oops - where'd friday go???

So as we have been talking about the different groups and their experiences writing and translating ancient texts, it has really struck me how interconnected the different aspects of writing are.

First of all, I never realized how much the writing medium influences/is influenced by the subject of the writing. What really surprised me was the realization that I have made medium decisions at several times based on subject. For instance, I take class notes on loose leaf paper with whatever will write, but my personal journal is leather bound, acid-free paper and is only written on with select pens. There’s a reason sticky notes don’t hang around for years at a time – that medium is designed for a very specific kind of information.

Also, not all civilizations had stone tablets, or metal plates, etc. but I feel it is important to note that although the writing medium itself may not fit into this importance-hierarchy theory, I feel like the thousands of man hours of work and the immense amount of resources that go into building the temple to house the less durable mediums still allow us to count that as an effort to preserve the important stuff.

So, If we take this observation – important information is put on a lasting medium – and add that the harder it is to write on the medium, the more important the information has to be in order to be recorded (think of how writing in your personal journal would be different if it were on stone tablets) (mine would probably only include major events and their date, ie – “Marriage to Ashley M, 5-20-11”) I feel like we can make an argument that the texts that endured from ancient civilizations did so because the people of that civilization wanted them to because they are what were most valued by those people. If this is true, we can take a SUPER basic summary of what remains from an ancient civilization and make some pretty powerful inferences about that civilization.

For instance, my assigned civilization, Mesopotamia, has thousands and thousands of artefacts that remained through the years. Most of these are business and law related. So, Mesopotamian society, especially sumeria, we can assume that they were a very business oriented society. I would assume that this means they were probably a capitalist society (to some extent) and that they had relatively good social mobility.

I dunno, do you think I’m overstepping historical interpretation boundaries?