ABSTRACT
Letter wntmg is a very ancient practice. Rudyard Kipling's suggestion that writing itself was invented for the purpose of sending letters is perhaps not as facetious as Kipling intended.2 Nearly four millennia before Kipling composed his Just So Stories, Sumerian storytellers were affirming that the world's first written text was a letter.3 The mythical antiquity of the letter form is regularly reconfirmed by archaeological discoveries. Extensive diplomatic correspondence dating from the second millennium Be has been uncovered in Syria. These earliest letters were closely linl<ed to the bureaucratic needs of expanding empires, but personal or familiar letters were not unknown even in very ancient times. Archaeologists have discovered thousands of such letters from New Kingdom Egypt. In the intervening centuries, letters have continued both to serve the needs of the most powerful, and to circulate among the less elevated. Letters not only facilitated the development of states and empires, but also, it is suggested, helped destroy them.' Letters and letter writing not only affirmed the authority of the elite, but also provided a means of expression for more marginal members of society. A history of letters and letter writing might thus embrace virtually all of recorded history. Mined for quotations, read for content, analysed for meaning, letters form the hidden underpinnings of much historical research.
