The following was composed in January of 2014, inspired by an advertisement by the Salem State Log, Salem State University's campus newspaper, for articles by students discussing their experiences with writing.
In more circumstances than most people, I prefer the written to the spoken word. It allows communication of ideas of greater complexity with greater precision in a form of greater duration. It is an invention that has expanded and enhanced the reliability of our collective memory, thereby facilitating both great evil as well good, but also a uniquely human exploration of the universe.
What is writing? Writing is a means of conveying information. What distinguishes it from the spoken word? It is seen, not heard. Most languages today are associated with no script—they are spoken, never written. And while the means of recording spoken language has existed since the nineteenth century, even today the vast majority of spoken language dissipates instantaneously upon its utterance, precariously stored only in our fickle memories.
Writing was invented five thousand years ago in order to facilitate administration by states. It has been essential in organizing larger armies, creating deadlier weapons, and in promoting and perpetuating hatred and violence. It has also been used to organize industry more rationally in order to produce greater quantities food, medicine, and other forms of material wealth, and to foster an expanded sense of community, so that two billion Christians worldwide share a sense of community with a handful of two-thousand-year-old Greek authors from the Middle East. Writing has preserved portions of our collective cultural heritage in a way not possible without writing. I can read the Epic of Gilgamesh today in a form not dramatically dissimilar from the version with which a Babylonian might have experienced it five thousand years ago.
Writing’s significance in human history is only one part of the story of writing, however, for we are composed of chemical elements forged in the cores of stars, animated by energy radiated by our sun, conscious by virtue of the pushes and pulls between the electrons of the atoms that compose our neurons. The precise transmission of complex ideas to subsequent generations, made possible by the preservation of those ideas in writing, has facilitated the accumulation of the collective observations of humankind on an otherwise implausible scale, which has allowed us to discern not only the origins of our societies and of our species, but of our universe. We are the universe made conscious, and through us the universe explores itself—an exploration not possible without the use of this five-thousand-year-old invention of our species we call writing.
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I spent several years researching Moshoeshoe's life, and wrote a biography titled NKETU:The Engmatic King. It was shortlisted for the 2013 JacanaMedia Award, and is now on a POD site UK-based Feedaread.com where it can be bought for $15. A paperback with full colour cover. I had many more sources than the Leonard Thomson you mentioned who was useful only up to a point. I thus made some interesting discoveries. To make the book more accessible to young readers here in South Africa, I decided not to write an academic tome, but to slightly fictionalize it. If you go onto the site you can read the first ten pages, and a blurb, if you like. It would be a good idea to buy the book though, for if you do, I'll give you my list of sources. That's assuming you want them!! regards Reen Collett