached his head, and Socrates became quiet at last. Another moment passed, and he was still. Socrates, their beloved teacher, was dead.

Athens of the late fifth century, which was one of the most literate places on earth. Thanks to the alphabet, Greek writing was much easier to learn than many other writing systems, twenty-four letters neatly matched to sounds, which meant that written Greek was close to spoken Greek. No need to learn some ancient literary language like Hebrew or Old Akkadian. And the political system made sure that a citizen, even a lowly one, perhaps even a slave, a migrant, or a woman, could learn to read and write. Only the expense of papyrus, which had to be imported, was a drag on literacy. There was much to read. The stories of the Trojan War had been written down hundreds of years before in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Most people continued to experience these epics live by listening to specially trained bards who recited them to large audiences.

Socrates himself had studied Homer, but he didn’t use writing in his teaching method. Instead he found potential students at the gymnasium or in the marketplace by drawing them into conversation. He wasn’t always successful, because he was so odd. He was ugly, with a broad face and snub nose, and not well groomed. He rarely went to the public bath, didn’t oil his skin and hair, and didn’t usually use perfume.

What Socrates offered them was a new way of thinking in which everything was open to questioning, even Homer.

Only one student had a plan: Plato. He had not been with Socrates during the teacher’s final hours. Was he unable to bear the thought of Socrates in prison, dying?

As the living memory of Socrates faded, these written dialogues preserved him with all of his foibles, strange manners, and charisma. In fact, everything we know about Socrates—his ability to drink his companions under the table, his disheveled appearance, the love he inspired in his students—comes to us through Plato’s dialogues. One other writer, Xenophon, authored Socratic dialogues, but his are less significant. The Socrates we know is Plato’s Socrates, a Socrates transmitted by the written word.

JESUS FIRST DECADES C.E., SEA OF GALILEE (ISRAEL) Four hundred years after Socrates, another teacher emerged, this time in the Middle East.

It was fortunate that he knew the Hebrew Bible so well. After he had fasted in the wilderness for forty days, an evil spirit came to tempt him. “Command that these stones be made bread,” it said. “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee.” Jesus was hungry, his body and mind weakened, but in this hour of need he could turn to the scripture and recite verses that defended him from the cunning temptation the Evil One had put in his ear. He would remember reading the precept “Man does not live by bread alone.” And “Do not tempt your God.” Whatever the Evil One tried, he ran up against Jesus’ knowledge of the scripture. A very good thing it was that God, with t...

After the fasting and the temptations, Jesus emerged a changed man, and he began to preach. First he gathered only a few students around him, persuading them to leave their families and homes, to abandon everything they knew and cherished, and to follow him. And follow him they did, first a few, then more as word spread of a teacher wandering around the Sea of Galilee. In synagogues and courtyards he preached, asking questions, giving answers, sometimes straightforward ones but more often enigmatic parables and riddles. Soon t...

It was there that he delivered his most famous sermon, a sermon that spoke to people directly in words they could understand, a speech about poverty, powerlessness, and persecution, but also about a new way of life. He told them that the world as they knew it was ending, and that their lives as they knew them would end as well. He told them to prepare themselves, to change, to follow him. Everyone he addressed, even the lowliest. There was only one group he did not like, whom he attacked directly: the guardians of the Bible. These scribes were charged with interpreting the foundational text of their culture, the text Ezra had instituted as scripture upon his return from exile. But Jesus did not accept the authority of these scribes. Like other rebels against foundational literature, like Confucius and Socrates (and perhaps the Buddha) before him, Jesus could have wr...

Only once did Jesus actually write. He was sitting in the courtyard of the temple, teaching those who had gathered around him, when a group of priests and scribes dragged in a woman who had committed adultery. According to the law, written in the Hebrew Bible, she should be stoned to death, and the scribes were hoping that he would come out publicly against the sentence, and therefore against the law, so they could attack him. But Jesus did not rise to the bait. He knew the law encoded in the s...

It was John the Baptist who had first spelled it out: “For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” ’ ” Jesus presented himself as the one prophesied in the scriptures. He didn’t say to the crowds that he had written new scripture; he said, “This that is written must yet be accomplished in me.” He was the scripture, its living manifestation: “The Word was made flesh.”

The authorities in Jerusalem hated the idea of their text being made flesh—literature had long since become a matter of power and authority. The Roman overlords didn’t like it, either. They didn’t care about the scripture, but they sensed the rebellion in what he said. The result was yet another sham trial and death sentence. Socrates had been lucky, having been allowed to die a painless death in the company of his students. Jesus was publicly mocked, a crown of thorns was pressed onto his head, and he was made to drag his heavy wooden cross through the streets and up the executioner’s hill. He was nailed to the cross, the cross was set up with its heavy human load, and Jesus was left hanging there until he died of asphyxiation. The flesh was dead.

What would be his legacy? The same dilemma that had confronted the students of other teachers confronted his followers now. In their first desperation, Jesus came to their aid: His corpse vanished and then appeared to his followers, encouraging them to spread his teachings by word of mouth. To aid them in this endeavor, he sent a second miracle, the miracle of words, Pentecost. Tongues of fire ...

These miracles only postponed the problem of his legacy, and ultimately the solution was writing. Written accounts of Jesus emerged less than a century after his death, based on oral traditions among his students. Later called the Gospels, they preserved the story of Jesus’ words and deeds as if reported by eyewitnesses. The Gospels were powerful, and not only because Jesus’ words had been powerful. By focusing on their master’s humiliation and death, the authors of the Gospels created an unusual type of hero, a rebel who was also a victim. This was not how a hero was supposed to be represented, but the writers realized that par...

A Jew and Roman citizen, Paul had been involved in persecuting the followers of Jesus, but he had a conversion experience on the road to Damascus, when he believed the resurrected Jesus had appeared to him. After his conversion, he began to work as a preacher, traveling far and wide to visit Christian communities in Asia Minor. He interpreted Jesus’ words and deeds and turned them into a system of belief called Christianity (much as Plato had done with Socrates, creating a system called Platonism, and as Lenin would do with Marx, creating a system called Marxism).