3 Quotes Tagged: transmission

After weaning the indigenous people's of Egypt: 'from their miserable and barbarous manners, [Osiris] taught them how to till the earth, and how to sow and reap crops, he formulated a code of laws for them, and made them worship the gods and perform service to them. He then left Egypt and traveled over the rest of the world teaching the various nations to do what his own subjects were doing. He forced no man to carry out his instructions, but by means of gentle persuasion and an appeal to their reason, he succeeded in inducing them to practice what he preached.

You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I’m telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren’t reading it.

It's not unreasonable [...] to suppose that some kind of cosmic "sky-ground" religion lay behind the alignments to the solstices and the equinoxes at Watson Brake and at the other early sites — a religion sufficiently robust to ensure the continuous successful transmission of a system of geometry, astronomy, and architecture over thousands of years.
John Clark is in no doubt. 'The evidence,' he says, 'suggests very old and widely disseminated knowledge about how to build large sites. The building lore persisted remarkably intact for so long that I think we can, and must, assume that it was part of special knowledge tied to ritual practice.'
Where did this special knowledge come from before it appeared at Watson Brake?