Future of the Book and Ancient Egyptians

I am sorry it took me so long to get this post up, I spent a lot of my weekend dealing with a fractured radius.

Alright on with the post!

If I could go back to any time period, I would go back to ancient Egypt. It is my favorite period of history and I learnt a bit about ancient Egyptian literature during my undergraduate degree. The literature of ancient cultures like the Egyptians encompasses a wide variety of topics and genres, including everything from love poems to mathematical treaties. Due to the nature of the mediums used for publishing literature during this time period, such as papyrus and tablets, only a small percentage of ancient Egyptian literature has been successfully recovered by archaeologists. Yet the myths, cattle transaction records, and poems are available for readers all around the globe in translated books and online.

Therefore what I would tell them about the future of books is how the advent of the internet provides hitherto unprecedented freedom and access to knowledge and books. Wherein anyone can search up a book title and most likely purchase an online copy or have it shipped to their door. Yet I would emphasize that the purpose of books and literature has not changed so drastically as to be unrecognizable by ancient Egyptians.

For instance, books and literature in modern culture can be used as symbols of status, just like texts containing funeral spells in ancient Egypt. Similarly modern self-help books remind me of the wisdom text in ancient Egypt, which discuss the best ways to live and improve your life.

What I am trying to express is that however books change a thousand years in our future may be as incomprehensible to us as the online book, EReaders, and next day shipping would have been to the ancient Egyptian. Yet no matter how much the mediums involved in publishing and reading change, there are literary topics that have a weird universal potency.

I would tell the ancient Egyptian about the internet and EReaders because I think it is astounding that we can look back thousands of years into the history of literature, and the human race, and through books identify underlying themes that surpass changes in technology, and that connect our lives to those of our ancestors.

Thank you all for a wonderful blogging semester!