The irony being that the surviving records of antiquity are literally just predominantly the royal propaganda because those were carved into stone which lasted and other writing formats didn’t survive.
The guy carving into the rock here in reality was doing so at the bidding of a guy who would have killed him if he didn’t write the version of reality he wanted recorded.
The idea that what was written down could be instantly disputed and checked against facts at all is the part this dude would find unbelievable.
Then the printing press fragmented and diluted the power of the elites. For example, I believe that it’s no coincidence that Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation came very soon after Gutenberg; in fact, I believe it was inevitable.
EDIT: well what do you know… it was Martin Luther himself who translated the famous Gutenberg Bible. Talk about one degree of Kevin Bacon.
Yes, Martin Luther did translate the Gutenberg Bible from Latin, Hebrew, and Greek into German. His translation was then printed at a high number and distributed in 1534. This was one of the first times that the Bible became accessible for the masses in their own language.
Yeah, cuneiform was interesting in terms of the medium and how much and how broadly it survived. Their folk tale in terms of how they received the writing was that someone from the ocean arrived and was trying to communicate and pressed reeds into the wet mud.
I sometimes wonder if there was an Aegean earlier Bronze Age/prehistory writing system (like the one found on the Dispilio tablet) that has been lost to the ages because it was on a temporary medium and then the Sumerians ended up with a version of writing that persisted in a loosely similar way to their folk history.
The irony being that the surviving records of antiquity are literally just predominantly the royal propaganda because those were carved into stone which lasted and other writing formats didn’t survive.
The guy carving into the rock here in reality was doing so at the bidding of a guy who would have killed him if he didn’t write the version of reality he wanted recorded.
The idea that what was written down could be instantly disputed and checked against facts at all is the part this dude would find unbelievable.
Then the printing press fragmented and diluted the power of the elites. For example, I believe that it’s no coincidence that Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation came very soon after Gutenberg; in fact, I believe it was inevitable.
EDIT: well what do you know… it was Martin Luther himself who translated the famous Gutenberg Bible. Talk about one degree of Kevin Bacon.
Huh? The Gutenberg Bible is a Latin vulgate edition, and it was printed three decades before Luther was even born.
Google threw the following text at me:
So I misunderstood the time jump.
Ahem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nāṣir
Yeah, cuneiform was interesting in terms of the medium and how much and how broadly it survived. Their folk tale in terms of how they received the writing was that someone from the ocean arrived and was trying to communicate and pressed reeds into the wet mud.
I sometimes wonder if there was an Aegean earlier Bronze Age/prehistory writing system (like the one found on the Dispilio tablet) that has been lost to the ages because it was on a temporary medium and then the Sumerians ended up with a version of writing that persisted in a loosely similar way to their folk history.