The Revolutionary Evolution of the Media -- Chapter 3

Chapter 3 The Sacred Part of Mediaamp8217s EvolutionTo understand media amp8230 yesterdayamp8217s todayamp8217s and tomorrow39s amp8230 letamp8217s start with God Or more properly gods Time and again religion has helped drive media to new levels and that39s just as true today as it was back in that firstgrunt era From onetoone verbal communications right through to todayamp8217s burgeoning connectivity the history of religious exercise is a history of content aimed at believers amp8230 proselytizing or reaffirming As the first of the amp82204Csamp8221 content creates the palate Donamp8217t think that matters as much today It does in the US Think megachurches amp8230 or for that matter Fox News As a friend of mine named Scott Gentry tweeted once amp8220Content will always be King Queen and Jester Use it wiselyamp8221Starting at the beginning with the oldest writing found in Mesopotamia near Uruk modern day AsSamawah Iraq but a major Sumerian city circa 3500 BC included cuneiform tablets that have allowed scholars to track religious thought from early Sumer through Persian and Greek conquerors up to Biblical times Enuma Elish When on High amp8230 an epic poem describes the creation of heaven and earth to the hero Marduk The Sumerians also invented the modern calendar theirs had 12 months with months alternating between 29 and 30 days In Mesoamerica the Maya had two separate years a 260day Sacred Round and a 365day Vague Year The calendars were etched onto clay tablets or carved in stoneA great deal of early religious stories tales songs poems and epics revolved around death Among the first books was The Book of the Dead in the papyrus of Nu Egypt The amp8220bookamp8221 highlights spells to enable the deceased to have a comfortable afterlife Much remains of Egyptian religious rituals including two versions of daily temple rituals Papyrus scrolls showed up around 600 BC Egyptamp8217s religions spanned from about 4000 BC to the Sixth Century AD or CE when the last temple of the goddess Isis was shuttered on the island of PhilaeIshtar was more than the name of a bad movie it was one of the names of the Mother of Gods in ancient Greece that even predated the arrival of the Hellenes That tribe which came from the north brought us philosophical academies staged tragedies and comedies and the idea of citizen participation The Phoenician alphabet emerged around 2000 BCIn looking back from ancient Rome the Etruscans dominated most of the BC eras on the Italian peninsula before the sophisticated citystate of Rome itself emerged From the Etruscans one of the first books of anatomy grew out of their hepatoscopy amp8211 the study of the liver Seems they were superstitious about the liver as a look into the bodyamp8217s soul amp8230 so they sacrificed some victims to examine the livers There is a bronze liver from Piacenza that is divided into 40 regions each named for a godRoman gods often followed the Greek hierarchies with new names and in many cases somewhat different attributes Among early books those by Greek sibyls female Greek oracles formed significant parts of Roman religions A convoluted tale click here for Wikipediaamp8217s take on the stories resulted in one of the last kings of Rome acquiring the socalled Sibylline Books which the Romans took as valuable prophecies It seemed to work Augustus decided to at least in Egypt with Cleopatra Isis be divine like Alexander They Augustus and Cleopatra named their kids the Sun and the MoonIt wasnamp8217t long before Roman emperors were all divine though not all demanded to be worshiped as Caligula and Nero didIn Persia now Iran a country surrounded by mountains big ones not much is known before the Aryan invasion around 1000 BC bringing Indian and Asian influences A little earlier than 600 BC a preacher arose in what is now northeastern Iran amp8230 but his teachings and hymns met with hostility until a regional ruler named Vishtaspa became a disciple of Zarathustra amp8211 usually called by the Greek version of his name Zoroaster His 17 hymns known as The Gatha along with later about the 5th century AD or CE the AvestaFrom the Indian subcontinent came the Hindu religion amp8230 something difficult to describe as it is often defined by what it isnamp8217t An old Indian saying might be relevant to itamp8217s understanding amp8220The problem of death is the beginning of philosophyamp8221 Sometime between 1500 and 1200 BC some Aryan tribes from the North invaded what is now Punjab and wrote hymns amp8230 the Rig Veda amp8220 amp8230 it is the oldest work of literature in an IndoEuropean language it is the oldest living religious literature of the worldamp8221 It amp8220consists of 1028 hymns to the vedic dietiesamp8221The Hindu calendar worked a bit differently Like we count our individual ages from birth the Hindu calendar counts from when one god went back to heaven amp8230 or about 5116 years agoIndia also fostered the cult of Buddha Speaking largely in dialogues parables anecdotes similes and stories Buddha spoke to popular audiences Many things were written as summaries of his teachings or in lists to help listeners rememberChina is a case unto itself with its own unique languages and a writing methodology based on ideographic scripts Chinese indigenous religions arenamp8217t so much religions as teachings although Taoists in a later reaction to Buddhism embraced priests Chinese recorded history begins with the Shang dynasty which ruled from the 16th to the 11th centuries BC Dating to the Chou dynasty around 770 BC the Book of Songs is one of the earliest Chinese collections of hymns Confucius later called them the amp8220documents of antiquityamp8221 and based a number of his teachings on them Just before Confucius life the Chou dynasty devolved from a somewhat centralized empire into a collection of feudal citystates whose princes based their lineages on local cultheroes of the pastFrom the 6th through the 3rd centuries in China came the Age of Philosophy That brought amp8211 or resulted from amp8211 the formation of merchant classes the minting of coins interregional commerce and political unrest Confucius used the earlier Book of Songs and the Book of Documents attempting to reawaken the Chinese to an earlier tradition Formatting it all in a quasireligious sense he created an ethical and moral system from writings that were amp8220auguristic dominated by magic and amoralamp8221 His teachings took China from concern amp8220with good and bad luck to a concern with right and wrongamp8221 You can read his 20 books called the Analects to find out what that means It is worth noting that Confucianism is an activist and worldly philosophy which metamorphosed into a state religionTaoism on the other hand spoke of the amp8220otherworldlyamp8221 Tao means the way The Chuang Tzu and the Lieh Tzu are the earliest surviving works of the Taoist Canon of mysticism and are attributed to the probably mythical Lao TzuPaper by the way was introduced in China in 105 ADAs the first amp8220people of the Bookamp8221 the Torah originally the Jewish people created a religion and a history unlike any other before The dependence upon one divine revelation coupled with a dependence upon that revelation as opposed to looking upon a panoply of gods amp8211 all lower caseThe Hebrew Bible a collection of books was written across a thousand years or so culminating in canonization around the end of the 1st century AD The Bible consists of the Torah the Prophets and the WritingsThe developments of all these peculiar contents around the world in the eras before the common era BCE or BC and how they were distributed revolved around tribal manners of communicationsAfter the commencement of the common era the decline of Rome and the Dark Ages the next steps in media presaged the Industrial Revolution and more amp8211 and faster amp8211 changesNext week Chapter 4 In PrintIn an almost 50year career writing and reporting on media Paul S Maxwell started andor ran some 45plus publications ranging from CATV Newsweekly to Colorado Magazine to CableVision to Multichannel News to CableFAX and The BRIDGE Suite of daily newsletters and research publications In between publishing stints Maxwell served as an advisor andor consultant to a number of major media companies and media startups including running a unit of MCI and managing a partnership of TCI and McGrawHillSend any and all criticisms suggestions rants threats corrections etc to him at cablemaxmaccom He has a new Web site coming soonCheck us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggerscomFollow our Twitter updates at MediaBizBloggerThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggerscom management or associated bloggers MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform and readers may share their comments and opinions in response to all commentaries

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