ABSTRACT
The written sign is the linchpin of western civilization, the chief vehicle for
the transmission of knowledge across time and space. Although rooted in
an oral epic tradition, ancient societies from Babylonia to Rome assiduously
transcribed and preserved foundational texts. The Hebrew Bible presented
divine enunciation and human transcription of Torah as nearly simulta-
neous. The Jewish Oral Law of late antiquity metamorphosed into a massive
corpus of written exegetical and legal texts, just as primitive Christianity’s
logocentrism (‘‘In the beginning was the [spoken] Word,’’ says the Gospel of John) engendered the medieval monastery, whose center was the scriptorium.
In the early modern period, the development of print technology freed the
word from its cloister and made possible the wide dissemination of abstract
thought, which is most effectively expressed in concrete text.1 The nineteenth-
century newspaper further de-sacralized the written word – Hegel remarked
that newspaper reading was the modern substitute for daily prayers – and
democratized it. But from the epoch of the Bible to the era of the boulevard
press, the written word remained the common vehicle for signification and communication.
