College Essay on
Oral-Scribal Cultures
Man is by nature, a social animal. He lives in form of social groups called
societies and depends on his fellow beings in day today life. While living in a
social set up, it demands certain methods of communication to be adopted by the
members to run the show. Language is the most primary and effective tool of
communication. Apart from routine conversations, there are matters that are to
be reported to the next generations. For these matters we currently use the
written method, i.e., books or documents are published and preserved for future
use. In the primitive societies where there was no concept of writing and
printing, this kind of communication was done orally. One person to another and
from generation to generation orally communicated the important events. The
history of mankind can thus be divided into two phases-oral and scribal.
However, the invention of printing press brought a revolution in the society and
that era can be termed as and advanced phase of culture. Here we are concerned
about the social set up of the oral and scribal culture around the dark ages.
Order Your
Term Papers, College Essays and Research Papers
The term Dark Age is itself controversial-it cannot be applied to a specific
period of time in history. The reason bring that it was not necessary that the
entire world was passing through same social conditions at one time. On the
contrary, the world hosted various cultural and social set ups in different
parts at the same phase of time. However, between 1200 to 1100 BC, the Mycenean
Greeks abandoned their civilization due to reasons unknown. That period was
called the “Greek Dark Ages”.
In the oral culture as described above, the events were preserved through words
of mouth and were passed from generation to generation. With the passage of time
man developed script and started writing on peaces of wood, rocks, leaves,
animal bones and skin and the like. Before the advent of script, carving of
stones was popular and images thus made indicated certain events. These carved
images enabled the archaeologist and anthropologists to study the ancient
cultures. The introduction of scribal although improved the mode of
communication as compared to oral method but the scribal cultures also had
drawbacks like “distributed nodes of production, weak notions of authorship and
ownership, and limited production.”
The patterns of social relationships and social consciousness varied in the oral
and scribal cultures. The change in mode of communication has brought
transformation in all fields of social life. During the oral and scribal era,
all the affairs of government, social and individual interaction and affairs
were conducted orally. For such communication, physical appearance of the
related persons was extremely important or rather unavoidable. This gave rise to
a social intimacy and stronger friendly and family bonds between members of the
society. “The primacy of physical presence in communication promoted community
formations that were very much dependent on geographical togetherness and within
that constraint further determined by communities based on parochial and family
bonds.” In presence of these strongly ties, people were morally indebt to each
other and that moral and social consciousness did not allow them to do anything
that was against the interests of other members of the society. Word of mouth
was the only proof to any commitment and everyone felt himself morally bound to
fulfill that promise. Similarly in business deals, the parties and the witnesses
both realized the importance of oral deeds and always complied with these. The
people in oral and scribal cultures were closely attached and associated to each
other. As a result of this association, their social structure was based on a
strategy calling for collective interest. Their political and economic stands
were common and linked closely to each other’s. There was little room for
‘thine’ and ‘mine’. The virtues of the society lied in respect, loyalty,
selflessness and common good.
Order Your
Term Papers, College Essays and Research Papers
The books written during the early scribal and partially oral culture were also
different in nature. There was no concept of authorship. The works of those
writers was attributed mostly to their teachers and the text contained a
dialogue or discussion between various popular literary figures. Plato’s
‘Republic’ can be quoted as an example, which contains a discussion between
Socrates and other characters. Moreover, “in the commentaries of the ancient
texts, too, the focus is on the tradition rather than on the authors who wrote
these works. The origin of these ancient traditions is usually associated with
nebulous historical or mythical figures. When one studies any corpus of such
texts along with the commentaries, one tends to think more in terms of
collective authorship instead of an individual author. Thus, the idea or the
knowledge transmitted was more important than the individuals who contributed to
the tradition.”
The difference between the oral and scribal culture was minor. Although, oral
culture is more primitive but after the initiation of scribal traditions both
culture existed side by side. The oral communication lost its authenticity
through re-communication but the scribal scripts existed unaltered and proved as
more reliable pieces of information for the future. The amalgam of the oral and
scribal culture is best described by the famous American author Elizabeth
Eisenstein, saying that "scribal culture was so thin that heavy reliance was
placed on oral transmission... producing a hybrid half-oral half literate
culture that has no precise counterpart today".
End
Notes
Bureaucrats
and Barbarians: The Greek Dark Ages. http://www.wsu.edu:8000/~dee/MINOA/DARKAGES.HTM
From Scribal Culture to Typographic Culture. http://www.cecm.sfu.ca/personal/tstanway/MKM/typographic.html
Odin, Jaishree K. Technologies of Writing, http://www.hawaii.edu/aln/printing.htm
Scribal culture, http://65.107.211.206/cpace/infotech/asg/ag11.html
Order Your
Custom Term Papers, College Essays and Research Papers
