Post #175 July 8, 2019

“How Storytelling Became Writing”

It’s general knowledge that storytelling is as old as Man.  It began as an oral tradition, Og and Grog swapping tall tales around a campfire.  There was no writing in those ancient days.  Stories were created and passed down by word of mouth and the storyteller was as much a theatrical performer as anything else. 

Then writing came along.   Writing began as a way of keeping records.  What kind of records?  Commercial transactions.  Agricultural production…Og has brought ‘x’ number of crops to town for sale.  He sold 1/2 x, so we make a record of the sale for future use.  Legal and government transactions, decrees, laws and codes were also among the first things to be written down. 

But after a long time using their writing skills to record transactions, scribes (the first people to become skilled at writing) probably grew a little bored.  They began to adapt their writing skills to other uses, like telling lurid accounts of the great deeds of kings and gods.  These first stories were likely little more than written versions of the oral tales.  There were chronicles of the times, fables, proverbs and sayings, love letters, lyrics to songs and even epic poems, all of this transcribed from the oral storytellers and, over time, embellished with additional materials and using new literary techniques.   Thus, was born literature and the first use of writing as a medium for telling stories.

The legal codes of Hammurabi in the 18^th century BC were an early example. 

From these crude beginnings, scribes-turned-storytellers laid the foundations for some of the great archetypes of stories that we use even today.  This was the beginning of the epic story—a tale of a human being or beings who were larger than life, like Odysseus and Jason.  It was also the beginning of the myth, stories and tales to explain the mysteries of nature and life, to explain things we don’t understand. 

One of the earliest stories of this era was the tale of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian epic from about 2600 BC.  This story detailed what may well be a folk memory of a real king, who ruled a city called Uruk in this time. 

People, in other words, the audiences for stories, were deeply concerned in their time about the thoughts, and actions of the gods and the great heroes (maybe it isn’t really that different today). These were the themes of the first written tales, generally in cities around Mesopotamia. The affairs of the gods were of great importance to the lives of people in this era.

The earliest storytelling writers tried to penetrate the mysteries of life and offer explanations for them, explanations for storms, floods, eclipses, the death of kings, why some cities failed and some prospered.  They tried in their stories to sort out the rights and wrongs of life, and cope with the ever-present fear of death. 

Storytelling writers are still doing that today.  Our lives are infinitely more complex, but reading some of the earliest written stories, we still see and feel a kinship with the concerns and even writing techniques of the earliest scribes.  Techniques like how to build and keep an audience, how to convey a message or a moral.  In time, purely fictional heroes would supplant the heroes of the old oral epics.  Thus, instead of Gilgamesh, we have Captain Ahab.  Instead of Jason or Odysseus, we have Captain Kirk.  Instead of Hercules, we have Tarzan and Batman.

But the same concerns that drove the earliest scribes to record and eventually embellish what they were hearing persist to this day. 

Man is preeminently a storytelling animal. Our brains are wired that way.  We make sense of our world through stories.  Even Jesus Christ knew this, so he conveyed what the kingdom of God was like through countless stories and parables.

The next time you sit at your computer pondering how to get out of some plot complication, remember your scribal ancestors scratching away on a clay tablet, trying to figure out how to explain why the sun god disappeared in an eclipse yesterday. 

We owe more than we think to these earliest writers.

The next post to The Word Shed comes on July 15.  See you then.

Phil B.