A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

  In all probability, writing was invented for commercial reasons, to remember that a certain number of cattle belonged to a certain family, or were being transported to a certain place. A written sign served as a mnemonic device: a picture of an ox stood for an ox, to remind the reader that the transaction was in oxen, how many oxen, and perhaps the names of a buyer and seller. Memory, in this form, is also a document, the record of such a transaction.

  The inventor of the first written tablets may have realized the advantage these pieces of clay had over the holding memory in the brain: first, the amount of information storable on tablets was endless — one could go on producing tablets ad infinitum, while the brain’s remembering capacity is limited; second, tablets did not require the presence of the memory-holder to retrieve information. Suddenly, something intangible — a number, an item of news, a thought, an order — could be acquired without the physical presence of the message-giver; magically, it could be imagined, noted and passed on across space and beyond time. Since the earliest vestiges of prehistoric civilization, human society had tried to overcome the obstacles of geography, the finality of death, the erosion of oblivion. With a single act — the incision of a figure on a clay tablet — that first anonymous writer suddenly succeeded in all these seemingly impossible feats.

  But writing is not the only invention come to life in the instant of that first incision: one other creation took place at that same time. Because the purpose of the act of writing was that the text be rescued — that is to say, read — the incision simultaneously created a reader, a role that came into being before the actual first reader acquired a physical presence. As that first writer dreamed up a new art by making marks on a piece of clay, another art became tacitly apparent, one without which the markings would have been utterly meaningless. The writer was a maker of messages, the creator of signs, but these signs and messages required a magus who would decipher them, recognize their meaning, give them voice. Writing required a reader.

  The primordial relationship between writer and reader presents a wonderful paradox: in creating the role of the reader, the writer also decrees the writer’s death, since in order for a text to be finished the writer must withdraw, cease to exist. While the writer remains present, the text remains incomplete. Only when the writer relinquishes the text, does the text come into existence. At that point, the existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until the moment in which a reader reads it. Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet, does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.

  This uneasy relationship between writer and reader has a beginning; it was established for all time on a mysterious Mesopotamian afternoon. It is a fruitful but anachronic relationship between a primeval creator who gives birth at the moment of death, and a post-mortem creator, or rather generations of post-mortem creators who enable the creation itself to speak, and without whom all writing is dead. From its very start, reading is writing’s apotheosis.

  Writing was quickly recognized as a powerful skill, and through the ranks of Mesopotamian society rose the scribe. Obviously the skill of reading was also essential to him, but neither the name given to his occupation nor the social perception of his activities acknowledged the act of reading, and instead focused almost exclusively on his ability to record. Publicly, it was safer for the scribe to be seen not as one who retrieved information (and was thereby able to imbue it with sense) but as one who merely recorded it for the public good. Though he might be the eyes and tongue of a general, or even a king, such political power was better not flaunted. For this reason, the symbol of Nisaba, Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was the stylus, not the tablet held before the eyes.

  It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the scribe’s role in Mesopotamian society. Scribes were needed to send messages, to convey news, to take down the king’s orders, to register the laws, to note the astronomical data necessary for keeping the calendar, to calculate the requisite number of soldiers or workers or supplies or head of cattle, to keep track of financial and economic transactions, to record medical diagnoses and prescriptions, to accompany military expeditions and write dispatches and chronicles of war, to assess taxes, to draw contracts, to preserve the sacred religious texts and to entertain the people with readings from the epic of Gilgamesh. None of this could be achieved without the scribe. He was the hand and eye and voice through which communications were established and messages deciphered. This is why the Mesopotamian authors addressed the scribe directly, knowing that the scribe would be the one to relay the message: “To My Lord, say this: thus speaks So-and-so, your servant”.3 “Say” addresses a second person, the “you”, earliest ancestor of the “Dear Reader” of later fiction. Each one of us, reading that line, becomes, across the ages, this “you”.

  In the first half of the second millennium BC the priests of the temple of Shamash, in Sippar, in southern Mesopotamia, erected a monument covered with inscriptions on all twelve sides, dealing with the temple’s renovations and an increase in royal revenue. But instead of dating it in their own time, these primordial politicians dated it to the reign of King Manishtushu of Akkad (circa 2276–2261 BC), thereby establishing antiquity for the temple’s financial claims. The inscriptions end with the following promise to the reader: “This is not a lie, it is indeed the truth.”4 As the scribe-reader soon discovered, his art gave him the ability to modify the historical past.

  With all the power that lay in their hands, the Mesopotamian scribes were an aristocratic elite. (Many years later, in the seventh and eighth centuries of the Christian era, the scribes of Ireland still benefited from this exalted status: the penalty for killing an Irish scribe was equal to that for killing a bishop.)5 In Babylon, only certain specially trained citizens could become scribes, and their function gave them pre-eminence over other members of their society. Textbooks (school tablets) have been discovered in most of the wealthier houses of Ur, from which it may be inferred that the arts of writing and reading were considered aristocratic activities. Those who were chosen to become scribes were taught, from a very early age, in a private school, an e-dubba or “tablet-house”. A room lined with clay benches in the palace of King Zimri-Lim of Mari,6 though it has yielded no school tablets to the scrutiny of archeologists, is considered to be a model for these schools for scribes.

  The owner of the school, the headmaster or ummia, was assisted by an adda e-dubba or “father of the tablet-house” and an ugala or clerk. Several subjects were offered; for instance, in one of these schools a headmaster by the name of Igmil-Sin7 taught writing, religion, history and mathematics. Discipline was in the hands of an older student who fulfilled more or less the functions of a prefect. It was important for a scribe to do well at school, and there is evidence that fathers bribed the teachers to obtain good marks for their sons.

  After learning the practical skills of fashioning clay tablets and handling the stylus, the student would have to learn how to draw and recognize the basic signs. By the second millennium BC, the Mesopotamian script had changed from pictographic — more or less accurate depictions of the objects for which the words stood — to what we know as “cuneiform” writing (from the Latin cuneus, “nail”), wedge-shaped signs representing sounds, not objects. The early pictograms (of which there were more than two thousand, as there was one sign for each represented object) had evolved into abstract markings that could represent not only the objects they depicted but also associated ideas; different words and syllables pronounced the same way were represented by the same sign. Auxiliary signs — phonetic or grammatical — led to an easier comprehension of the text and allowed for nuances of sense and shades of meaning. Within a short time, the system enabled the scribe to record a complex and highly sophisticated literature: epics, books of wisdom, humorous stories, love poems.8 Cuneiform writing, in fact, survived through the successive empires of Sumer, Akkadia and Assyria, recording the literature of fifteen different
languages and covering an area occupied nowadays by Iraq, western Iran and Syria. Today we cannot read the pictographic tablets as a language because we don’t know the phonetic value of the early signs; we can only recognize a goat, a sheep. But linguists have tentatively reconstructed the pronunciation of the later Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform texts, and we can, however rudimentarily, pronounce sounds coined thousands of years ago.

  The first writing and reading skills were learned by practising the linking of signs, usually to form a name. There are numerous tablets that show these early, clumsy stages, with markings incised by an unsteady hand. The student had to learn to write following the conventions that would also allow him to read. For instance, the Akkadian word “to”, ana, had to be written a-na, not ana or an-a, so that the student would stress the syllables correctly.9

  Once the student had mastered this stage, he would be given a different kind of clay tablet, a round one on which the teacher had inscribed a short sentence, proverb or list of names. The student would study the inscription, and then turn the tablet over and reproduce the writing. To do this, he would have to bear the words in his mind from one side of the tablet to the other, becoming for the first time a transmitter of messages — from reader of the teacher’s writing, to writer of that which he has read. In that small gesture a later function of the reader-scribe was born: copying a text, annotating it, glossing it, translating it, transforming it.

  I speak of the Mesopotamian scribes as “he” since they were almost always male. Reading and writing were reserved for the power-holders in that patriarchal society. There are, however, exceptions. The earliest named author in history is a woman, Princess Enheduanna, born around 2300 BC, daughter of King Sargon I of Akkad, high priestess of the god of the moon, Nanna, and composer of a series of songs in honour of Inanna, goddess of love and war.10 Enheduanna signed her name at the end of her tablets. This was customary in Mesopotamia, and much of our knowledge of scribes comes from these signatures, or colophons, which included the name of the scribe, the date and the name of the town where the writing took place. This identification enabled the reader to read a text in a given voice — in the case of the hymns to Inanna, the voice of Enheduanna — identifying the “I” in the text with a specific person and thereby creating a pseudo-fictional character, “the author”, for the reader to engage with. This device, invented at the beginning of literature, is still with us more than four thousand years later.

  The scribes must have been aware of the extraordinary power conferred by being the reader of a text, and guarded that prerogative jealously. Arrogantly, most Mesopotamian scribes would end their texts with this colophon: “Let the wise instruct the wise, for the ignorant may not see.”11 In Egypt during the nineteenth dynasty, around 1300 BC, a scribe composed this encomium of his trade:

  Be a scribe! Engrave this in your heart

  So that your name might live on like theirs!

  The scroll is better than the carved stone.

  A man has died: his corpse is dust,

  And his people have passed from the land.

  It is a book which makes him be remembered

  In the mouth of the speaker who reads him.12

  Two students’ tablets from Sumer. The teacher wrote on one side, the student copied the teacher’s writing on the other. (photo credit 12.1)

  A writer can construct a text in any number of ways, choosing from the common stock of words those which seem to express the message best. But the reader receiving this text is not confined to any one interpretation. While, as we have said, the readings of a text are not infinite — they are circumscribed by conventions of grammar, and the limits imposed by common sense — they are not strictly dictated by the text itself. Any written text, says the French critic Jacques Derrida,13 “is readable even if the moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I don’t know what its alleged author consciously intended to say at the moment of writing it, i.e. abandoned the text to its essential drift.” For that reason, the author (the writer, the scribe) who wishes to preserve and impose a meaning must also be the reader. This is the secret privilege which the Mesopotamian scribe granted himself and which I, reading in the ruins that might have been his library, have usurped.

  In a famous essay, Roland Barthes proposed a distinction between écrivain and écrivant: the former fulfils a function, the latter an activity; for the écrivain writing is an intransitive verb; for the écrivant the verb always leads to an objective — indoctrinating, witnessing, explaining, teaching.14 Possibly the same distinction can be made between two reading roles: that of the reader for whom the text justifies its existence in the act of reading itself, with no ulterior motive (not even entertainment, since the notion of pleasure is implied in the carrying out of the act), and that of the reader with an ulterior motive (learning, criticizing) for whom the text is a vehicle towards another function. The first activity takes place within a time frame dictated by the nature of the text; the second exists in a time frame imposed by the reader for the purpose of that reading. This may be what Saint Augustine believed was a distinction God Himself had established. “What My Scripture says, I say,” he hears God reveal to him. “But the Scripture speaks in time, whereas time does not affect My Word, which stands for ever, equal with Me in eternity. The things which you see by My Spirit, I see, just as I speak the words which you speak by My Spirit. But while you see those things in time, it is not in time that I see them. And while you speak those words in time, it is not in time that I speak them.”15

  As the scribe knew, as society discovered, the extraordinary invention of the written word with all its messages, its laws, its lists, its literatures, depended on the scribe’s ability to restore the text, to read it. With that ability lost, the text becomes once again silent markings. The ancient Mesopotamians believed birds to be sacred because their footsteps on wet clay left marks that resembled cuneiform writing, and imagined that, if they could decipher the confusion of those signs, they would know what the gods were thinking. Generations of scholars have tried to become readers of scripts whose codes we have lost: Sumerian, Akkadian, Minoan, Aztec, Mayan.…

  Sometimes they succeeded. Sometimes they failed, as in the case of Etruscan writing, whose intricacies we have not yet decoded. The poet Richard Wilbur summed up the tragedy that befalls a civilization when it loses its readers:

  TO THE ETRUSCAN POETS

  Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young

  Took with your mothers’ milk the mother tongue,

  In which pure matrix, joining world and mind,

  You strove to leave some line of verse behind

  Like a fresh track across a field of snow,

  Not reckoning that all could melt and go.16

  A fanciful map of Alexandria from a sixteenth-century manuscript. (photo credit 12.2)

  ORDAINERS OF THE UNIVERSE

  lexandria in Egypt was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC. Quintus Curtius Rufus, a Roman historian who lived in the reign of Claudius and wrote more than four centuries after the event, noted in his History of Alexander that the founding took place immediately after Alexander’s visit to the shrine of the Egyptian god Ammon, “the Hidden One”, where the priest addressed Alexander as “son of Jupiter”. In this recently acquired state of grace, Alexander chose for his new city the stretch of land between Lake Mareotis and the sea, and ordered his people to migrate from neighbouring cities to the new metropolis. “There is a report,” wrote Rufus, “that after the king had completed the Macedonian custom of marking out the circular boundary for the future city-walls with barley-meal, flocks of birds flew down and fed on the barley. Many regarded this as an unfavourable omen, but the verdict of the seers was that the city would have a large immigrant population and would provide the means of livelihood to many countries.”1

  People of many nations did indeed flock to the new capital, but it was a different sort of immigration that ultimately made Alexandria famous. By the time o
f Alexander’s death in 323, the city had become what we would call today a “multicultural society”, divided into politeumata or corporations based on nationality, under the sceptre of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Of these nationalities, the most important aside from the native Egyptians was the Greeks, for whom the written word had become a symbol of wisdom and power. “Those who can read see twice as well,” wrote the Attic poet Menander in the fourth century BC.2

  Though traditionally the Egyptians had set down much of their administrative business in writing, it was probably the influence of the Greeks, who believed that society required a precise and systematically written record of its transactions, that transformed Alexandria into an intensely bureaucratic state. By the mid-third century BC, the flow of documents was becoming unwieldy. Receipts, estimates, declarations and permits were issued in writing. There are examples of documents for every kind of task, no matter how small: keeping pigs, selling beer, trading in roasted lentils, keeping a bath-house, undertaking a paint job.3 A document dating from 258–257 BC shows that the accounting offices of the finance minister Apollonius received 434 rolls of papyrus in thirty-three days.4 A lust for paper does not imply a love for books, but familiarity with the written word no doubt accustomed the citizens of Alexandria to the act of reading.

  If the tastes of its founder were anything to go by, Alexandria was destined to become a bookish city.5 Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedon, had engaged Aristotle as a private tutor for his son, and through Aristotle’s teaching Alexander became “a great lover of all kinds of learning and reading”6 — so keen a reader, in fact, that he was seldom without a book. Once, travelling in Upper Asia and “being destitute of other books”, he ordered one of his commanders to send him several; he duly received Philistus’s History, a number of plays by Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus and poems by Telestes and Philoxenus.7