The Problem with Writing

I feel like the overall theme we established with our unit on oral culture was, in simplified terms, something like "Oral preservation and subsequent acquisition of knowledge is much more important than we realized, and it has preserved a lot of knowledge about past civilizations." I feel like what we're kind of getting to with this unit is "Written knowledge enhanced the oral" with some sort of implication that the written is superior. HOWEVER, I think this is too hasty a statement for us to make without considering some downsides to written knowledge that haven't really been discussed yet.

Brianne's post about Izapa Stela 5 and some myths surrounding it got me thinking about the drawback of written knowledge if it is misunderstood. But what if it's changed? It's a whole lot easier to change a text than it is to change a story the people keep retelling each other. Here are a couple of examples:

We know that during the several copyings of the Bible, the translators made several changes both inadvertently and intentionally. This is why the Bible occasionally conflicts itself (for some reason, whether Saul's fellow travelers on the road to Damascus saw the light or heard the voice is the example that always gets brought up) and why Joseph Smith had to go through and create some minor changes. If we didn't have those changes, though, we would be very confused by the Bible, and we wouldn't understand it.

About a thousand years after the completion of the Vulgate Bible, a young woman was being tried for heresy. Joan of Arc, an illiterate peasant from an obscure French village, had singularly changed the future of all of Western Europe, and then imagine the effects that Western Europe has had on the world since the Renaissance. Needless to say, she's an important historical figure. (Actually, she's one of my favorite little pieces of history, and I'm surprised I lasted until this week without bringing her up in my writings for any of my classes). One of the many remarkable things about Joan's story is that when she was tried for heresy by the British (ok, I am NOT going to get into the abundance of crap about how her trial broke countless ecclesiastic and monarchical laws) her defense was essentially perfect. One common example is when the all-British inquisitors asked her if she knew she was in God's grace. Catholic doctrine held that no one could be certain that they were in God's grace, so she could not answer yes. Answering no would have been like a confession. Joan's response was therefore (this quotation may be a little off) "If I am not, may God put me there, and if I am, may God keep me." The British were reportedly astonished when they heard this response from this uneducated, illiterate peasant who might not even have known that according to official Catholic doctrine, no one could know for sure if they were in God's grace.
When the trial was over and Joan had been burned, the British were worried about the papacy learning what happened and that Joan was clearly innocent of her official crime of breaking a Church law against cross-dressing. Therefore, they (Here is the point to this very long story) changed the trial manuscripts! We know this because of the fact that this was all going on in Rouen and the people there were therefore sympathetic to Joan and that some of the British came clean afterwards because they feared damnation. But not everyone that changes a document comes out with it because of fear of eternal fire and brimstone, so... (Of course I can't provide an example of a text someone didn't later say was wrong because then we wouldn't know about it being wrong. It's irritating how this works, isn't it?)

Take for example the Rosetta Stone (agh, here I go again mention it!) that Brenda discussed in her last post. If the person doing the translation messed something up in reading the Ancient Greek, our fundamental understanding of Ancient Egypt could be horribly misconstrued! This would be an even larger problem for older civilizations, like Alex's Sumerians, and even civilizations whose origins are still debated, such as James's Scythians.

What if, say, Homer's account that suggested Troy was in modern-day Turkey has been mistranslated and misinterpreted, and the city it is actually talking about is another naval power, say the Songhai Empire (ok, I know the chronology doesn't work for this at all, but let's just go with it.) Imagine the difference that would give us in terms of knowledge of the world balance of power in antiquity!

Also, when one has primarily or only written text left from a historical figure's life, it can be hard to tell a lot about them. Take Shakespeare for example. The main thing we have left from him is his written works. Now, however, there are countless theories about "Did Shakespeare exist?" suggesting that he was someone else or even a group of people (which is entirely ludicrous; of course it was Shakespeare). I even saw a preview for a movie that appeared to be about this subject a month or two ago and was embarrassed for is writers. But the point is (I seem to be wandering off onto tangents a lot today about historical figures, maybe because they're the best way to illustrate the point and they're also interesting, not that the point isn't) that the written can be edited or changed or mistranslated, which, in some ways, makes it very inferior to the oral.

Now, I'm by no means saying writing things isn't useful: I'm an English major; I would be burned like Joan of Arc for saying that. But imagine if God gave Joseph Smith the best Egyptian-English and even the best Hebrew-English books that the early nineteenth century had to offer instead of the Urim and Thummim and how so many things would have gone wrong with the translations (not that some people don't say he was one of those ones creating falsehoods on purpose anyways). It's a scary thought, isn't it?