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times venerable age, and survived perhaps as the result of responsible care or in spite of the ravages of war, fire, or neglect. The persistent usefulness of what might have been viewed as traditional media, and possible resistance to the new or alternative, or simply the usefulness of different media for different purposes, may have caused these periods of transition, such as the transition from the roll to the codex, to extend for centuries before what we define as new or historically later media noticeably replaced the older or traditional. For those adopting the newer media there was the possibility of perceiving the traditional or longer established media as obsolete, but, considering the length of time that it sometimes took for one medium to supersede another in common usage, both media may have been perceived as equally old and traditional, or essentially of equal value, each equally ap- propriate for their intended purpose. For all these reasons the transitions in the form and function of the book that we recognize before Gutenberg were remarkably slow and gradual, especially when viewed through the expecta- tions for comparatively rapid technological change that we experience today.
A. The Earliest Written Records Include Little or No Documentation of the Transition from Oral to Written Culture
The first transitional phase in the form and function of the book was the transition from oral to written culture. Because the origins of this transition occurred orally rather than in writing it may only be studied in instances in which we have substantial evidence of an oral culture, the earliest example of which is ancient Greece, because of recorded Greek epic poetry that evolved from oral culture. But even without records of oral cultures in Mesopotamia and Egypt, we may discuss the origins of writing on clay tablets and papyri in those regions that significantly predated written culture in Greece.
In Western civilization writing began in about 3000 BCE as a system of pictographs created by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, with predecessors reaching to the late fourth millennium, or about the period of Uruk IV; 3300–3100 BCE. These pictographs were written with styli on tablets of soft clay. Around or prior to those dates Egyptian hieroglyphs may have evolved
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