The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization

faith-and-doubt

• Jews were forming an ethnic identity by setting themselves apart — becoming a people of the book, a text not dependent on land, on kings and empires.

  WWP-RC-132

• The exiled scribes even imagined their god as a scribe — God dictates, Moses writes faithfully, then God inscribes the tablets himself.

  WWP-RC-127

education-and-formation

• Writing was so powerful that humans now imagined this technology to be everywhere — the whole world full of traces that could be read.

  WWP-RC-119

• Having accumulated more information than anyone before, Ashurbanipal created the first significant system of information management — his favorite text was Gilgamesh.

  WWP-RC-122

obedience-and-authority

• Given Luther's insistence on scripture and his success with print, it was only a matter of time until he would put the two together — a Bible laypeople could read.

  WWPS-RC-127

• Pizarro's trap would work now or never — the encounter between a written empire and an oral one, decided in a single desperate afternoon.

  WWP-RC-139