The invention of the alphabet and economic growth in the Levant in the first millennium B.C.

Abstract

The title of this paper might be understood to imply that it had been the invention of the alphabet which had led to an economic growth in the Levant in the first millennium B.C. However as it will be shown below, a close look at different variables reveals that although this could be true, it is not inevitable, and that therefore there is no causal link between the invention of the alphabet and economic growth.

Writing itself is only one facet of a language and it would be wrong to identify the two. Humans had conducted their business through the spoken word before they invented writing, and as Ong says, ‘All changes in social and noetic structures that can be identified after writing is introduced are not due simply to writing. Writing itself has social causes. It grows, for example, first in urban environments for use in recording ownership and related uses’.1 However, once invented, writing affects societies in manifold ways including the field of ‘marketing and manufacturing’.2

Having made writing part and parcel of ourselves, it is now very easy for us to forget that it is in fact a technology, which Plato had downgraded inasmuch as he had viewed it as an external technological element which was foreign to human beings. In reality, however, writing (especially the alphabet) ‘is a technology, calling for the use of tools and other equipment, styli or brushes or pens, carefully prepared surfaces such as paper, animal skins, strips of wood, as well as inks or paints, and much more’.3 Since nowadays the technological aspect of writing (such as the production of pens and word processors) is concentrated in factories far away from us, we are not even aware that it is a very drastic technology indeed, seeing that it was what had actually started the process of divorce between words and ‘the living present’.