The Long Way Back to Ourselves

2.8

Writing: When Information Left the Brain

This episode traces writing to its origin: the oldest surviving texts from Uruk, around 3300 BCE, are not prayers but inventories of barley, sheep, and beer, and the earliest recorded name in history, Kushim, likely belongs to a bookkeeper, not a king. It presents Denise Schmandt-Besserat's theory that clay tokens sealed inside hollow balls, then pressed into clay, turned into the first written signs, though scholars dispute the path. It corrects the assumption that easier scripts spread literacy faster, pointing to Chinese writing, readable across unintelligible dialects, versus alphabetic Europe, where writing what you speak split Latin. It closes with Plato's Phaedrus, where Socrates warns writing weakens memory and offers only the appearance of wisdom.