ABSTRACT
THE EARLIEST use of connected writing (as opposed to isolated magic pictures, developing into magic patterns) was as an aid to memory. That is to say, its purpose was to help people not to forget what they knew already; whereas in more advanced communities the chief use of writing is to tell people things that they have not heard before. Writing in early China, for example, was used to record the taking of omens, in order to assist in the correct interpretation of future omens. It was used to record infrequent rites, such as those of coronation1 which might occur only once in a generation and were consequently apt to be imperfectly remembered. It was used to record the libretti of the great sacrificial dances that attended the worship of dynastic founders,2 to record the main events (campaigns, reprisals, visits from other tribes, together with portents and omens other than those obtained by divination) of tribal life. All such writing as this was necessarily anonymous. No notion of 'authorship' attended it. It was merely the work of scribes, mechanically setting down things that were in danger of being forgotten.
