Synoptic History

	
A little ditty on history: by Ernie McCracken

     And what is history?  In our history classes and textbooks we learn of
the founding of nations, the conduct of wars, the significant activities of
significant leaders.  We learn dates and names this way, little else.  It offers
sparse information on the lives of ordinary people.  At the macrocosmic end of
the scale, it delineates neither cultural trends nor the principles which are
basic to those trends.  No wonder that students, whether sharp or dull, find
history classes boring and difficult.  (The exception is, of course, those
cognitive workhorses who actually enjoy memorizing meaningless lists by rote. 
They make good accountants and librarians.  Although-- voila! -- they are
exactly the ones who determine the content of the curriculum.)
     Occasionally a text will mention a tad of information about economy. 
(Lower Allegumbria exports sheep tails.  King Creetone depleted his treasury
constructing croquet courts.  The Easterly River runs north and south through
Simmoli Land.)  But the authors seldom go on to relate this to the events that
take place.
     And every once in awhile a history text will mention an invention or two,
in an apologetic manner, as if this were some sort of public service message
sandwiched in between the all-important wars and aristocratic scandals.  Yet,
every major invention has brought about more change in human affairs than the
founding of ANY nation, slave or free.  The making and use of fire, the wheel,
agriculture and animal husbandry, metallurgy, the nautical arts, the
automobile, aircraft, computers  These will continue long after any nation or
religion or leader is long forgotten and gone to dust.
     Of all the inventions and discoveries, perhaps the most significant is the
printing press.  In social science circles, we say that history, in its strictest
sense, is the account of humankind as it appears in writing, and that that
which happened before writing is PREhistory.  
     But where do we draw the line?  Where does prehistory end and history
begin?  If we consider alphabetic writing, then that takes us back through the
Romans and Greeks to the Phoenicians, at least 2500 BC.  But then, we cannot
exclude other forms of writing such as Chinese characters, Egyptian
hieroglyphs, Mesopotamian cuneiform, Minoan linear A & B, pre-Columbian
glyphs (in North, South, and Central Americas), forgotten Easter Island
writing, Arabic script, Sanskrit, etc.  This is not to mention exotic records
such as the quipu (Mayan knotworks), braille (tactile literacy), pre-Christian
Celtic runes, and so on.  Dare we consider (as we must!) also the scribed
languages of mathematics, symbolic logic, and music?  What about Morse code,
smoke signals, yarrow patterns, tom-tom beats? 
     Look at our alphabet, and it's easy to see its derivation from
pictoglyphs.  The "A" was once a bull's head, the "B" a house or pair of
mountains.  It's even easier to see in Chinese characters and Egyptian
hieroglyphs.  So what is the difference between a letter, a character, a
hieroglyph, and a pictoglyph?  Not much!  It seems that the only significant
difference is that a pictoglyph becomes a hieroglyph, then a character, then a
letter as its form progresses further and further from the original depiction of
an actual form in reality  which is to say, its level of abstraction.  And who
will say that a letter is more sophisticated, accurate, or useful than a
character?  Certainly not the Chinese, and they comprise nearly a third of the
population of the human race!  (That's not counting other oriental peoples, such
as Japanese and Koreans, who also use Chinese characters, albeit in
conjunction with their own phonetic characters.)
     So mayhap we are behooved to include the pictoglyph as a form of
writing.  (There are, incidently, marks found on antlers, stones, and bones,
dated to the last ice age, that appear to be quite similar to runes or some
sort of alphabet.  We don't have enough of them to be certain, though.) 
Anyway, things are complicated enough already, so let's get back to the
pictoglyphs for now.  They definitely take writing back 10,000 years or more.
     If we include pictoglyphs, then it stands to reason that we must also
include pictures of every kind.  After all, are they not records?  Are the not
scribed?  What is a record, anyway?  
     A record is a form of communication, a transmission of information. 
Every picture ever made is a medium of transmission of information, whether
the artist or scribe intends it as a communication to others or not.  After all,
even if the artist paints a picture and immediately destroys it, without showing
it to anyone else, it has still served to communicate something to the artist
him/herself.
     So I believe we must include art as a form of writing.  That takes us
back to the beginnings of Cro-Magnon Man (modern humans), about 65,000
years ago.
     The whole point I'm striving to make here, is that the essence of history
is neither more nor less than the communication of information, the
transmission of data, the sharing of awareness.  This is indicated at every
point in the development of humanity.  When the first Homo habilis showed
his/her offspring how to knock two chips off a rock and make a pebble tool,
that was communication of information.  It was not writing, of course.  But
once a Cro-Magnon or other human drew a picture in the dust to illustrate the
lesson, that might be considered writing.
     Even money, the most sacred of our icons worldwide, is a form of
communication, a transmission of information.
     Transmission of data, communication of information, the sharing (thus,
expansion) of awareness  for that is what information is, awareness:  that,
dear reader, is the concluding point of this article, that the history of the
human experience is essentially the expansion of awareness.  It is what hit the
Darwin Fish in the face when it climbed up on the rocks; it is what will drive us
eventually to the stars.  Hope you're not disappointed.

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