Communication in Orality and the Advent of Writing

Not only the advent of writing but the use of cheaper and more flexible writing materials helped the communication of ideas and the democratization of knowledge through the spread of education. An important stage was reached with the use of paper. Previously the media for visible language consisted of clay tablets (as in Mesopotamia), of other solid materials, of wax tablets, of papyrus, and in the West of parchment (of skins). Papyrus gave Egypt a considerable advantage for the sending of messages and recording of information, but in the West that material had to be imported at considerable expense and the local use of parchment meant that a manuscript of 150 pages required the skins of a dozen sheep, only possible in a "carnivorous society" (Braudel, p. 497). Paper was cheap and could be manufactured out of local vegetable or waste material. But it was a long time coming to the West and when it did so, like writing and later printing, represented "the conquest of the East." Invented in China at the beginning of the common era, it was adopted throughout the Islamic world from Central Asia, to Baghdad around 1000 C.E., to Spain where paper mills were turning in the twelfth century. In Christian Europe, paper was first manufactured in Italy two hundred years later. The enormous advantage this gave to Islamic cultures in the communication of ideas is illustrated by the fact that the library of the caliph of Cordoba in the twelfth century consisted of 400,000 volumes, while the number in the monastery of St. Gall in Switzerland, one of the largest in the north, was six hundred. The discrepancy was enormous and represented the great lag in Western knowledge systems before the Renaissance and the advent of the printing press, also probably from China, at the end of the fifteenth century.

In Asia, the expense of communication was in copying (and creation) rather than materials; the use of paper enabled ideas and information to be communicated rapidly from East to West. The notion of zero and Arabic numerals that made such a difference to mathematical calculation were just part of a transfer that paved the way for the Renaissance and the "scientific revolution," including the revival of interest in the classical civilizations. Hence the rush of Western scholars to Palermo (such as Adelard of Bath) or to Toledo (the mathematician Gerbert of Aurillac) in search of what the Islamic world had to offer.

Gutenberg printing press. Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1395–1468) invented the printing press sometime in the mid-fifteenth century. The moveable printing blocks it employed made it far simpler to operate than the complicated machinery of the Far East, allowing Europe to gain an intellectual foothold in the world. © ERICH LESSING /ART RESOURCE, NY