American Minute with Bill Federer
History of Writing & Printing: Victor Hugo on Gutenberg's Press, "The Invention of Printing ... is the Mother of Revolution."
|
|
HISTORY OF WRITING
The invention of
"writing"
was around 3300 BC.
|
|
Richard Overy,
editor of
The Times Complete History of the World,
stated in "The 50 Key Dates of World History" (October 19, 2007):
"No date appears before the
start of human civilizations
about 5,500 years ago
and the beginning of a
written or pictorial history."
|
|
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
stated in the
Cosmos TV
series (2014, natgeotv.com, episode 10, "The Immortals"):
"It was the people who once lived here,
around 5,000 years ago,
who first started chopping up time into smaller bite-size portions of hours and minutes. They call this place Uruk. We call it Iraq.
... The part of
Mesopotamia
- the land between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The 'city' was invented here.
And one of humanities greatest victories was won over the ceaseless battle of time.
It was here that we learned how to write."
|
|
Writing
was first on
pieces of clay,
then on
papyrus reeds
from the Nile Delta.
The
reeds,
which grew 16 feet tall, had their outer rind removed, leaving the sticky inner cores, which were cut into strips, interwoven together, soaked, pressed, and then dried.
|
|
The word
"paper"
comes from the word
"papyrus."
It was the main medium to write upon for nearly 3,000 years.
|
|
Writing was invented in
China
around 2,600 BC during the reign of the legendary Yellow Emperor.
Instead of using reeds, the Chinese used
bamboo,
which was cut into strips and written upon vertically.
These strips were tied together creating
bamboo annals or books.
|
|
Around the same time,
writing
appeared in the
Harappan civilization
along the
Indus River Valley
in Punjab and Sindh.
Harappan writing
has never been deciphered.
|
|
Writing was also upon
palm leaves,
bark, bones,
and
stone.
Writing
was then made on
parchment
made from the
skins of sheep and goats,
and on
vellum
made from
calfskin.
|
|
WHO WAS ALLOWED TO WRITE?
Reading and writing
was, for the most part, limited to the
ruling elite
.
It was the
communication
of the
deep state class
who wanted to control the
ignorant and uneducated masses.
|
|
Anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss
(1908-2008) wrote:
"Ancient writing's
main function was to facilitate the
enslavement
of other human beings."
|
|
Emphasizing how tyrants need the masses of people to be ignorant,
George Orwell
wrote in
Nineteen Eighty-Four:
"In the long run,
a hierarchical society
was only possible on a basis of poverty and
ignorance."
|
|
James Madison
wrote to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822:
"Knowledge
will forever govern
ignorance."
|
|
Kings
had
scribes
who kept the court records.
Scribes
kept track of the
kings':
- treasures,
- decrees,
- genealogies,
- astronomical observations,
- myths, and
- royal propaganda.
An early form of fake news, scribes' records would omit military losses, rebellions, or anything that would portray the pharaoh negatively.
|
|
In order to carry out the
king's will,
some in the
administrative class
and
military class
were granted
security clearances
to learn the
secret
of
reading and writing.
|
|
Writing
was the equivalent of the
high tech industry.
Only
one percent of Egypt
could
read and write.
It was the
scribes' secret knowledge.
The National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, in its section on
Egyptian Artifacts,
has a display on
“Scribes,”
stating:
"Only a
small percentage
of ancient
Egypt’s population
was
literate,
namely the
pharaoh, members of the royal family, officials, priests
and
scribes.
... Particularly popular and lucrative, the
scribe’s profession
was mostly hereditary.
Scribes
had careers in the government, priesthood, and army. They began their rigorous training in their early childhood.
Most of their training took place inside a building called the "House of Life," attached to the temple.
Scribes
wrote on stone or clay sherds."
|
|
Elite ruling classes
always kept
common people
and
slaves
uninformed, prohibiting them from being educated or from communicating.
Rulers
controlled knowledge and communication throughout history:
- Islam's burning of libraries and forbidding followers to read the Bible;
- Medieval feudal lords and clergy communicated only in Latin;
- banning and burning of books during Reformation, Jewish pogroms, National Socialist Workers Party (Nazi), Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Erdogan's Turkish government, etc.;
- confiscation of printing presses;
- during Revolution, Britain's Writs of Assistance whereby British agents read all correspondence;
- more recently, attempts to restrict talk radio; and
- censor the internet.
|
|
Thomas Aquinas
wrote of Mohammed in
Summa contra Gentiles,
1258:
"It was a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity."
|
|
Thomas Jefferson
wrote to William Branch Giles, December of 1794
(The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia,
John P. Foley, ed., NY, Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1900:
"The attempt which has been made to
restrain the liberty of our citizens meeting together,
interchanging sentiments on what subjects they please,
and
stating their sentiments in the public papers,
has come upon us a full century earlier than I expected."
|
|
Limiting knowledge was seen in America prior to the
Civil War
where
Southern Democrat States
made it
illegal for slaves
to learn how to
read and write.
North Carolina
passed an Act in 1831:
"Whereas the
teaching of slaves to read and write,
has a tendency to excite dissatisfaction in their minds, and to produce
insurrection and rebellion ...
Be it enacted ...
That any free person, who shall hereafter
teach,
or attempt to teach,
any slave
within the State
to read or write
... shall be liable to indictment ... and upon conviction, shall ... be
fined
not less than one hundred dollars ...
imprisoned, or whipped."
|
|
Ancient Israel
was the first nation where the
general population
was
literate.
Levites
taught the people the law,
and taught them how to
read
the law.
Israel
functioned as a
Hebrew republic
for four hundred years before they sinned by asking for a king.
|
|
The
democracy of ancient Athens
and the
republic of ancient Rome
also required
citizens
to be
educated
and
informed.
|
|
Thomas Sowell
wrote in “Degeneration of Democracy,” 6/2010:
"A
democracy needs informed citizens
if it is to thrive, or ultimately even survive."
|
|
In
The Lessons of History
(Simon & Schuster, 1968, p. 77),
Will and Ariel Durant
wrote:
"Democracy
is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it
requires the widest spread of intelligence ...
Ignorance
... lends itself to
manipulation
by the
forces that mold public opinion."
|
|
James Madison
wrote to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822:
"A
people
who mean to be
their own Governors,
must arm themselves with the power which
knowledge
gives ...
A
popular government
without
popular information,
or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both."
|
|
As seen in
Ancient Israel, Athens
or
Rome,
for people to rule themselves in a democracy or a republic,
the people need to be educated
and
informed.
Therefore, whoever controls education and information controls the country.
In
America:
- The COUNTRY is controlled by LAWS >
- LAWS are controlled by POLITICIANS >
- POLITICIANS are controlled by VOTERS >
- VOTERS are controlled by PUBLIC OPINION >
- PUBLIC OPINION is controlled by MEDIA (News, Hollywood, Internet...) & EDUCATION >
- so whoever controls MEDIA & EDUCATION, controls the COUNTRY.
|
|
On controlling
public opinion, George Orwell
wrote in "Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels"
(Polemic,
September/October 1946):
"In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behavior is
public opinion.
But
public opinion,
because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law ...
The
individual
... is under
continuous pressure
to make him
behave
and
think
in exactly the same way as everyone else."
|
|
On controlling
education, George Orwell
commented in his novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of
this or that event, it never happened
– that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then
the lie passed into history
and became truth.
‘Who controls the past,’
ran the Party slogan,
‘controls the future; who controls the present controls the past’.
And when memory failed and
written records were falsified
– when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standards against which it could be tested.”
|
|
This is similar to the
first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi,
who conquered many kingdoms to
unify China
in 221 BC.
When
he was criticized
for not ruling as rulers had in the past, he ordered
all of the hand-written records of the past to be burned
and the
scholars buried.
The Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Qin
reported that Qin's Chancellor, Li Si, told the Emperor in 213 BC:
"I, your servant, propose that
all historians' records
other than those of
Qin's
be
burned
...
If anyone under heaven has copies of the
Classics of History (Shu Jing)
... they shall deliver them to the governor ... for
burning.
|
|
... Anyone who dares to discuss the
Classics of History
shall be
publicly executed.
Anyone who uses
history
to
criticize
the
present
shall have his family
executed
...
Anyone who has failed to
burn the books
after thirty days of this announcement shall be subjected to
tattooing
and be sent to
build the Great Wall."
|
|
HISTORY OF PRINTING
The
Qin Dynasty
was overthrown, and in 202 BC the
Han Dynasty
ruled
China.
In the following centuries,
Chinese scribes
developed the process of making
paper
from
tree pulp
and
rags.
Beginning in 175 AD, during the
Han Dynasty, scribes
placed
paper over stone engravings
of texts of Confucius and made
rubbings with charcoal.
|
|
This developed into laying
paper over raised stone letters
covered with
ink,
a technique which spread to other countries like
Japan,
where a Nara Empress printed a Buddhist charm in 768 AD.
|
|
Using a method with
carved wooden or baked clay blocks, China,
during the
Tang Dynasty,
created what could be considered the
first "printed" book
in 868 AD.
|
|
In
China,
Bi Sheng invented
movable type
printing with
porcelain characters
during the
Song Dynasty,
1041, leading to
China
being the
first country
to have
printed "paper currency."
|
|
Printing of currency, using
copper plates,
occurred on a mass scale during
Kublai Khan's Yuan Dynasty,
1215-1294, even being mentioned by
Marco Polo.
China's
over-printing of currency
led to it being
devalued,
resulting in
inflation
and
economic collapse.
Ultimately, the
currency depreciated
by 1,000 percent causing the country to become politically unstable.
This contributed to ending the
Mongolian Yuan Dynasty
in 1368.
|
|
The shear number of
Chinese characters,
over 50,000, discouraged
China
from making further printing innovations.
|
|
In 1234,
Korea's Goryeo Dynasty
invented the first "metal" movable type printing press.
In 1443,
Korean Emperor Sejong the Great
introduced a
24-letter han'gul alphabet
which
made printing practical.
|
|
Whereas
China
used
pictogram characters,
and
Egypt
used
hieroglyphs,
Western Civilization
had been using a
phonetic characters
dating back to a
Semitic alphabet
around 1500 BC.
|
|
It was not until 1400 AD that
Europeans
first began using
carved wooden blocks
applied with
ink
to print
religious messages.
|
|
I
n Germany,
Johannes Gutenberg
invented a printing press - the
Western world's first "metal moveable type" printing press.
|
|
On AUGUST 24, 1455,
Gutenberg
printed his masterpiece, the
Gutenberg Bible,
regarded as
the first book of significance ever printed.
|
|
No longer copied tediously by the hands of scribes,
Bibles
were soon
mass produced.
|
|
Gutenberg,
whose name means "beautiful mountain," wrote about his
42-line Gutenberg Bible,
also called the
Mazarin Bible,
1455:
"God
suffers in the multitude of souls whom His word can not reach.
Religious truth is imprisoned in
a small number of manuscript books
which confine instead of spread the public treasure.
Let us break the seal which seals up holy things and give wings to
Truth
in order that she may win every soul that comes into the world by her word
no longer written at great expense by hands easily palsied,
but
multiplied like the wind by an untiring machine ..."
|
|
Gutenberg
continued:
"Yes, it is a
press,
certainly, but a
press
from which shall flow in inexhaustible streams the most abundant and most marvelous liquor that has ever flowed to relieve the thirst of men.
Through it,
God will spread His word;
a spring of
pure truth shall flow from it;
like a new star it shall scatter the darkness of ignorance, and cause a light hithertofore unknown to shine among men."
|
|
In March of 1455, future
Pope Pius II
commented on
Gutenberg's Bible
in a letter to Cardinal Carvajal:
"All that has been written to me about that
marvelous man
seen at
Frankfurt
is true. I have not seen complete
Bibles
but only a number of quires of various books of the
Bible.
The
script
was
very neat and legible,
not at all difficult to follow - your grace would be able to read it without effort, and indeed without glasses."
|
|
Unfortunately for
Gutenberg,
he had borrowed 8,000 guilders from
Johann Fust,
who sued him at the archbishop's court in 1456 and took the print shop, leaving
Gutenberg bankrupt.
Gutenberg
re-started a smaller print shop, and participated in
printing Bibles
in the town of Bamberg.
|
|
Gutenberg's
invention was considered
the most important event of the modern period
as it began a
printing revolution
which
spread knowledge, information
and
ideas
at an unprecedented speed.
Gutenberg's
invention significantly fueled Europe's
Renaissance, Reformation, Age of Enlightenment,
and the
Scientific Revolution.
|
|
No longer was knowledge and information solely under the control of the ruling class establishment.
Later generations experienced innovations whereby individuals could communicate information with large numbers of people through
theater, music, talk radio, television, telephone,
and
the internet.
Each method, though, has seen attempts by powerful deep state elites to regulate and control it.
|
|
Victor Hugo
wrote in
The Hunchback of Notre Dame,
1831, book 5:
"The 15th century everything changes. Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself ...
Gutenberg's
letters of lead ... supersede Orpheus's letters of stone ...
The invention of printing
is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolution ..."
|
|
Hugo
continued:
"Whether it be Providence or Fate,
Gutenberg
is the precursor of
Luther."
|
|
In
A Tramp Abroad,
1880,
Mark Twain
wrote:
"We made a short halt at Frankfort-on-the-Main ... I would have liked to visit the birthplace of
Gutenberg,
but ... no memorandum of the house has been kept."
|
|
Napoleon introduced
the
printing press
into
Egypt
when he invaded in 1798.
|
|
On August 12, 1993,
Pope John Paul II
gave a rare copy of the
Gutenberg Bible
to
President Bill Clinton
at Denver's Regis University in Colorado.
|
|
While in Colorado, the
Pope,
with
Vice-President Al Gore
in attendance, addressed over 375,000 at Cherry Creek State Park, August 15, 1993:
"At no other time in history, the 'culture of death' has assumed a social and institutional form of legality to justify the most horrible crimes against humanity ... massive taking of lives of human beings even before they are born ...
Any reference to a 'law' guaranteed by the Creator is absent ... No longer is anything considered intrinsically 'good' and 'universally binding' ...
Vast sectors of society
are
confused
about
what is right and what is wrong
and are at the mercy of those with the power to
'create' opinion
and
impose it on others ..."
|
|
Pope John Paul II
continued:
"The family especially is under attack ... The weakest members of society are the most at risk. The unborn, children, the sick, the handicapped, the old ...
Do not be afraid to go out on the streets and into public places ... This is no time to be ashamed of the Gospel.
It is a time to preach it from the rooftops ... You must feel the full urgency of the task. Woe to you if you do not succeed in defending life."
|
|
The word
"Bible"
comes from the Greek word
"biblia"
meaning books, as it is a collection of many Old Testament and New Testament books, bound together in one volume.
From 382 AD to the Renaissance and Reformation, there have been typically 73 books in the Bible. The Eastern Orthodox Bible has 78, the Geneva Bible has 80, and the Ethiopian Bible has 81.
In 1625, the
King James Bible
was revised to the number to 66 books.
|
|
Since Gutenberg's invention
of the
printing press
in mid-1400's, the
HOLY BIBLE
has been
THE MOST PRINTED BOOK IN ALL OF WORLD HISTORY,
estimated at over 6 billion copies.
|
|
Woodrow Wilson
stated at the
300th Anniversary of the Translation of the King James Bible
in the English Language, May 7, 1911:
"I wonder how many persons in this great audience realize the significance for
English-speaking peoples
of the
translation
of the
Bible
into the
English tongue.
Up to the time of the translation of the
Bible
into
English,
it was a book for long ages withheld from the perusal of the peoples of other languages ...
Not a little of the history of liberty lies in the circumstance that the moving sentences of this
Book
were made familiar to the ears and the understanding of those peoples who have led mankind in exhibiting the forms of government and the impulses of reform which have made for freedom and for self-government among mankind ..."
|
|
Wilson
continued:
"For this is a book which reveals men unto themselves, not as creatures ... under human authority ...
It reveals
every man
to himself as
a distinct moral agent,
responsible not to men, not even to those men whom he has put over him in authority, but
responsible
through his own conscience
to his
Lord and Maker.
Whenever a man sees this vision
he stands up a free man."
|
|
Franklin D. Roosevelt
stated October 6, 1935:
"The four hundredth anniversary of the
printing of the first English Bible
is an event of great significance ...
The ... influence of
this greatest of books
... so greatly affected the progress of Christian civilization ...
This Book
continues to hold its
unchallenged place as the most loved, the most quoted
and
the most universally read
and
pondered of all the volumes ...
It continues to hold its
supreme place
as
the Book of books ..."
|
|
FDR
concluded:
"We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a Nation, without reckoning with the place
the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic ...
Its teaching ... is
ploughed into the very heart of the race.
Where we have been
truest and most consistent in obeying its precepts
we have attained the
greatest measure of contentment and prosperity."
|
|
Schedule Bill Federer for informative interviews & captivating PowerPoint presentations: 314-502-8924
wjfederer@gmail.com
American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission is granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate, with acknowledgment.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|