The validity of writing is established from written records, obtained from archeological findings. The oldest example of picture writing discovered has been produced on a limestone tablet. It came from the city state of Kish in ancient Sumer. The first Egyptian hieroglyphs are dated around 3000 BCE. Cuneiform writings were found at El Mardish in Syria and dated from 2500. Chinese writings appeared around 1300 BCE in the Yellow River Estuary. Cretean writing was coming into use between 2000 and 1200 on the island of Crete and Hittite writing was found in Anatolia dated around 1200. Proto-Sinaitic writing was used extensively in Palestine between 1600 and 1500. It was pictorial in character. Inscriptions were found at Beth Shemesh, El-Hadr, Gezer, Lachish, Meggido, Sechem, Tel el-Hesi, Tel el-Sarem, Aelia (Jerusalem) and Tel el-'Ajjul. Palestinian texts from Gezer and Sechem are found from 1100 BCE. They are pictorial in character, changing to linear on the newer ones. The earlier Biblos-Achiram inscriptions are dated from 1000. From this was derived the main subdivisions of Semitic writings Phoenician and Canaanite, followed by their sub branches Philistine, Aramean, Samaritan, Hebrew and South Arabic. The concept regarding the divine origin of writing in ancient times is found among civilized and primitive people of the five continents. The Babylonians believed that it was Nabu, the patron of sciences, who invented writing. In earlier Mesopotamian tradition it was assigned to the goddess Nisaba. The Egyptians believed that it was the god Thoth who invented writing. They called it the speech of the gods. In Chinese legends the inventor was either Fohi the founder of commerce or Ts'ang Tsien, with the face of a four eyed dragon. The Bible distinguishes between divine writing (Exodus 31:18) and the later human writing (Isaiah 8:1). In Islamic tradition God created writing. For the Hindus it was Brahma who gave the knowledge of letters to men. The Northern saga attributes the invention of the runes to Odin. In the Irish legends Ogimos is the inventor of writing. Dismissing the available historical facts Judeo-Christian religions insist that the text of the Bible was revealed by the tribal god Yahweh over a period of time to some pious Jews of antiquity. Conveniently, the ones selected for this personal communication knew how to read and write, had paper, pen and ink already invented, a supply of papyrus handy as well as chisel and hammer to alternate between stone tablets and paper to record the divine uttering. For no particular reason they wrote down the holy words right to left and rolled them up in scrolls. Thereafter specially appointed guardians carried them around in colorful processions. Eventually pious monks translated them to all languages to spread the holy words to every corner of the globe. Outside of the Bible there are no records in existence to justify this scenario. If we study more worldly evidence the work of archeologists, linguists or other accredited scientists, we find that the first writings in recorded history were produced by the Sumerians. At first they used pictures to represent an object and eventually developed 350 syllables which they impressed into wet clay with a tool having a triangular tip. This tool produced the characteristic wedge shaped cuneiform writing. The Sumerians were not Semites. They migrated south from the marsh lands around the foothills of the Ural mountains, along the shores of the Caspian sea to settle in Mesopotamia. Here they developed history's first great civilization. In 2350 BCE Sumer was conquered by the Semitic Akkadians. For a while, the two nations lived side by side and the Akkadians even used Sumerian as the language for study and learning. Later they developed their own cuneiform writing based on the Sumerian model. In time Akkadian became the language not only of Mesopotamia and the Old Babylonian Empire but the whole Middle East. It has eventually spread out all over the world.

In ancient times books were the subject of astonishment and regarded as instruments of divination. It was believed that a book can predict the future and reveal what is hidden. A mystic power considered to be a living being which can speak through the initiated. The power of a charm or an amulet depended to a great extent on the writings it included. The small box fundamentalist Jews wear during prayers and the hollow cylinders they attach to their door post contain sacred writings. Moslems carry amulets with enclosed verses from the Koran. Christians used to fan a sick person with the leaves of the Bible and swallowed small pieces of paper with prayers written on them. In 1910 at the consecration ceremony of the West Minster Cathedral, the archbishop was tracing the letters of the Latin and Greek alphabets in small heaps of ashes laid out along the lines of St. Andrew's cross. Even today, there are many customs and rituals embedded in religious ceremonies by presenting songs and formulas which are totally unintelligible to those who hear them often even to those who utter them. Many so called civilized societies are still engaged in burning books. In ancient practice this was done to destroy the evil lurking inside. We are fortunate indeed, that nowadays they don't send the owner along to burn, as it was practiced during the Holy Inquisition. Written records of ancient times, came down to us through many perils. They have survived through wars, fire, weather, neglect as well as willful, wanton destruction by barbarians and fanatics. In the Greek speaking world and later in the Roman era, there were many libraries and hundreds of thousands of books. Literacy was more widespread in the second century than in the eighteenth. The walls of Pompeii were covered with writings in three popular languages Latin, Greek and Oscan. Writing and reading was very much common place then. Nearly all towns people, including slaves, could read and write. In Egypt not long ago, a large private book collection was dug up buried under the sand, near villages where today only a few fellahin own a single book or would be able to read them if they did. The Great books of Greece and Rome were written down between 800 and 450 BCE. Only a few were left behind for us to read. Unfortunately most of them were destroyed.

About a century before the beginning of the current era, the book format (codex) started to replace scrolls for it was easier to find a page then unroll several feet of scrolls to read a single column. Mark, author of the first written version of the life of Jesus, wrote his gospel in Rome in a parchment notebook with pages which he took to Alexandria. Here the early Christians grew accustomed to have their sacred writings in the form of a flat paged book. By the year four hundred, the scrolls became obsolete. Unfortunately it also meant that any of the old texts in which the readers of the times were not interested were not codified, put in book form, and survived only in exceptionally rare instances. For that reason, many written records of the past were irrevocably lost. We are also confronted with other difficulties to understand the correct meaning of texts written hundreds, even thousands of years ago. The early Greeks and Romans wrote in capital letters only and

In Petronius's Satirica the guests are discussing a friend who has just died: 'Ah he had a good life, the abbot isolated him, and he died a millionaire' went the translation. The original ABASSECREUIT divided properly as AB ASSE CREUIT means simply that he started out with a nickel. The copyist divided the words incorrectly as ABBAS SECREUIT meaning the abbot isolated him. This translation of course doesn't make sense, not to mention that there were no abbots in the days of Petronius. Censorship was an other destructive hazard threatening the survival of literature. We are unaware of censorship in ancient Greece. Antipater brought Demosthenes to his death, yet no efforts were made to destroy his speeches. The emperors of Rome however vigorously practiced the burning of offensive books. The Christians were not considered to possess books worth destroying and only during the last of the pagan persecutions in 303, ordered Diocletian to have the Scriptures burned. That persecution however soon ended and no Christian books were irrevocably lost. A generation later the Christians came to power and started to destroy the pagan books with vengeance. The great philosopher Prophyry wrote a destructive analysis of the Christian doctrine and the Scriptures in fifteen volumes. It was burned by imperial order. Only a few fragments are left, which were quoted by his opponents. Drama was specially repellent to the early Christians therefore they banned all plays. Consequently the professional theater ceased to exist. For a thousand years, men forgot the power and meaning of drama. Lyric poems, glorification of carnal experience were allowed to perish. Yet there were some curious ways for classical books to survive.

For the sake of economy scribes used to wash off the ink from pages of pagan books and inscribed the Bible or stories of saints on the cleaned off surfaces. One of the best books of Cicero was his dialogue on the state. He published it in 51 BCE. It was much admired and popular, but during the Dark ages it has completely vanished. In 1819 Angelo Mai, an expert on old books and head of the Vatican Library, discovered Cicero's lost book under a commentary on the Psalms written by St. Augustine. How many libraries contain forgotten copies of works of doctrine beneath which there sleep great classical master pieces? A magnificent copy of Homer's Iliad was set in a coffin as a pillow beneath the head of a beautiful and apparently much beloved young woman. Out of a cheap mummy case of old papyri some dedicated scientists resurrected part of the lost tragedy of Antiope, written by Euripides. Other manuscripts were rescued under the most unusual circumstances. At Tebtunis, excavators came across a cemetery of sacred crocodiles. Full of enthusiasm, the scientists were exuberant in examining one sacred crocodile after the other but the excavation of these saurian mummies soon palled when they found to their dismay, that a dead sacred crocodile was much like an ordinary dead crocodile. Eventually a workman lost his temper and smashed one of them to pieces only to find that the crocodiles were encased in molded papyri, even their mouths and body cavities were stuffed with ancient scrolls.

In 1945 a Gnostic library of thirteen volumes was found in Upper Egypt containing among other things a gospel in Coptic adapted from Greek preserving some wonderful traditional words of Jesus. In the year 1844 Constantin von Tischendorf visited the remote monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai. There he found a manuscript of the Bible written in beautiful clear script around the year 330. It is now one of the chief treasures of the British Museum. The earliest authors wrote on clay when cuneiform writing was invented about six thousand years ago. For thousands of years, writing was chiseled into stone, impressed on clay, scratched into bark and leather, painted on bamboo, papyrus and silk, but always one copy at the time. Then in China between the second and sixth centuries paper, ink and movable carved blocks were invented to permit many copies to be printed at a time. It took a thousand years for the idea to catch on in backward Europe. Suddenly books were being printed all over the world. Just before Gutenberg's invention of the movable type around 1450, there were less then fifty thousand books in all of Europe about as many as in China in 100 BCE. Fifty years later there were ten million printed books around and learning became available to anyone who could read. Today, books are printed in massive and inexpensive editions. For a low price one can ponder 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', 'The Origin of the Species' or 'The Nature of the Universe'. Books are like seeds. They lay dormant for centuries then suddenly flower into blossom. Literacy and the love of reading is the best gift parents can bestow on their children, made easy with the great selection of books available through libraries for everyone to read.

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