History of writing

The history of writing traces the development of writing systems and how their use transformed and was transformed by different societies. The use of writing prefigures various social and psychological consequences associated with literacy and literary culture.
Each historical invention of writing emerged from systems of proto-writing that used ideographic and mnemonic symbols but were not capable of fully recording spoken language. True writing, where the content of linguistic utterances can be accurately reconstructed by later readers, is a later development. As proto-writing is not capable of fully reflecting the grammar and lexicon used in languages, it is often difficult or impossible to deduce what the author intended to communicate.
Early uses of writing included documenting agricultural transactions and contracts, but it was soon used in the areas of finance, religion, government, and law. Writing allowed the spread of these social modalities and their associated knowledge, and ultimately the further centralization of political power.
Writing systems typically satisfy three criteria. Firstly, the writing must have some purpose or meaning to it, and a point must be communicated by the text. Secondly, writing systems make use of specific symbols which may be recorded on some writing medium. Thirdly, the symbols used in writing generally correspond to elements of spoken language. In general, systems of symbolic communication like signage, painting, maps, and mathematical notation are distinguished from writing systems, which require knowledge of an associated language to read a text.
The norms of writing generally evolve more slowly than those of speech; as a result, linguistic features are frequently preserved in the written form of a language after they cease to appear in the corresponding spoken language.
Before the 20th century, most scholarly theories of the origins of writing involved some form of monogenesis, the assumption that writing had been invented only once as cuneiform in ancient Sumer, and spread across the world from there via cultural diffusion. According to these theories, writing was such a particular technology that exposure through activities like trade was a much more likely means of acquisition than independent reinvention. Specifically, many theories were dependent on a literal account of the Book of Genesis, including the emphases it placed on Mesopotamia. Over time, greater awareness of the systems of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica conclusively established that writing had been independently invented multiple times. Four independent inventions of writing are most commonly recognized—in Mesopotamia (c. 3400–3100 BC), Egypt (c. 3250 BC), China (before c. 1250 BC), and Mesoamerica (before c. 1 AD).
Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs both gradually evolved from proto-writing between 3400 and 3100 BC. The Proto-Elamite script is also believed to have been in use during this period. Regarding Egyptian hieroglyphs, scholars point to very early differences with Sumerian cuneiform "in structure and style" as to why the two systems "(must) have developed independently," and if any "stimulus diffusion" of writing did occur, it only served to transmit the bare idea of writing between cultures. Due to the lack of direct evidence for the transfer of writing, "no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt."
During the 1990s, symbols originally inscribed between 3400 and 3200 BC were discovered at Abydos, which shed some doubt on the previous notion that the Mesopotamian sign system predated the Egyptian one. However, scholars have noted that the attestation at Abydos is singular and sudden, while the gradual evolution of the Mesopotamian system is lengthy and well-documented, with its predecessor token system used in agriculture and accounting attested as early as 8000 BC.
As there is no evidence of contact between the Chinese Shang dynasty (c. 1600 – c. 1050 BC) and the literate civilizations of the Near East, and the methods of logographic and phonetic representation in Chinese characters are distinct from those used in cuneiform and hieroglyphs, written Chinese is considered to be an independent development.
In each case where writing was invented independently, it emerged from systems of proto-writing, which used ideographic and mnemonic symbols to communicate information, but did not record human language directly. Historically, most proto-writing systems did not produce writing systems; the earliest writing dates to the Early Bronze Age (3300–2100 BC), but proto-writing is attested as early as the 7th millennium BC. Examples of proto-writing during the Neolithic and Bronze Age include:
Later examples include quipu, a system of knotted cords used as mnemonic devices within the Inca Empire (15th century AD).
The origins of writing are more generally attributed to the start of the Late Neolithic, when clay tokens were used to record specific amounts of livestock or commodities. These tokens were initially impressed on the surface of round clay envelopes and then stored in them. The tokens were then progressively replaced by flat tablets, on which signs were recorded with a stylus. Actual writing is first recorded in Uruk (modern Iraq), at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and soon after in various parts of the Near East.
An ancient Sumerian poem gives the first known story of the invention of writing:
The emergence of writing in a given area is usually followed by several centuries of fragmentary inscriptions. Historians mark the "historicity" of a culture by the presence of coherent texts written by the culture. Scholars have disagreed concerning when prehistory becomes history and when proto-writing became true writing.
Sumerian writing evolved from a system of clay tokens used to represent commodities. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, which recorded numbers using a round stylus pressed into the clay at different angles. This system was gradually augmented with pictographic marks indicating what was being counted, which were made using a sharp stylus. By the 29th century BC, writing used a wedge-shaped stylus and included phonetic elements representing syllables of the Sumerian language, and gradually replaced round-stylus and sharp-stylus markings during the 27th and 26th centuries BC. Finally, cuneiform became a general-purpose writing system with logograms, syllables, and numerals. From the 26th century BC, the system was adapted to write the Akkadian language, and from there to others, such as Hurrian and Hittite. Scripts similar in appearance to this writing system include those for Ugaritic and Old Persian.
Geoffrey Sampson states that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script, and, probably [were], invented under the influence of the latter", and that it is "probable that the general idea of expressing words of a language in writing was brought to Egypt from Sumerian Mesopotamia". However, more recent scholars have held that the evidence for direct influence is sparse. During the 1990s, the discovery of glyphs at Abydos dated between 3400 and 3200 BC has challenged the hypothesis that writing diffused from Mesopotamia to Egypt, pointing instead to the independent development of writing within Egypt. The Abydos glyphs, found in tomb U-J, are written on ivory and are likely labels for other goods found in the grave. While sign usage in Mesopotamian tokens is attested c. 8000 BC, Egyptian writing appears suddenly in the late 4th millennium BC.
Frank J. Yurco states that depictions of pharaonic iconography such as the royal crowns, Horus falcons and victory scenes were concentrated in the Upper Egyptian Naqada and A-Group cultures. He further elaborates that "Egyptian writing arose in Naqadan Upper Egypt and A-Group Nubia, and not in the Delta cultures, where the direct Western Asian contact was made, [which] further vitiates the Mesopotamian-influence argument".
Egyptian scholar Gamal Mokhtar argues that the inventory of hieroglyphic symbols derived from "fauna and flora used in the signs [which] are essentially African" and in "regards to writing, we have seen that a purely Nilotic, hence African origin not only is not excluded, but probably reflects the reality", although he acknowledges the geographical location of Egypt made it a receptacle for many influences.
Writing was of political importance to the Egyptian empire, and literacy was concentrated among an educated elite of scribes. Only people from certain backgrounds were allowed to train as scribes, in the service of temple, royal, and military authorities.
The first alphabetic writing was developed by workers in the Sinai Peninsula to write West Semitic languages c. 1800 BC, "in the context of cultural exchanges between Semitic-speaking people from the Levant and communities in Egypt". This earliest attested form is known as the Proto-Sinaitic script, and it adapted concepts and at least some of its written letterforms from Egyptian hieroglyphic writing; it adopted wholly West Semitic sound values for its letters, as opposed to adapting existing Egyptian ones. Precise dating of its origin, as well as the graphical origins of many letterforms (if any) remain unclear, and the script remains undeciphered. These early abjads (where letters generally represent only the consonantal sounds of a language) remained of marginal importance for several centuries; it is only towards the end of the Bronze Age that forms of Proto-Sinaitic script split into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet (c. 1400 BC), the undeciphered Byblos syllabary, and the Ancient South Arabian script (c. 1200 BC). Proto-Canaanite, which was probably influenced by the Byblos syllabary, in turn inspired the Ugaritic alphabet (c. 1300 BC).
The Phoenician alphabet (c. 1050 BC), which was ultimately adapted into the Greek alphabet, is another direct descendant of Proto-Sinaitic.
The Geʽez script native to Ethiopia and Eritrea descends from the Ancient South Arabian script, which had initially been used to write early Geʽez texts.
Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous script native to western Anatolia, used to record the Hieroglyphic Luwian language. It first appeared on Luwian royal seals from the 13th century BC.
The earliest attested Chinese writing comprise the body of inscriptions on oracle bones and bronze vessels dating to the Late Shang period (c. 1200 – c. 1050 BC), with the earliest of these dated c. 1250 BC.
Several syllabic and logographic writing systems were used in the Bronze Age Aegean civilizations (the Mycenaean civilization on the Greek mainland and the Minoan civilization on Crete), which ultimately fell out of use and were forgotten centuries prior to the introduction of the alphabet to the region by the Phoenicians:
Of several symbol systems used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, the Maya script appears to be the best developed, and has been fully deciphered. The earliest inscriptions identifiable as Maya date to the 3rd century BC, and the earliest that can be deciphered and read dates to 199 AD. The system was in continuous use from the 1st century AD until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. Maya writing used logograms complemented by a set of syllabic glyphs.
The Phoenician alphabet gave rise to the Aramaic and Greek alphabets. Most of the writing systems used throughout Afro-Eurasia descend from either Aramaic or Greek. The Greek alphabet was the first to introduce letters representing vowel sounds. It and its descendant in the Latin alphabet gave rise to several European scripts in the first several centuries AD, including the runic, Gothic, and Cyrillic alphabets. The Aramaic alphabet evolved into the Brahmic scripts of India, as well as the Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac abjads—with descendants spread as far as the Mongolian script. The South Arabian alphabet gave rise to the Geʽez abugida.
The history of the Greek alphabet began as early as the 8th century BC, when the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet for their own use. The letters of the Greek alphabet generally visually correspond to those of the Phoenician alphabet, and both came to be arranged using the same alphabetical order. Those adapting the Phoenician system added three letters to the end of the series, called the "supplementals". Several varieties of the Greek alphabet developed. One, known as the Cumae alphabet, was used west of Athens and in southern Italy. The other variation, known as Eastern Greek, was used in present-day Turkey and by the Athenians, and eventually the rest of the world that spoke Greek adopted this variation. After first writing right to left, like the Phoenicians, the Greeks eventually chose to write from left to right. Occasionally however, the writer would start the next line where the previous line finished, so that the lines would read alternately left to right, then right to left, and so on. This is known as boustrophedon writing, which imitated the path of an ox-drawn plough, and was used until the 6th century.
The Greek alphabet is the progenitor of each script currently used to write the languages of Europe. The most widespread descendant of Greek is the Latin script, named for the Latins, a central Italian people who came to dominate Europe with the rise of Rome. Around the 5th century BC, the Romans adopted writing from the Etruscan civilization, who wrote in a number of Italic scripts derived from the western Greeks. Due to the cultural dominance of the Roman state, the other Old Italic scripts have not survived in any great quantity, and the Etruscan language is mostly lost.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, the production and transmission of literature that had previously been widespread across the Roman world became largely confined to the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, where the primary literary languages were Greek and Persian respectively—though other languages such as Syriac and Coptic were also important.
The spread of Islam in the 7th century brought about the rapid establishment of Arabic as a major literary language in much of the Mediterranean and Central Asia. Arabic and Persian quickly began to overshadow Greek's role as a language of scholarship. Arabic script was adopted to write the Persian and Old Turkic languages. This script also heavily influenced the development of the cursive scripts of Greek, the Slavic languages, Latin, and other languages. The influence of Arabic writing during the Crusades also resulted in the Hindu–Arabic numeral system being adopted throughout Europe. By the 11th century, the city of Córdoba, Andalusia in what is now southern Spain had become one of the world's foremost intellectual centres, and was the site of the largest library in Europe.
By the 14th century, the Renaissance in Europe led to a revival of the importance of Greek, as well as of Latin as a significant literary language. A similar though smaller emergence occurred in Eastern Europe, especially in Russia. At the same time Arabic and Persian began a slow decline in importance as the Islamic Golden Age ended. The revival of literacy development in Western Europe led to many innovations in the Latin alphabet and the diversification of the alphabet to codify the spoken forms of the various languages.
Within a society, the mediums, materials, and technologies used for writing shape what it is used for and what social impact it has. For example, the physical durability of different writing materials directly determines which historical examples of writing have survived for later analysis: while bodies of inscriptions made in stone, bone, or metal from each literate society in antiquity have survived, many contemporaneous manuscript cultures are only attested indirectly.
The common materials in the Mesopotamian world were the tablet and the roll, the former probably having a Chaldean origin, the latter an Egyptian. The tablets of the Chaldeans are small pieces of clay, somewhat crudely shaped into a form resembling a pillow, and thickly inscribed with cuneiform characters. Similar use has been seen in hollow cylinders, or prisms of six or eight sides, formed of fine terracotta, sometimes glazed, on which the characters were traced with a small stylus, in some specimens so minutely as to require the aid of a magnifying glass.
In Egypt, the primary materials used for writing had different properties. Monuments depict the use of wooden tablets for writing; as early as the 4th millennium BC during the earliest Theban dynasties, papyrus had also been adopted. The papyrus reed grew chiefly in Lower Egypt and could be adapted into a more economical writing medium—its pith was extracted and divided into thin pieces that were flattened under pressure and glued together. By adjoining other strips at right angles, papyrus rolls of any length could be produced. Compared to Mesopotamia, the cheapness of writing materials used in Egypt seemingly resulted in writing itself becoming more widespread as a practice.
Egyptian papyrus was exported across the world, and ultimately became the subject of great demand. As a result, it became costly and was replaced by other materials including leather and parchment. With the invention of wood-pulp paper, the cost of writing material began to steadily decline. While advancements in the mass production of paper throughout the 20th century improved the strength, ink retention, and other qualities of wood-pulp paper, it became one of the cheapest commodities in the global economy, resulting in its unprecedented availability as a writing medium as well as its widespread adoption for other applications.
According to Denise Schmandt-Besserat, writing had its origins in the counting, cataloguing, and trade of agricultural produce. Government tax rolls followed thereafter. Written documents became essential for the accumulation and accounting of wealth by individuals, the state, and religious organizations as well as the transactions of trade, loans, inheritance, and documentation of ownership. With such documentation and accounting larger accumulations of wealth became more possible, along with the power that accompanied wealth, most prominently to the benefit of royalty, the state, and religions. Contracts and loans supported the growth of long-distance international trade with accompanying networks for import and export, supporting the rise of capitalism. Paper money was first used in China during the 11th century; it and other financial instruments relied on writing, initially in the form of letters and later as specialized genres designed to facilitate specific types of transactions and guarantees of value between individuals, banks, or governments. With the growth of economic activity in late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, sophisticated methods of accounting and calculating value emerged, with such calculations both carried out in writing and explained in manuals. The creation of corporations then proliferated documents surrounding organization, management, the distribution of shares, and records management.
During the late 18th century, François Quesnay and Adam Smith developed systematic theories of economics for the first time. The works of Quesnay, Smith, and their colleagues introduced the concept of an economy as such—as well as the concept of a national economy. Economics has since developed as a field with many authors contributing texts to the professional literature, and governments collecting data, instituting policies and creating institutions to manage and advance their economies. Deirdre McCloskey has examined the rhetorical strategies and discursive construction of modern economic theory. Graham Smart has examined in depth how the Bank of Canada uses writing to cooperatively produce policies based on economic data and then to communicate strategically with relevant publics.
Private legal documents for the sale of land appeared in Mesopotamia in the early 3rd millennium BC, not long after the appearance of cuneiform writing. The first codes of law were written in Mesopotamia c. 2100 BC, exemplified in the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 BC) that was inscribed on stone stelae throughout the Old Babylonian Empire. While the ancient Egyptian state did not codify its laws, legal documents such as official decrees and private contracts were used during the Old Kingdom c. 2150 BC. The Torah, comprising the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, codified the laws of Ancient Israel. Laws were frequently codified in ancient Greek and Roman polities, with Roman law ultimately serving as a model for both church canon law and secular law used throughout much of Europe during the Middle Ages.
In China, the earliest evidence for the codification of laws or punishments are bronze inscriptions made in 536 BC. The earliest law codes to be preserved in their entirety were those of the Qin and Western Han dynasties (221–9 BC), which articulated a full system of social control and governance, with criminal procedures and accountability for both government officials and citizens. These laws required complex reporting and documenting procedures to facilitate hierarchical supervision from the village up to the imperial centre.
While common law developed in a mostly oral environment in England after the Roman period, with the return of the church and the Norman Conquest, customary law began to be inscribed as were precedents of the courts; however, many elements remained oral, with documents only memorializing public oaths, wills, land transfers, court judgements, and ceremonies. During the late medieval period, however, documents gained authority for agreements, transactions, and laws.
Writing has been central to expanding many of the core functions of governance through law, regulation, taxation, and documentary surveillance of citizens; all dependent on growth of bureaucracy which elaborates and administers rules and policies and maintains records. These developments which rely on writing increase the power and extent of states. At the same time writing has increased the ability of citizens to become informed about the operations of the state, to become more organized in expressing needs and concerns, to identify with regions and states, and to form constituencies with particular views and interests; the history of journalism is closely linked to citizen information, regional and national identity, and expression of interests. These changes have greatly influenced the nature of states, increasing the visibility of people and their views no matter what the form of governance is.
in the ancient Near East and China, states developed extensive bureaucracies which relied on a literate class of scribes and bureaucrats. In the Ancient Near East this was carried out through the formation of scribal schools; in China, this led to the institution of written imperial examinations based on classic texts that effectively defined traditional Chinese education for millennia. Literacy was associated with the government bureaucracy; following its emergence, printing was tightly controlled by the government, with texts written in vernacular Chinese being comparatively rare until the written vernacular Chinese movement that followed the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). In ancient Greece and Rome, class distinctions between citizen and slave, wealthy and poor limited education and participation. During the Middle Ages and early modern period, the church dominated education in Europe, reflecting the central role religious life had in the maintenance of state power and bureaucracy.
In Europe and its American colonies, the introduction of the printing press and decreasing cost of paper and printing allowed for greater access of ordinary citizens to gain information about the government and conditions in other regions within the jurisdictions. The Reformation's emphasis on the individual reading of sacred texts eventually increased the spread of literacy beyond the ruling classes, and opened the door to a wider awareness and criticism of government policy. Growing divisions along confessional and political lines in English society during 16th and 17th centuries culminated in the English Civil War that resulted in the sovereignty of Parliament being prioritized over the prerogatives of the British monarchy. In this and other periods of conflict throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, cheap and disposable printed materials facilitated propaganda campaigns appealing to segments of the emerging public, pamphlet wars with authors attacking one another, and challenges to the status quo, often illicit, able to be published clandestinely.
Newspaper publishing and journalism, having origins in commercial information, soon was to offer political information and was instrumental to the formation of a public sphere. Newspapers were instrumental in the spread of information, fostering discussion and the formation of political identities in the American Revolution. During the late 19th century, the circulation of regional newspapers encouraged adoption and articulation of urban or localized identities by readers. A focus on national news that followed telegraphy and the emergence of newspapers with national circulation along with scripted national radio and television news broadcasts also created horizons of attention through the 20th century, with both benefits and costs.
Much of what is considered knowledge is inscribed in written text and is the result of communal processes of production, sharing, and evaluation among social groups and institutions bound together with the aim of producing and disseminating knowledge-bearing texts; the contemporary world identifies such social groups as disciplines and their products as disciplinary literatures. The invention of writing facilitated the sharing, comparing, criticizing, and evaluating of texts, resulting in knowledge becoming a more communal property across wider geographic and temporal domains. Religious texts formed the common knowledge of scriptural religions, and knowledge of those sacred scriptures became the focus of institutions of religious belief, interpretation, and schooling.
Scholars have disagreed concerning when written record-keeping became more like literature, but the oldest surviving literary texts date from a full millennium after the invention of writing. The earliest literary author known by name is Enheduanna, who is credited as the author of a number of works of Sumerian literature, including Exaltation of Inanna, in the Sumerian language during the 24th century BC. The next earliest named author is Ptahhotep, who is credited with authoring The Maxims of Ptahhotep, an instructional book for young men in Old Egyptian composed in the 23rd century BC. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a notable early poem, but it can also be seen as a political glorification of the historical King Gilgamesh of Sumer whose natural and supernatural accomplishments are recounted.
The identification of sacred religious texts codified distinct belief systems, and became the basis of the modern concept of religion. The reproduction and spread of these texts became associated with these scriptural religions and their spread, and thus were central to proselytizing. Their status created expectations that believers either read or otherwise respect their contents; priests charged with reading, interpretation and application of texts were especially vital in societies prior to the advent of mass literacy.
In Mesopotamia and Egypt, scribes became important for roles beyond the initiating roles in the economy, governance and law. They became the producers and stewards of astronomy and calendars, divination, and literary culture. Schools developed in tablet houses, which also archived repositories of knowledge. In ancient India, the Brahman caste became stewards of texts that aggregated and codified oral knowledge. Those texts then became the authoritative basis for a continuing tradition of oral education. A case in point is the work of Pāṇini, a linguist who analysed and codified knowledge of Sanskrit syntax, prosody, and grammar. Mathematics, astronomy, and medicine were also subjects of classic Indian learning and were codified in classic texts. Less is known about Mayan, Aztec, and other Mesoamerican learning because of the destruction of texts by the conquistadors, but it is known that scribes were revered, elite children attended schools, and the study of astronomy, map making, historical chronicles, and genealogy flourished.
In China, after the Qin dynasty attempted to remove all traces of the competing Confucian tradition, the Han dynasty made philological knowledge the qualification for the government bureaucracy, so as to restore knowledge that was in danger of vanishing. The imperial examination system for the civil service functioned for two millennia, and consisted of a written exam based on knowledge of classical texts. To support students obtaining government positions through the written examination, schools focused on those same texts and the associated philological knowledge. These texts covered philosophical, religious, legal, astronomical, hydrological, mathematical, military, and medical knowledge. Printing as it emerged largely served the knowledge needs of the bureaucracy and the monastery, with substantial vernacular printing only emerging around the 15th century.
While Socrates thought writing an inferior means of transmission of learning (recounted in the Phaedrus), we know of his works through Plato's written accounts of his dialogues. Havelock also connects the philosophical work of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle with literacy, as it enabled the development of critical thinking via the analysis of permanent texts written both by the author and their peers. Aristotle wrote treatises and lectures which were the core of education at the Lyceum, along with the may volumes collected in the Lyceum's library. The Stoics and Epicureans also wrote and taught during the same period in Athens, although we now have only fragments of their works.
Greek writers were the founders of many other fields of knowledge. Herodotus and Thucydides, who wrote during the 5th century BC in Athens, are considered founders of the Western historiographical tradition, incorporating genealogy and mythic accounts into systematic investigations of events. Thucydides developed a more critical, neutral history through greater examination of documents, transcription of speeches, and interviews. During the same period, Hippocrates authored several works codifying what was known within the field of medicine. The works of Galen, a Greek physician living in Rome during the 2nd century AD, were important in European medical practice through the Renaissance. Hellenized writers in Egypt also produced compendia of knowledge using the resources of the Library of Alexandria, such as Euclid's Elements, which remains a standard reference work in geometry. Ptolemy's Almagest, an astronomy treatise, was used throughout the Middle Ages.
Roman scholars continued the practice of writing compendia of knowledge, including Varro, Pliny the Elder, and Strabo. While much of Roman accomplishment was in material culture of construction, Vitruvius documented much of the contemporary practice to influence design until today. Agriculture also became an important area for manuals, such as Palladius's compendium. Numerous manuals of rhetoric and rhetorical education that were to influence future generations also appeared, such as the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero's De Oratore and Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria.
With the fall of Rome, the Middle East became the crossroads for learning, with knowledge bearing texts from the West and East meeting in Constantinople, Damascus, and then Baghdad. The House of Wisdom with a large library was founded, where Greek works of medicine, philosophy, mathematics and astronomy were translated into Arabic, along with Indian works on mathematics and therapeutics. To these texts, philosophers such as Al-Kindi and Avicenna and astronomers such as Al-Farghani made new contributions. Al-Khwarizmi authored the first work on algebra, drawing on both Greek and Indian resources. The centrality of the Quran within Islam also led to growth of Arabic linguistics. From Baghdad, knowledge and texts were to flow back to South Asia and down through Africa, with a large collection of books and an educational center around the Sankoré Madrasah in Timbuktu, the seat of the Songhai Empire. During this period the deposed Abbasid Caliphate moved its seat of power and learning to Córdoba, now in Spain, where they founded a major library which reintroduced many of the classic texts back into Europe along with texts of Arab learning.
The reintroduction of classical texts into Europe through the library and intercultural intellectual culture in Córdoba, including the classical Greek canon, as well as Arabic texts by Avicenna and Al-Khwarizmi, created a need for interpretation and scholarship to make those works more accessible to scholars in monasteries and urban centres. During the 12th century, universities emerged from clusters of scholars in Italy at Bologna, in Spain at Salamanca, in France at Paris and in England at Oxford. By 1500, there were at least 60 universities throughout Europe enrolling at least 750,000 students. Each of the four faculties—liberal arts, theology, law, and medicine—was oriented around transmission of and commentary on classical texts, rather than the production of new knowledge. This form of scholastic education continued well into the 17th century in some locations and disciplines.
Johannes Gutenberg's introduction of the moveable type printing press to Europe c. 1450 created new opportunities for the production and widespread distribution of books, fostering much new writing, with particular consequences for the development of knowledge, as documented by Elizabeth Eisenstein. The production and distribution of knowledge was no longer tied to monasteries or universities with their libraries and collections of scribal copies. In the ensuing centuries a politically and increasingly religiously divided Europe, no single authority was able to censor or control the production of books. While universities remained attached to disseminating traditional texts, publishing houses became the new centres of knowledge production, and publishing houses in different jurisdictions led to a diversity of ideas becoming available as books moved across borders and scholars came to see themselves as citizens of the Republic of Letters.
The comparison of multiple editions of traditional texts led to improved textual scholarship. The ability to share and compare results from many regions and enlist more people into the production of science soon led to the development of early modern science. Books of medicine began to incorporate observations from contemporary surgery and dissections, including printed plates providing illustrations, to improve knowledge of anatomy. With many copies of traditional books and new books appearing, debates arose over the value of each in what became known as the "battle of the books". Maps and discoveries of exploration and colonization also were recorded in books and governmental records, often with the purpose of economic exploitation as in the General Archive of the Indies in Seville but also to satisfy curiosity about the world.
Printing also made possible the invention and development of scientific journals, with the Journal des sçavans appearing in France and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in England, both in 1665. Over the years, these journals proliferated and became the basis of disciplines and disciplinary literature. Genres reporting experiments and other scientific observations and theories developed over the ensuing centuries to produce modern practices of disciplinary publication with the extensive intertexts which represent the collective pursuits of disciplinary knowledge. The availability of scientific and disciplinary books and journals also facilitated the development of modern practices of scientific reference and citation. These developments from the impact of printing on the growth of knowledge contributed to the Scientific Revolution, science in the Renaissance and during the Enlightenment.
In the 18th century, dissident Scottish and English universities began offering practical instruction in rhetoric and writing to enable non-elite students to influence contemporary events. Only in the 19th century did the universities in some countries begin making place for the writing of new knowledge, turning them in the ensuing years from primarily disseminating knowledge through the reading of classical texts to becoming institutions devoted to both reading and writing. The creation of research seminars and the associated seminar papers in history and philology in German universities were a significant starting point for the reform of the university. Professorships in philology, history, economy, theology, psychology, sociology, mathematics and the sciences were to emerge over the century, and the German model of disciplinary research university was to influence the organization of universities in England and the United States, with another model developing in France. Both emphasized production of new knowledge by faculty and acquisition thereof by students. In elite British universities, writing instruction was supported by the tutorial system with weekly writing by students for their tutors, while in the United States regular courses in writing were often required starting in the late 19th century, with writing across the curriculum becoming an increasing focus, particularly towards the end of the 20th century.
Walter J. Ong, Jack Goody, and Eric A. Havelock were among the earliest to systematically argue for the psychological and intellectual consequences of literacy. Ong argued that the introduction of writing changed the form of human consciousness from sensing the immediacy of the spoken word to the critical distance and systematization of words, which could be graphically displayed and ordered, such as in the works of Petrus Ramus. Havelock attributed the emergence of Greek philosophic thought to the use of the written word which allowed the comparison of beliefs and belief systems and the critical examination of concepts. Jack Goody argued that written language fostered such practices as categorization, making lists, following formulas, developing recipes and prescriptions, and ultimately making and recording experiments. These practices changed the intellectual and psychological orientation of those who engaged with them.
While recognizing the possibilities of all these psychological and intellectual changes that accompanied these literate practices, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole argued that these changes did not come universally or automatically with literacy, but rather were dependent on the social uses made of literacy in their local contexts. They carried out field observation and experiments among the Vai people of West Africa, for whom the psychological impacts of literacy vary due to the three different contexts in which locals learn to read and write the Vai language, English, and Arabic—practical skills, secular education, and religious education, respectively. European literacy was associated with European-style schooling, and fostered among other things syllogistic reasoning and logical problem solving. Arabic literacy was associated with the religious training of madrasas and fostered, among other things, heightened rote memory. Literacy in the written forms of Vai associated with daily practices of making requests and explaining tasks, increased anticipation of audience knowledge and needs along with rebus solving (as the written language used rebus-like icons).