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subtlety, and in the smallest of details. Furthermore, the written word, thought to be the surer and safer means of communica- tion, is not only less reliable but also more permeable to out- side aggression than are the more secret codes of an oral system. During the time of the Roman Empire, for instance, the fact that the Celts were still “prehistoric”—meaning that they hadn’t recorded their history, ways, and beliefs—made it much harder for the conquering Romans to devise an appropriate strategy to subjugate them (Desdemaines-Hugon, Stepping-Stones: A Journey Through the Ice Age Caves of the Dordogne [2010], p. 75).
Because, as mentioned in Introduction to this essay, writing began in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE, there is little or no documentation of the transition from oral to written culture in those regions. The Epic of Gilgamesh, preserved in the library of Ashurbanipal, was an oral composition written in a literate culture, as distinct from an oral composition composed in an exclusively oral culture.56
In the European tradition the earliest transition from oral to written cul- ture for which there are useful records occurred in ancient Greece. During this transition literature was recorded and passed down from generation to generation, in both the ancient oral tradition of memorization, and through the methods, new to this society, of reading and writing. It was a transition away from a purely oral culture, but not a clear transition to a written cul- ture in modern sense; it was an intermediate condition, in which, after the
56 “. . . there seems little doubt that the form of the written epic that has come down to us is the result of aggregating (and so transforming) earlier products, possibly of an oral tradition. But we need to appreciate a further point if we are to understand the position of this epic in relation to literacy. For even before the version we know was brought together in writing, the constituent parts existed not simply as ‘oral poems’ but as part of a culture in which writing had played an increasingly important part since the fourth millennium. For Mesopotamia had not experienced a truly oral culture, a purely oral tradition, since that time. It is true that writing appears to have been relatively little used for ‘lit- erary’ activity in the usual sense. However, its poetry was subject to influences both in the form and in content, in composition and in reproduction (memorization), that emanated from the other changes that writing had wrought, promoted or accompanied” (Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral [1999] 92).
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