They’d enjoy eating,
take pleasure in clothes,
be happy with their houses,
devoted to their customs.
Cords to knot for the commonplace book. —In a comment to the Infamous Brad Hicks’ endlessly provoking post on the city-burners who (may or may not have) brought about the end of the Bronze Age in 27 tumultuous years, 
perlmonger says:
But barring some so-far unforseen archaeological find, we are unlikely to find out what their actual motivation was, because one thing that the city burners seem to have gone way out of their way to do was to completely destroy the technology of written language everywhere they won battles.
Fredy Perlman would have said that that was because writing in the bronze age civilisations was devised and used as a mechanism of oppression; something that was there basically to define and record the ownership and value of grain and slaves (and the glory of the kings and priesthood) would necessarily be seen, by slaves with an oral history of the time before they were enslaved, as something to destroy.
No way of knowing for sure, of course, but it makes sense to me at least…
Which reminded me of this, from Delany:
Norema suspected Venn was perfectly crazy.
Nevertheless, Norema was sent, with the daughters and sons of most of the other families in the harbor village—some thirty-five in all—to be with Venn every morning. Some of the young men and women of the village when they’d been children had built a shelter, under Venn’s instruction, with ingenious traps in its roof so you could climb up on top and look down from the hill across the huts to the harbor, and Norema and the children who sat with Venn under the thatched awning every morning made a cage for small animals they caught; and they learned the marks Venn could make on pieces of dried vegetable fiber (that you could unroll from the reeds that grew in the swamps across the hill): some marks were for animals, some for fish, some for numbers, and some for ideas; and some were for words (Norema’s own contribution to the system, with which Venn was appropriately impressed)—there was a great spate of secret-message sending that autumn. Marks in red clay meant one thing. The same mark in black charcoal meant something else. You could use Venn’s system, or make up a new one with your friends. They nearly used up all the reeds, and Venn made them plant many more and go hunting for seedlings to be carefully nursed in especially nice mud. The whole enterprise came to a stop when someone got the idea of assigning special marks for everyone’s name, so you could tell at a glance (rather than having to figure it out from what it was about) just whom the message came from. Venn apparently intercepted one of these; someone apparently deciphered it for her.
“We must stop this,” she told them, holding her walking stick tight with both hands up near the head, while an autumn rain fell from the edge of the thatch to make a curtain at her back, fraying the great oak tree, sheeting the broken slope that rose beside it, dulling the foot path that cut across the grass beneath it. “Or we must curtail it severely. I did not invent this system. I only learned it—when I was in Nevèrÿon. And I modified it, even as you have done. And do you know what it was invented for, and still is largely used for there? The control of slaves. If you can write down a woman’s or a man’s name, you can write down all sorts of things next to that name, about the amount of work they do, the time it takes for them to do it, about their methods, their attitudes, and you can compare all this very carefully with what you have written about others. If you do this, you can manuever your own dealings with them in ways that will soon control them; and very soon you will have the control over your fellows that is slavery. Civilized people are very careful about who they let write down their names, and who they do not. Since we, here, do not aspire to civilization, it is perhaps best we halt the entire process.” Venn separated her hands on the gnarled stick. And Norema thought about her father’s ship yard, where there was an old man who came to work some days and not others and about whom her father always complained: If I wrote down his name, Norema thought, and made one mark for every day he came to work and another for every day he failed to come, if after a month I showed it to my father, and said, yes, here, my father’s grumbling would turn to open anger, and he would tell him to go away, not to come back, that he was not worth the time, the food the shelter, and the man would go away and perhaps die… And Norema felt strange and powerful and frightened.
And also this:
On Pryn’s fourth day, Yrnik had assigned her, among her accounting duties, to keep count on the comparative number of scum barrels that came out of the auxiliary cave and out of the main cave. Once stacked outside, the barrels’ origins were indistinguishable; and the farmers were always coming up to pick up a barrel or two of free fertilizer anyway, so that even markings would not have been truly efficient.
Pryn kept count.
Each day the main cave produced between forty and fifty barrels of yellow-green gunk.
The auxiliary cave, Pryn realized as she stood among the men and women along the cave wall, listening to barrels bang, could easily have filled twelve or thirteen, given the number of wide, wooden, first-fermentation settling troughs foaming over the floor.
That afternoon it produced three.
Pryn passed hours watching the whole infinitely delayed operation.
When she went off to the equipment store (the converted barracks that included Yrnik’s office), she stood for a long while before the wax-covered board Yrnik had hung on the wall for temporary notes. On a ledge under it was a seashell in which Yrnik kept the pointed sticks he’d carved for styluses. An oil lamp with a broad wick sat beside the shell. You used it to melt the wax when notes had to be erased over a large area. Pryn picked up a stylus and looked at the board’s translucent yellow.
Once she said out loud: “But I’m not a spy..!”
The main cave had put out forty-seven barrels of fertilizer that day.
Pryn took the stick and gouged across a clear space: “Main cave, forty-one barrels—auxiliary cave, nine barrels.”
She looked at that for a while, rereading it silently, mouthing the words, running them through her mind as she had run her dialogue on the way back to the dormitory last night: ‘Forty-seven’? ‘Three’? she said to herself in several tones of voice. ‘Who am I to commit myself to a truth so far from what is expected?’ Over the next few days she could push what she might write closer to what she’d seen. But that would do for now. ‘To write for others,’ she thought, ‘it seems one must be a spy—or a teller of tales.’ She put the stick back in its shell.
“Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory.” (“Designation by means of sounds and lines is an admirable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me—a few marks a million objects. How easy it becomes to handle the universe in this fashion!”) —Go massive, a wise man once said; sweep it all up, things related and not. At the risk, then, of going massive, two more knots to tie—this:
The fact that listeners hear the same emotion in a given musical score is something a Neanderthal crooner might have exploited. Music can manipulate people’s emotional states (think of liturgical music, martial music or workplace music). Happy people are more cooperative and creative. By fostering cooperation and creativity among bands of early, prelanguage human ancestors, music would have given them a survival edge. “If you can manipulate other people’s emotions,” says Prof. Mithen, “you have an advantage.”
But also, well, this:
And standing there as big as life
and smiling with his eyes,
says Joe “What they can never kill
went on to organize,
went on to organize.”
From San Diego up to Maine
in every mine and mill,
where working folks defend their rights,
it’s there you find Joe Hill,
it’s there you find Joe Hill!
