Politics

Absent readers and absent writers; know the reader.

Judge David Weinzweig | 1.13.2026 8:01 AM

Ancient Mesopotamians used pictures of basic objects to preserve and describe their culture. The Phoenicians pivoted from pictures to symbols around 1600 B.C., a harbinger of our modern alphabet.  Each symbol represented a spoken sound, but the reader read the symbols from right to left.

This method spread to Israel and Greece, where the Phoenician alphabet was refashioned into the Greek alphabet, but the Greeks invented vowels and redirected the reader from left to right.

The Romans then used the Greek alphabet to make the Latin alphabet, and hundreds of languages have sprung from the Latin alphabet, including English.

When the Phoenicians invented the alphabet and written communication, they invented a method to exchange and preserve thought, long after the thinker has stopped thinking. Words live on the page, where they reverberate beyond our physical and temporal reach. A device that teleports ideas through space and time. Yes, it sounds like Star Wars, but I only mean to say that shouting distance was no longer required to make a point. As a result, we can read the Gettysburg Address in 2024, even though President Abraham Lincoln died in April 1865. Lincoln understood this power and described it well:

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention........

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