Communication in Middle East and Abroad

The administration of large political entities, whether kingdoms or empires, required skills in writing and numeracy for administrative purposes, so that the ruler's writ could be understood by his officials and communicated throughout the land. In ancient empires there was a priestly monopoly on secular, as well as esoteric, knowledge. In societies whose cultural "memory" was limited by their inability to store large quantities of data in archives, the centralization of all knowledge was no doubt functional. Monopoly of knowledge was based on stone (later papyrus) and pictographs in Egypt, clay tablets and cuneiform in Mesopotamia. Difficult scripts were ultimately a constraint on both governance and trade, so expanding empires required conventionalization of the written language.

Conquest, in turn, involved the mixing of languages and writing systems. The Sumerians had a word-value writing system, while that of the Akkadians was based on syllable values. Simplification of writing was paired with the adoption of the sexagesimal counting system in the centralized bureaucracy established by Hammurabi (1792–1750 B.C.E.; Old Assyrian Empire, 1800–1375 B.C.E.). The sexagesimal system had been passed on after 2000 B.C.E. from the Sumerians to the Babylonians and Assyrians, "together with their cuneiform script, which they adapted to their Semitic languages" (van der Waerden, p. 667).

The alphabet was invented by Semitic peoples, possibly in Palestine, on the fringes of the Babylonian and Egyptian empires before 1500 B.C.E., and perfected along the Phoenician coast. The alphabet formed part of an integrated writing system that came to include papyrus and the reed pen. Two families of script emerged: one Phoenician (reflecting demands of maritime trade and an alphabet that could be used with papyrus), the other Aramaic (responding to demands of land-based trade and, possibly, the use of parchment). The alphabet was flexible, and it favored the growth of trade and the rise of cities. Extensive oral traditions of the ancient Jews and Egyptians now could be written down. The written letter replaced the graven image. The ban on graven images in Judaism (and, later, in Islam) may well reflect ancient rivalries with peoples whose writing systems were based on pictographs.

The centralization of power (Assyrians, then Persians) involved problems of communication and transportation, both of which were reflected in administrative capacity (the ability to move documents over space) and continuity (the ability to store documents over time). Laws and edicts had to be delivered to provincial governors and also stored over time in a central archive to promote continuity and stability, both in administration and in law.

Conquest has always been a powerful means of cultural diffusion. When the Persians conquered Egypt in 525 B.C.E., they set off a century of intense cultural exchange. Babylonian astrology may have first reached Egypt then (Parker, p. 723). Conquest also had systemic effects on language use. The Roman conquest (and doubtless that of the Arabs later on) had the effect of destroying oral cultures and replacing them by a more standardized written one. This has been a constant of Middle Eastern history.

Ease of communication meant that there were continuous or intermittent cultural exchanges over long periods of time between the same places, in both directions. Thus, Indian mathematical astronomy received a constant infusion of new ideas from the West: in the fifth century B.C.E. from Mesopotamia via Persia; in the second and third century C.E. from Mesopotamia via Greece; in the fourth century C.E. directly from Greece; in the tenth through the eighteenth centuries from Persia; in the nineteenth century from England. In the first three transmissions, the Indians got theory that was either out-of-date in its country of origin or else was deviant, so there was virtually no reflection of Ptolemaic astronomy in India until the seventeenth century (Pingree, p. 533). At the same time that elements of Greek astronomy reached India, the Arabs introduced Indian astronomical tables in the Middle East and adopted their format.