When battle is heard outside the city, there is panic but guardsmen prevent a riot, then:
"...the swarms began ebbing out of the streets. People realized they'd best get home, or wherever they might find shelter, and stay put." (p. 80)
During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, people learned that, during a bomb alert, they should go home and stay there. In Dublin, some people, hearing that there was a bomb alert in O'Connell St, stood at the end of the street, waiting to see what would happen. Fortunately, it was only an alert.
Fire Brigade public information has included the slogan: "Get out. Stay out. Call us out." Let the professionals deal with a problem - unless the problem becomes so widespread that everyone has to be involved. Then - coordinated action, not panic or riot.
Everard is in a besieged city but knows what should happen and, in any case, has his own agenda which involves preserving, not deflecting, the course of events. This must be frustrating:
"...the stirrup was unknown to them..." (p. 78)
In so many ways, a time traveller could easily improve the lives of the people that he moves among.
14 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
We see a similar scenario in ENSIGN FLANDRY, as a Merseian submarine was shelling Kursoviki. The Tigeries, due to lack of experience with artillery, were milling about the streets when peoples on more technologically advanced planets would have known the only thing to do was getting under cover.
I think it needed the invention of the stirrup before cavalry became a practical fighting arm of any army.
Ad astra! Sean
"In so many ways, a time traveller could easily improve the lives of the people that he moves among."
Imagine introducing an alphabetic or syllabic script before early Cuneiform was developed. Even a hunter gatherer society can find a sufficiently simple writing system useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cree_syllabics
In the chapter on writing systems in "Guns, Germs & Steel" it is pointed out how the early cuneiform script was used to keep track of what the peasanty 'owed' the temple priests, while the first writing in the Greek alphabet we have in on a vase saying it is the prize for a dancing contest. The relative simplicity of alphabetic script is a big help to making a society more egalitarian & spreading useful knowledge much more than complicated hieroglyphics can.
Jim,
And the hero of de Camp's LEST DARKNESS FALL replaces Roman with Arabic numerals, including the all-important, "0," zero.
Paul.
Kaor, Jim!
I partially disagree. A HUGE reason for why any kind of writing system was developed was precisely for that reason: keeping records and keeping track of mercantile and governmental transactions of all kinds.
And it took time and hard experience with more complex writings systems like that of cuneiform before simpler, more efficient scripts like that of the Phoenicians and Greeks to be worked out. And some countries, like China and Japan, still insist on using the more complex ideographic writing, instead of some kind of alphabetic.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: that's "path dependency". Once a big investment has been made in a system, even a superior one can be rejected, or only adopted very slowly, simply because the transition cost is so high.
But if the alphabetic scripts had come first, through time travel or simple chance, the more cumbersome ones would never have been developed.
In the ISLAND series, within a few hundred years the whole world uses the Latin script and Arabic numerals and arithmetic and double-entry bookkeeping.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that makes sense, "path dependency." Once Egyptian hieroglyphics and cuneiform had been worked out and become strongly rooted, replacing them with more efficient scripts would be slow and difficult, due to those "transition costs." I assume those costs are why China and Japan still use ideographic writing systems.
We do see that development with Egyptian hieroglyphics, btw. As millennia passed simpler, more efficient forms of that kind of writing came into use.
I remember how both Nantucket and the renegade William Walker spread knowledge of Roman letters and Hindu/Arabic numerals. I do question how quickly Babylon and Egypt, which already had ancient writing systems, would have adopted Roman letters.
Ad astra! Sean
Path dependency is why I included the link to Cree syllabics. The Cree could have had no use for anything as complex and hard to learn as cuneiform, but with something like the syllabics that anyone could learn in an afternoon, soon they were all leaving notes written in soot on birchbark for each other.
It is vanishingly improbable that someone could invent such an elegant writing system without previous exposure to other writing systems, but James Evans who had knowledge of many writing systems or Sequoyah who knew about the basic principle of letters representing sounds could devise writing systems far simpler than ideographs.
Kaor, Jim!
But the FACT remains that Cretan syllabics did not spread into wide use. Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mesopotamian cuneiform remained the most widely used and/or prominent forms of writing for many centuries. And Stirling's comments about path dependency and transition costs explains why that was the case. To say nothing of simple human stubbornness: "What was good enough for Grandpa is good enough for me!"
And China and Japan still use ideographic writing, despite the drawbacks.
I wondered, just now, if the Thera eruption, which devastated Minoan civilization, contributed to Cretan syllabics not spreading?
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Jim!
Maybe I misunderstood, you did not have the Cretans in mind?
Ad astra! Sean
"I'm not going to change now!"
Sean: they wouldn't, if it was just that.
But it's an associated part of a "package" being offered, and the package has irresistible attractions; increased wealth and military power, just for starters.
McAndrews in Egypt isn't able to budge the entrenched power of the scribal caste; Kashtiliash in Babylon is, because he's monarch, and because he has an overall plan that involves mass literacy, which the Nantucketers have convinced him his necessary.
In the somewhat longer term, the closer international contact and inter-imperial rivalries drive things.
It's rather like 18th and 19th century Europe; you didn't dare fall behind the neighbors, which made pushing modernization on reluctant, conservative elites worth the risk and effort.
One reason the Linear A/B syllabaries vanished in the late Bronze Age "dark" period is that they were never known by more than a very small scribal caste.
One reason for that, among the Mycenaean Greeks, is that they were simply badly designed to write a highly inflected Indo-European language.
The closest you could get to writing a Greek word like "Anthropos" (man) was "at-to-ro-po-se".
Every word had to end in a vowel; and that's just the -nominative case- of the word, which had to alter its ending to match the inflectional set-up of a sentence.
So for Greek, it was barely a writing system at all. Symbols had to have many alternative meanings -- up to 90 for one of the most common -- which could only be inferred from context. And the symbols for syllables had to be supplemented by hundreds of ideographic symbols.
Even compared to Egyptian or Chinese writing systems it was an abortion.
The Cree are a Amerindian people in Canada. No connection to Crete.
If you go to the link in my earlier comment you will see that they mostly live in a region unsuited to agriculture & when the missionary James Evans devised a very simple phonetic script for their language it was quickly taken up by the Cree since even nomadic hunters found it useful to leave notes for each other.
Thus my speculation about a time traveler introducing something of the sort to humanity before agriculture. I could easily imagine this resulting in humanity skipping Pharaohs & Theocracies for relatively egalitarian cultures once agriculture gets developed.
Kaor, Jim, Paul, and Mr. Stirling!
Jim: Apologies, I had been misunderstanding you. You were talking about N. American Indians like the Cree people, and the work of James Evans, who developed a written form of their language. When I finally looked up "Cree Syllabics," Evans work reminded me of what Sts. Cyril and Methodius had done, perhaps in the AD 900's, inventing the Cyrillic alphabet for writing in Russian and other Slavic languages.
But I doubt any time traveler would use something like Cree syllabics if the Roman alphabet would also do the job. Also the Cree, like the Slavic tribes, were already in contact with more advanced nations, and inevitably being changed by that contact.
Paul: Absolutely! Many, perhaps most people, don't want to change if they absolutely don't have to!
Mr. Stirling: Many thanks! Yes, I can see how a mix of fear, ambition, rivalry can drive even massive changes like adopting whole new forms of writing. Because that would be necessary if Egypt and Babylon wanted to stay strong and powerful. And the enemies McAndrews made in Egypt was why he eventually decided to seek his fortune elsewhere in Africa.
I thought of Peter the Great of Russia and the massive changes he introduced into his realm as one example of the modernization needed to make sure one's nation did not end up suffering the fate of Poland. And similar, less drastic modernizations elsewhere in Europe.
Understood, written Mycenaean Greek was simply not SUITABLE for Greek, which explains why it disappeared.
Ad astra! Sean
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