Читать книгу Empire and Communications - Harold Adams Innis - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Top

The Nile, with its irregularities of overflow, demanded a co-ordination of effort. The river created the black land which could only be exploited with a universally accepted discipline and a common goodwill of the inhabitants. The Nile acted as a principle of order and centralization, necessitated collective work, created solidarity, imposed organizations on the people and cemented them in a society. In turn the Nile was the work of the Sun, the supreme author of the universe. Ra—the Sun—the demiurge was the founder of all order human and divine, the creator of gods themselves. Its power was reflected in an absolute monarch to whom everything was subordinated. It has been suggested that such power followed the growth of astronomical knowledge by which the floods of the Nile could be predicted, notably a discovery of the sidereal year in which the rising of Sirius coincided with the period of floods. Moret has argued that as early as 4241 B.C. a calendar was adopted which reconciled the lunar months with the solar year, and that the adoption marked the imposition of the authority of Osiris and Ra, of the Nile and the Sun on Upper Egypt. The great gods of the fertile delta imposed their authority on the rest of Egypt and their worship coincided with the spread of political influence. Universal gods emerged in certain centres, their influence was extended by theologians, and diffusion of worship supported the growth of kingdoms. The calendar became a source of royal authority. Detachment of the calendar from the concrete phenomena of the heavens and application of numbers which provided the basis of the modern year has been described by Nilsson as the greatest intellectual fact in the history of time reckoning.

Achievement of a united monarchy by material victories and funerary beliefs and practices centring in the person of the king produced a social situation of which the invention of writing was the outcome. The position of the monarch was strengthened by development of the idea of immortality. The pyramids and the elaborate system of mummification carried with them the art of pictorial representation as an essential element of funerary ritual.

The divine word was creative at the beginning of the universe and acted on gods, men, and things in a fashion reminiscent of Genesis and the Gospel of St. John. ‘I created all shapes with what came out of my mouth, in the time there was neither heaven nor earth.’[19] In fixing the tradition of magic rites and formulae in the Old Kingdom the God Thoth,[20] as the friend, minister, scribe, and keeper of the divine book of government, of Ra became the Lord of ritual and magic. He represented creation by utterance and production by thought and utterance. The spoken word possessed creative efficiency and the written word in the tomb perpetuated it.[21] The magical formulae of the pyramids assumed the productive and creative power of certain spoken words.

In the handbooks of temple structure and adornment of sacred shrines which probably made up a large part of temple libraries, Thoth was the framer of rules of ecclesiastical architecture. No essential difference existed between pictorial decorations and hieroglyphic script. Thoth represented intelligence and was ‘Lord of the Divine Word’. He was the unknown and mysterious, the lord of scribes and of all knowledge, since the setting down of words in script suggested the possession of mysterious and potent knowledge in the scribe who ‘brought into being what was not’. Formulae of sacred ritual, collections of particularly effective formulae, and books of divine words were attributed to Thoth as the inventor of language and script. Beginning with drawing and literature in the decoration of temples and tombs in the use of figures as definitions of living beings and objects, the pictorial principle was extended and adapted to the need of expressing non-pictorial elements into a hieroglyphic system by 3500 B.C. Hieroglyphics was the Greek name for sacred engraved writing. From about 4000 B.C. the names of kings, wars, political events, and religious doctrines were written. The earliest documents were names and titles on sealings and vases, notes of accounts or inventories, and short records of events. Seals and wooden tablets with primitive script recorded the outstanding events of the Abydos reign. Writing gradually developed toward phoneticism and by the time of Menes (about 3315 B.C.)[22] many picture signs had a purely phonetic value and words were regularly spelled out.

As the founder of the first dynasty at Thinis, Menes developed the theory of the absolute power of kings. A new capital was built at Memphis at the balance of the two lands to the north and to the south. As the successor of Horus and Osiris and as their living image the king was identified with them in every possible way in order to ensure eternal life. From about 2895 B.C. to 2540 B.C. autocratic monarchy was developed by right divine. The pyramids of about 2850 B.C. suggested that the people expected the same miracles from the dead as from the living king. All arable land became the king's domain. After 2540 B.C. royal authority began to decline and the power of the priests and the nobles to increase. The difficulties of the sidereal year in which a day was gained each year may have contributed to the problems of the absolute monarch and hastened the search for a solar year possibly discovered by the priests. The Sun Ra cult was exalted to the rank of chief God and the king was lowered from the Great God to the Son of Ra and to the Good God. The king as a Sun-god was a man who did not work with his hands but merely existed and, like the sun, acted on environment from a distance. The Sun was law and imposed it on all things, but law was distinct from the Sun as it governed even him. Recognition of this fact has been described as implying the discovery of government.[23] In Heliopolis as the centre of priestly power, the doctrine was developed in which God was conceived of as an intelligence which has thought the world and expresses itself by the word, the organ of government, the instrument of continuous creation, and the herald of law and justice. An order of the king was equivalent to an act of creation of the same kind as that of the demiurge. The command of the superior obeyed by dependents was reinforced by the mystery of writing as a reflex of the spoken word. Centralization of the gods favoured the growth of political ideas.

After a period of political confusion from 2360 B.C. to 2160 B.C. a new political order emerged in which the absolute monarch was replaced by the royal family. The clergy of Heliopolis established a new calendar and imposed it on Egypt. Extension of privileges to the priestly class brought a transition to oligarchy. The royal domain was broken up in favour of a feudal clergy and royal officials. The Theban kings (2160-1660 B.C.) restored order and prosperity. After 2000 B.C. religious equality was triumphant. The masses obtained religious rights and corollary political rights. The Pharaohs gave up their monopoly and accepted the extension of rights to the whole population. Admission of the masses to religious rights and to everlasting life in the next world was recognized along with civic life in this world. Power was essentially religious and extension of direct participation in worship brought increased participation in the administration of stock and the ownership of land. The management of royal lands was farmed, partial ownership of houses and tombs was permitted, and free exercise of trades and administrative offices was conceded. Peasants, craftsmen, and scribes rose to administrative posts and assemblies.

The profound disturbances in Egyptian civilization involved in the shift from absolute monarchy to a more democratic organization coincides with a shift in emphasis on stone as a medium of communication or as a basis of prestige, as shown in the pyramids, to an emphasis on papyrus. Papyrus sheets dated from the first dynasty and inscribed sheets from the fifth dynasty (2680-2540 B.C. or 2750-2625 B.C.). In contrast with stone, papyrus as a writing medium was extremely light. It was made from a plant (Cyperus papyrus) which was restricted in its habitat to the Nile delta and was manufactured into writing material near the marshes where it was found. Fresh green stems of the plant were cut into suitable lengths and the green rind stripped off. They were then cut into thick strips and laid parallel to each other and slightly overlapping on absorbent cloth. A similar layer was laid above and across them and the whole covered by another cloth. This was hammered with a mallet for about two hours and the sheets welded into a single mass which was finally pressed and dried. Sheets were fastened to each other to make rolls, in some cases of great length. As a light commodity it could be transported over wide areas.[24] Brushes made from a kind of rush (Juncus maritimus) were used for writing. Lengths ranging from 6 to 16 inches and from ¹/₁₆ to ¹/₁₀ of an inch in diameter were cut slantingly at one end and bruised to separate the fibres.[25] The scribe's palette had two cups, for black and red ink, and a water-pot. He wrote in hieratic characters from right to left, arranging the text in vertical columns or horizontal lines of equal size, which formed pages. The rest of the papyrus was kept rolled up in his left hand.[26]

Writing on stone was characterized by straightness or circularity of line, rectangularity of form and an upright position, whereas writing on papyrus permitted cursive forms suited to rapid writing. ‘When hieroglyphs were chiselled on stone monuments they were very carefully formed and decorative in character. When written on wood or papyrus they became simpler and more rounded in form.... The cursive or hieratic style was still more hastily written, slurring over or abbreviating and running together ... they ceased to resemble pictures and became script.’[27] ‘By escaping from the heavy medium of stone’ thought gained lightness. ‘All the circumstances arouse interest, observation, reflection.’[28] A marked increase in writing by hand was accompanied by secularization of writing, thought, and activity. The social revolution between the Old and the New Kingdom was marked by a flow of eloquence and a displacement of religious by secular literature.

Writing had been restricted to governmental, fiscal, magical, and religious purposes. With increase in use of papyrus, simplification of hieroglyphic script into hieratic characters in response to the demands of a quicker cursive hand, and growth of writing and reading, administration became more efficient. Scribes and officials charged with the collection and administration of reserves and of rents and tributes from the peasants became members of an organized civil service, and prepared accounts intelligible to their colleagues and to an earthly god, their supreme master. After 2000 B.C. the central administration employed an army of scribes, and literacy was valued as a stepping-stone to prosperity and social rank. Scribes became a restricted class and writing a privileged profession. ‘The scribe comes to sit among the members of the assemblies ... no scribe fails to eat the victuals of the king's house.’[29] ‘Put writing in your heart that you may protect yourself from hard labour of any kind and be a magistrate of high repute. The scribe is released from manual tasks.’[30] ‘But the scribe, he directeth the work of all men. For him there are no taxes, for he payeth tribute in writing, and there are no dues for him.’[31]

The spread of writing after the democratic revolution was accompanied by the emergence of new religions in the immortality cult of Horus and Osiris. Ra worship had become too purely political, and individuals found a final meaning and a fulfilment of life beyond the vicissitudes of the political arbitrator.[32] Osiris, the god of the Nile, became the Good Being slain for the salvation of men, the ancestral king and model for his son Horus. As an agricultural god he had faced death and conquered it. His wife Isis, the magician, made codes of law and ruled when Osiris was conquering the world. She persuaded the Sun-god Ra to disclose his name, and since knowledge of a person's name[33] gave to him who possessed it magical power over the person himself she acquired power over Ra and other gods. In the twelfth dynasty Osiris became the soul of Ra, the great hidden name which resided in him. With Ra he shared supremacy in religion and reflected the twofold influence of the Nile and the Sun. Night and day were joined as complementary—Osiris, yesterday and death, Ra, to-morrow and life. Funerary rites invented by Isis were first applied to Osiris. Conferring immortality they have been described by Moret as ‘the most precious revelation which any Egyptian god had ever made to the world’.

Osiris was served by Thoth as vizier, sacred scribe, and administrator. As the inventor of speech and writing, ‘Lord of the creative voice, master of words and books’, he became the inventor of magic writings. Osiris became the centre of a popular and priestly literature to instruct people in the divine rights and duties. Words were imbued with power. The names of gods were part of the essence of being, and the influence of the scribe was reflected in the deities. Since religion and magic alike were sacred they became independent. The priest used prayers and offerings to the gods, whereas the magician circumvented them by force or trickery. Family worship survived in the Osirian cult, and because of a practical interest magic was used by the people. Since to know the name of a being was to have the means of mastering him, to pronounce the name was to fashion the spiritual image by the voice, and to write it especially with hieroglyphics was to draw a material image. In the manifold activity of the creative word magic permeated metaphysics. Polytheism persisted, and names were among the spiritual manifestations of the gods. Magical literature and popular tales preserved the traditions of the great gods of the universe.

The king gained from the revolution as the incarnation of the king gods, Falcon, Horus-Seth, Ra, Ra-Harakhti, Osiris, Horus, son of Isis, and Amon-Ra, who ruled Egypt. The king's devotion created a great wave of faith among the people. Ritual enabled him to appoint a proxy to act as prophet. Power was delegated to professional priests who first incarnated themselves in the king and performed the ceremonies in every temple every day. The worship of Ra and the celestial gods was confined to priests and temples. The priests of Atum condensed revelation in the rituals of divine worship, and a cult supplied the needs of living images in statues in the temple.

The shift from dependence on stone to dependence on papyrus and the changes in political and religious institutions imposed an enormous strain on Egyptian civilization. Egypt quickly succumbed to invasion from peoples equipped with new instruments of attack. Invaders with the sword and the bow and long-range weapons broke through Egyptian defence, dependent on the battle-axe and the dagger. With the use of bronze and possibly iron weapons, horses and chariots, Syrian Semitic peoples under the Hyksos or Shepherd kings captured and held Egypt from 1660 to 1580 B.C. Egyptian cultural elements resisted alien encroachments and facilitated reorganization and the launching of a counter-attack. The conquerors adopted hieroglyphic writing and Egyptian customs, but complexity enabled the Egyptians to resist and to expel the invaders. They probably acquired horses[34] and light four-spoked chariots from the Libyans to the west, and after 1580 B.C. the Nile valley was liberated. In a great victory at Megiddo in 1478 B.C. Thutmosis III gave a final blow to Hyksos power. Under rulers of the eighteenth dynasty (1580-1345 B.C.) the New Theban Kingdom was established.

In the New Kingdom, the Pharaohs at Thebes, as the capital and metropolis of the civilized east, had resumed their sovereign rights, taken possession of the goods of the temples and brought clerical vassalage to an end. Monarchical centralization was accompanied by religious centralization. The gods were ‘solarized’, and Amon the God of the Theban family as Amon-Ra reigned over all the gods of Egypt after 1600 B.C. As a result of the success of war in imperial expansion, the priests became securely established in territorial property and assumed increasing influence. Problems of dynastic right in the royal family gave them additional power.

The use of papyrus rapidly increased after the expulsion of the Hyksos. The cult of Thoth had played an important role in the expulsion of the Hyksos and in the New Kingdom. Thoth became the god of magic. His epithets had great power and strength, and certain formulae were regarded as potent in the resistance to, or in the expulsion of, malicious spirits. To about 2200 B.C. medicine and surgery had advanced since mummification had familiarized the popular mind with dissection of the human body and had overcome an almost universal prejudice, but after the Hyksos invasion medicine became a matter of rites and formulae.[35]

Military organization essential to expulsion of the invaders became the basis of expansion and the growth of an Egyptian empire. Protectorates were established beyond the borders as a means of economy in the use of soldiers and in administrative costs. Syria and Palestine became part of the empire. Reinforcements were brought by sea and control extended to Carchemish on the Euphrates by 1469 B.C. During the period of the Egyptian hegemony, from about 1460 to 1360 B.C., the Pharaohs employed directive authorities found in conquered countries, and made them effective by a process of Egyptianization. Under Amenophis II and Thotmes IV (1447-1415 B.C.) control was extended through marriage alliances with Mitannian princes and by intrigue and bribery implied in the sending of gold to the Kassites. Union in marriage took the place of unity derived from blood kinship. The system of amalgamating gods as a means of uniting groups into a nation was supplemented by union through marriage.

Under Amenophis III the Egyptian empire reached the zenith of wealth and power. A postal service was established between the capital and the cities of the empire, but cuneiform was appropriated as a simpler medium of communication than hieroglyphics. Akhenaten (1380-1362 B.C.), son of Amenophis III, possibly with the support of learned Egyptian priests, who held higher beliefs as philosophers in an exalted idea of the one and only God, attempted to introduce a system of worship which would provide a religious basis for imperial development. The worship of Aten, the solar disk, was a device for creating a united Orient. Religious monopoly of the solar disk was designed to provide a common ideal above political and commercial interests, and above distinctions between Egyptians and foreigners.

These internationalist tendencies were resisted by the priests of Amon and the sacerdotal class supported by popular feeling. The priesthood defeated an attempt to impose a single cult in which duty to the empire was the chief consideration. It has been suggested that the rise of a middle-class bureaucracy under anti-aristocratic kings was accompanied by increased democratization of the cult of Osiris.[36] Desperate attempts of the heretic kings to free themselves from the growing domination of Theban priests were defeated, and Tutankhaten, the son-in-law of Akhenaten, returned to the worship of Amon, restored the gods to all their privileges, and changed his name to Tut-ankh-Amen. Akhenaten had failed to gain emotional support from the people, and they returned to the private worship of Osiris and the enjoyment of Osirian privilege.

Successful wars had also created a military nobility, holding land, enjoying certain privileges, and becoming an hereditary privileged class which supported the restoration of Amon. About 1345 B.C. Horemheb, a general, raised himself to power, received the crown of Thebes from Amon, and re-established the old order in favour of priests and soldiers. From the nineteenth dynasty (1345-1200 B.C.) the gods intervened more and more in private affairs. Royal authority and lay justice were weakened by the influence of the priests and the popularity of the gods. After Rameses II (1300-1234 B.C.) the first prophet of Amon became the highest personage in the royal administration. In the twentieth dynasty an invasion of people of the seas was followed by the loss of the Syrian provinces. By the end of that dynasty in the twelfth century the royal heredity, which had lain in the queen,[37] was included among the privileges of the family of the first prophet. On the death of Rameses XII kingship was assumed by the royal priests, and royal decrees were those of Amon. A priestly theocracy had replaced human kingship. The weakness of a theocratic society was shown in the invasions of the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks, but its strength was evident in the periodic outbreaks against foreign domination and in the difficulties of Assyrians and Persians in attempts to establish empires in Egypt. Nectanebo (359-342 B.C.) was the last Egyptian king claiming descent from the god Amon.

The dominance of stone as a medium of communication left its stamp on the character of writing, and probably checked its evolution after the introduction of papyrus and the brush. ‘The earliest form of writing seems to have been picture writing ... when the same fixed set of pictures were used over and over again to represent not merely ideas and objects but also words and sounds.’[38] As a result of the significance of writing to religion, and ample supplies of papyrus, Egypt never took the logical step of discarding the cumbersome methods of representing consonantal sounds or of creating an alphabet. With purely pictorial and artistic characters eye-pictures were used with ear-pictures and the script never passed to the use of fixed signs for certain sounds. Consonantal values were represented by single signs, principally for foreign names and words, but the older pictographic writing was maintained as a shorter and more convenient form of abbreviation, particularly after the scribes had learned a large number of signs. The Egyptians succeeded with consonants but failed with vowels, in contrast with the Sumerians, and enormously reduced the number of signs needed for the phonetic representation of the word.[39] But their language exhibited a distinction between consonants expressing the notion or conception of a root and vowels marking the form of roots and changes in their meaning, and opened the way to the splitting up of words and syllables into component elements which was denied to the Akkadians through their use of syllables.[40] Twenty-four signs emerged with the value of single consonants.

The effects of restricted development in writing were evident in literature. Freshness depended on the degree of accord between the art of writing and actual speech.[41] With the use of papyrus the didactic or reflective form had apparently been invented before 2000 B.C., but literary forms reached a high point after that date. Flinders Petrie, in illustrating his pattern of evolution of civilizations, suggests that Egyptian sculpture passed from archaism about 1550 B.C., painting became free and natural about 1470 B.C., literature witnessed freedom in style about 1350 B.C., mechanics became important about 1280 B.C., and wealth was dominant about 1140 B.C.[42] The attempt of Akhenaten to break the power of the priesthood and to remodel the religion of the people was accompanied by attempts to bring the written and the spoken language into accord, and to bring about an improvement of speech and writing. The Hymn to the Disk, about 1370 B.C., was the ‘earliest truly monotheistic hymn which the world has produced’.[43] Dominance of the priesthood from the thirteenth to the tenth centuries brought a separation of speech and literary language and artificial composition. Egypt has been described as the first consciously literary civilization to cultivate literature for its own sake, but style outlived its first freshness and gave way to artificiality and bombast, with little regard for content.

The special position of the scribe meant that prophets in the Hebrew sense failed to emerge. The Egyptian loved to moralize, and the highest literary distinction was reached in wisdom literature.[44] Since the development of script out of a series of picture drawings was based on the pun, the Egyptian was an ‘inveterate punster’. The Egyptians had no great body of national epic but were successful in the profane lyric, an art ‘entirely neglected by the Babylonians’.[45] Egypt gave to the world ‘what are, as far as we know, its earliest love poems’.[46] She was the home of the short story in which tales were told for the joy of story-telling.

The Egyptians had no record of laws comparable to Deuteronomy. In the Old Kingdom a strictly absolute monarch was sole legislator. With the use of papyrus the system of administration became one of numerous officials. Administration and its dependence on writing implied religious sanctions which meant encroachments on law. Lawsuits occupied a large place in Egyptian literature and great interest was shown in legal decisions, and in the nineteenth and later dynasties a consistent attempt was made to build up a law of procedure on the basis of omniscience of duty. The treatment of eternal property as a legal personality may have had its influence on Roman law and on the law of corporations.

Writing was a difficult and specialized art requiring long apprenticeship, and reading implied a long period of instruction. The god of writing was closely related to the leading deities and reflected the power of the scribe over religion. The scribe had the full qualifications of a special profession and was included in the upper classes of kings, priests, nobles, and generals, in contrast with peasants, fishermen, artisans, and labourers. Complexity favoured increasing control under a monopoly of priests and the confinement of knowledge to special classes. Monopoly of knowledge incidental to complexity coincided with the spread of magical writings among the people. Short cuts of magic and religion were entrenched in writing as the occupation of a respectable learned profession in the ruling class. Attempts of kings to escape were defeated by the power of monopoly. A monopoly control of communication defeated attempts to construct empires. The limitations of the Egyptian empire were in part a result of the inflexibility of religious institutions supported by a monopoly over a complex system of writing.

The demands of the Nile required unified control and ability to predict the time at which it overflowed its banks. Possibly the monarchy was built up in relation to these demands, and strengthened its position by construction of the pyramids, which reflected the power of the monarchy over space and time. But a monopoly of knowledge in relation to stone imposed enormous burdens on the community, and was possibly accompanied by inability to predict the date of floods through dependence on the sidereal year. A new competitive medium, namely the papyrus roll, favoured the position of religion, and possibly its advantages coincided with the discovery of a more efficient method of predicting time by dependence on the sun. In the period of confusion which accompanied the introduction of papyrus, Egypt was subjected to invasion. A fusion between the monarchy and the priesthood became the basis of a successful counter-attack and emergence of an Egyptian empire. Inability to maintain the fusion and to develop a flexible religious and political organization was in part a result of a monopoly of knowledge which had been built up in relation to the papyrus roll and a complex system of writing. A successful empire required adequate appreciation of problems of space which were in part military and political, and of problems of time which were in part dynastic and biological and in part religious. Dependence on stone as a medium provided the background of an absolute monarchy, but its monopoly position invited competition from papyrus and the development of a new monopoly dominated by religion and control over writing in the complex hieroglyphics. The new monopoly presented problems to an Egyptian empire and to other empires which attempted to exercise control over Egypt. Monopoly over writing supported an emphasis on religion and the time concept which defeated efforts to solve the problem of space.