Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs & Steel

2 3 6 ' GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL
ble only to scribes and read only in palaces, Greek alphabetic writing from the moment of its appearance was a vehicle of poetry and humor, to be read in private homes. For instance, the first preserved example of Greek alphabetic writing, scratched onto an Athenian wine jug of about 740 b.c., is a line of poetry announcing a dancing contest: "Whoever of all dancers performs most nimbly will win this vase as a prize." The next example is three lines of dactylic hexameter scratched onto a drinking cup: "I am Nestor's delicious drinking cup. Whoever drinks from this cup swiftly will the desire of fair-crowned Aphrodite seize him." The earliest preserved examples of the Etruscan and Roman alphabets are also inscriptions on drinking cups and wine containers. Only later did the alphabet's easily learned vehicle of private communication become co-opted for public or bureaucratic purposes. Thus, the developmental sequence of uses for alphabetic writing was the reverse of that for the earlier systems of logograms and syllabaries.
The limited uses and users of early writing suggest why writing appeared so late in human evolution. All of the likely or possible independent inventions of writing (in Sumer, Mexico, China, and Egypt), and all of the early adaptations of those invented systems (for example, those in Crete, Iran, Turkey, the Indus Valley, and the Maya area), involved socially stratified societies with complex and centralized political institutions, whose necessary relation to food production we shall explore in a later chapter. Early writing served the needs of those political institutions (such as record keeping and royal propaganda), and the users were full-time bureaucrats nourished by stored food surpluses grown by food-producing peasants. Writing was never developed or even adopted by hunter-gatherer societies, because they lacked both the institutional uses of early writing and the social and agricultural mechanisms for generating the food surpluses required to feed scribes.
Thus, food production and thousands of years of societal evolution following its adoption were as essential for the evolution of writing as for the evolution of microbes causing human epidemic diseases. Writing arose independently only in the Fertile Crescent, Mexico, and probably China precisely because those were the first areas where food production emerged in their respective hemispheres. Once writing had been invented by those

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few societies, it then spread, by trade and conquest and religion, to other societies with similar economies and political organizations.
While food production was thus a necessary condition for the evolution or early adoption of writing, it was not a sufficient condition. At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned the failure of some food-producing societies with complex political organization to develop or adopt writing before modern times. Those cases, initially so puzzling to us moderns accustomed to viewing writing as indispensable to a complex society, included one of the world's largest empires as of a.d. 1520, the Inca Empire of South America. They also included Tonga's maritime proto-empire, the Hawaiian state emerging in the late 18th century, all of the states and chiefdoms of subequatorial Africa and sub-Saharan West Africa before the arrival of Islam, and the largest native North American societies, those of the Mississippi Valley and its tributaries. Why did all those societies fail to acquire writing, despite their sharing prerequisites with societies that did do so?
Here we have to remind ourselves that the vast majority of societies with writing acquired it by borrowing it from neighbors or by being inspired by them to develop it, rather than by independently inventing it themselves. The societies without writing that I just mentioned are ones that got a later start on food production than did Sumer, Mexico, and China. (The only uncertainty in this statement concerns the relative dates for the onset of food production in Mexico and in the Andes, the eventual Inca realm.) Given enough time, the societies lacking writing might also have eventually developed it on their own. Had they been located nearer to Sumer, Mexico, and China, they might instead have acquired writing or the idea of writing from those centers, just as did India, the Maya, and most other societies with writing. But they were too far from the first centers of writing to have acquired it before modern times.
The importance of isolation is most obvious for Hawaii and Tonga, both of which were separated by at least 4,000 miles of ocean from the nearest societies with writing. The other societies illustrate the important point that distance as the crow flies is not an appropriate measure of isolation for humans. The Andes, West Africa's kingdoms, and the mouth of the Mississippi River lay only about 1,200, 1,500, and 700 miles, respectively, from societies with writing in Mexico, North Africa, and Mexico, respectively. These distances are considerably less than the distances the

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alphabet had to travel from its homeland on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean to reach Ireland, Ethiopia, and Southeast Asia within 2,000 years of its invention. But humans are slowed by ecological and water barriers that crows can fly over. The states of North Africa (with writing) and West Africa (without writing) were separated from each other by Saharan desert unsuitable for agriculture and cities. The deserts of northern Mexico similarly separated the urban centers of southern Mexico from the chiefdoms of the Mississippi Valley. Communication between southern Mexico and the Andes required either a sea voyage or else a long chain of overland contacts via the narrow, forested, never urbanized Isthmus of Darien. Hence the Andes, West Africa, and the Mississippi Valley were effectively rather isolated from societies with writing.
That's not to say that those societies without writing were totally isolated. West Africa eventually did receive Fertile Crescent domestic animals across the Sahara, and later accepted Islamic influence, including Arabic writing. Corn diffused from Mexico to the Andes and, more slowly, from Mexico to the Mississippi Valley. But we already saw in Chapter 10 that the north-south axes and ecological barriers within Africa and the Ameri-cas retarded the diffusion of crops and domestic animals. The history of writing illustrates strikingly the similar ways in which geography and ecology influenced the spread of human inventions.

CHAPTER 13
necessity's mother
ON JULY 3, 1908, ARCHAEOLOGISTS EXCAVATING THE ancient Minoan palace at Phaistos, on the island of Crete, chanced upon one of the most remarkable objects in the history of technology. At first glance it seemed unprepossessing: just a small, flat, unpainted, circular disk of hard-baked clay, 6l/2 inches in diameter. Closer examination showed each side to be covered with writing, resting on a curved line that spiraled clockwise in five coils from the disk's rim to its center. A total of 241 signs or letters was neatly divided by etched vertical lines into groups of several signs, possibly constituting words. The writer must have planned and executed the disk with care, so as to start writing at the rim and fill up all the available space along the spiraling line, yet not run out of space on reaching the center (page 240).
Ever since it was unearthed, the disk has posed a mystery for historians of writing. The number of distinct signs (45) suggests a syllabary rather than an alphabet, but it is still undeciphered, and the forms of the signs are unlike those of any other known writing system. Not another scrap of the strange script has turned up in the 89 years since its discovery. Thus, it remains unknown whether it represents an indigenous Cretan script or a foreign import to Crete.
For historians of technology, the Phaistos disk is even more baffling; its