A little history for ya

In the beginning, there was the stylus.

In the relative cool of a high-windowed, mud-brick room in the palace complex near the Euphrates river, a scribe chooses from among a group of styluses (to him qan, 𒄀) hanging from wooden pegs pressed into the wall. He's surrounded by shelves that groan under the weight of hundreds of clay tablets, arranged according to type and date. He seats himself cross-legged on a woven mat and continues to transcribe tallies of grain shipments that have been hurried to him by runners, transcribing temporary notes into permanent record. Occasionally he dries a tablet over a small, purpose-built brazier before shelving it appropriately. Through the doorway he can see other scribes, similarly busy. Senior scribes handle more profound records, using finer clay and more elaborate markings to prepare reports for the king's council. It's about 1200 years before the Common Era in a Mesopotamian city, and our friend the scribe is watching, probably without knowing, the beginning of one of the most important arcs in the history of humanity.

* * *

In a chamber facing East, toward the rising sun, another scribe is bent over his work. Unlike the Mesopotamian scribe's modest room, this space reflects a profound spiritual significance; carved bronze vessels line the walls—ritual cauldrons for burning offerings and ornate containers holding turtle shells and ox shoulder blades prepared for divination. The air carries the scent of burning sandalwood and the metallic tang of heated bronze. This young man is a scribe-assistant to the bone diviner (貞人, zhenren) kneeling at a low bronze table, its surface inlaid with jade symbols representing the cyclical calendar. Before the diviner lies the carefully-prepared flat part of a turtle shell, its surface polished smooth and marked with preliminary grooves. Clay pots hold bronze implements heated in the sacred fire—tools that will create the cracks through which ancestors speak.

(Through bronze-fitted doorways, courtiers and military officials wait in adjoining chambers for the divination results. The rhythm of court life revolves around these sessions—agricultural decisions, military campaigns, and diplomatic missions all await the ancestors' guidance as recorded on oracle bones.)

The assistant sits ready with carving tools to inscribe the session's results. Wooden tablets with wax surfaces allow for quick notes during the divination, which will later be carved permanently into the bone and stored among the thousands of other sessions' results. It's 1200 BCE in the City of Yin, in the Shang Royal Court, and the young scribe is riding the same wave as his distant (in terms of both time and space) colleague in Mesopotamia.

* * *

Far away from the Anyang River but on the same day, a scholar works in the most prestigious section of a center of Vedic learning in northern India, a huge hall dedicated to the preservation and transmission of sacred knowledge. The hall stretches nearly a hundred feet long, with polished stone pillars supporting a high wooden ceiling decorated with carved symbols. Sizable windows provide steady natural light for the delicate work of manuscript copying, while oil lamps on bronze stands ensure work can continue after sunset.

Senior teachers (आचार्य, acharya) walk among the young copyists and the even younger boys preparing materials. Accuracy is paramount. After he finishes his work with a copper stylus on a dried and polished palm leaf, it will be verified by his superiors, ceremonially blessed, and added added to the hundreds of manuscripts arranged by subject on wooden shelves — or shipped off to other centers of learning. It's 1200 BCE in the Indus river valley, and the scholar is playing his role.

* * *

These three scribes, separated by thousands of miles and working in completely different cultural contexts, were addressing the challenge that would define human civilization for the next five thousand years: creating and managing an external memory that would outlast individual lives. What none of them could have imagined was that they were establishing and reinforcing a pattern—information as discrete, storable, retrievable objects—that would persist virtually unchanged until our own era.