Write Supremacy

This prejudice about the authority of written stories soon extended to cultures that could write them. Humanity’s story of itself was rent in two at the moment of writing’s invention. Time was divided into “history,” after writing, and “prehistory,” before writing. Places were divided into “civilized,” with writing, and “uncivilized,” without writing. The word illiterate became a pejorative, and people who could write wrote to aggrandize the importance of writing. Writing became a form of supremacy. We know a lot about the achievements of written cultures because they were written, and little about the achievements of oral cultures because they were not. History may or may not be written by victors, but it is certainly written by those who can write. — Kevin Ashton, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art Much of what we call history is only the well-lit portion of the scene. Documents serve as the streetlight underneath which we search for the keys to…