Copying is Interpretation

Before being transformed into film or being written down, epics like the *Odyssey* were handed down and reshaped in song for centuries, just like most other ancient knowledge. Socrates famously wrote nothing, and Plato wrote extensively while heavily criticizing writing as a way to communicate truths. It's crazy to think about how much of the knowledge we take for granted today started out in this way. Reliance on spoken word as memory was not unique to the Greeks; Judaism has a very strong oral tradition, as did Vedic India and other ancient societies. Writing made knowledge more durable, and it enabled us to express more complex ideas over time as layers of abstraction stacked up. But even written ideas morph over time. Take the Pythagorean theorem. `a²+b²=c²` is eight characters, an absurdly compact representation of an idea that took centuries of accumulation to formalize and transmit. But those six glyphs in that order only make sense because you already know what the letters…