Of course the modern folk who memorize lots of material do so because they’re paid for it. So likewise would the ancient memory-keepers have been. They probably didn’t have money, but they had some sort of economic structure, and the memory-keepers would certainly have received recompense in some form for their skills and labor.
That’s a strange way of looking at it. Modern actors and musicians are paid to entertain, and in order to that, they may have to memorize something.
Long-term memorizing of vital practical information in a hunter-gatherer culture that has no written records is something entirely different. But no doubt ‘professionals’ gained a lot of status and power, and were supported by the community.
Some of the information would also have been likely to help directly in their own survival.
There wouldn’t have been material recompense in most cases, because hunter-gatherer societies tend to be egalitarian in all material possessions. But there was status and power, and as thorny locust says, help in their own survival.
There would have been material recompense in the sense that the person whose job is to memorize the lore wouldn’t have been doing as much of the animal-spearing, berry-picking, or whatever other jobs the tribe needs done. Maybe the jobs all pay the same, but they’re different jobs, and different people get that pay for doing different things.
There are significant differences in this between cultural groups. In West Africa, the griot were very specialised knowledge keepers of history and genealogies. In Native American cultures, there were different societies, such as the medicine society, who maintained specific sections of the knowledge systems. In Australian Aboriginal cultures, the elders were across almost all the knowledge with specialists knowing more about the pharmacopeia, for example. But the elders were usually engaged in all the food gathering and land management, male and female roles and knowledge often kept separately. I don’t think that I could generalise too much on this, although the degree of specialisation certainly increases with larger and more settled societies. I suspect that you are right, the knowledge elite had varying degrees of material privileges.
This subject of memory aids is fascinating and makes me reflect on what I was taught about the origins of writing. Mostly there was no mention of why they developed, though you could speculate from early examples: Sumerian to record taxes and other transactions; Chinese for divination; Mesoamerican to remember kings and dates. You could conclude that people would have no motivation to develop writing until their societies reached some threshold of complexity. But if most pre-agricultural cultures were strongly motivated to retain knowledge and were experimenting with memory aids, why couldn’t or wouldn’t they go on to develop true writing systems? Maybe some did; maybe hundreds of unique and beautiful writing scripts have been developed around the world, and forgotten.
The evolution of writing is fascinating. It’s part of my current research. There is much debate about what is true writing. Does it have to be phonetic? If so, are Chinese characters a script? It’s hard to argue not, but they aren’t phonetic and only have a portion of phonetic indication, as far as I know. I am learning Chinese (Mandarin) because it is the only contemporary spoken language which can be traced back to its pictographic origins.
What were you taught about that,** EdwardLost**?
But I have a long way to go! Indigenous cultures can read images, such as Aboriginal bark paintings, as if they were text. Many argue that it is writing. I get confused by semantics fairly quickly, so I am not the best one to talk this topic.
So how much could the motifs at Gobekli Tepe be read in some ways like writing - those found by the Israeli archaeologists, linked to by** DrDeth** above? I haven’t got the answers. I’m still debating with myself about what is writing.
I think the key there would be that writing is a system. It’s one thing for a scholar of the tribe to be able to look at a painting, and recite from it the epic of the great king who fought a mighty battle against the sea-god, or whatever. But now take another scholar of the tribe, who knows what epics and kings and battles and sea-gods are, and who can tell the stories from other paintings, but who has never learned that particular story: Can he also look at that same picture, and read from it the same story? If so, then it’s writing: The story is entirely contained within the painting. If not, then it’s a memory aid: The story is contained within the mind of the scholar, and the painting merely helps to get it out.
I think you are right. And I think that writing developed from memory aids.
Take the development of glyphs in Egypt. They started out as pictograms: little drawings that look like what they represent. Then they started to use a rebus system: using pictograms to represent things they sound similar to. Then the rebus system evolved to use only the first sound of a pictogram. From there, getting to an abjad or full alphabet is a straight forward step.
In terms of memory aids, the simplest is a natural path out in the world. Then people would modify the path by adding memorable things to it. Then they would create a wholly artificial path. But still something to be walked along. The big breakthrough was creating a “path” as a sequence of memorable marks on a surface, that is traversed by moving one’s eyes over it rather than walking along it.
But you still needed to know what memory each mark was supposed to trigger. That could be non-obvious. The next step is making the mark look like what it’s supposed to trigger. That’s your basic pictogram. Following the writing development, it’s in the direction of storing less information in the person’s memory and more in the marks.
As memory systems (from paths to sequences of marks to pictograms to alphabets) require less personal memory, the keepers of knowledge lose social standing. The flip side is that the memory systems often become revered. Think of what is considered magical or mystical: spell (from old word for speaking), enchantment (from old word for singing), standing stones (memory paths), glyphs and runes (types of writing), glamour (old word for writing itself).
Even Christian iconography. As one commentator said about cathedrals from the middle ages - the local population could not read, the church decorations, the paintings, reliefs and statues were memory aids of the bible as much as they were displays of wealth for the church and its patrons - sometimes even in sequence - "Here’s Adam being created, here the serpent offers them an apple, here they are driven from Eden by the angel with flaming sword, here is Noah and the ark, here the exodus, etc. They even used simple tricks - there are 14 stations of the cross. If I threw a bunch of random events at you, it’s hard to remember them all or be sure they are correct. I give you 14 items in order, easier to remember all, be sure that none were omitted or duplicate. (Sequence, again). When does a “picture book” become a writing system like hieroglyphics? Even the plains Indians, I understand, had a memory system of pictographs drawn in sequence on buffalo hides to be memory aids of their history.
It seems to me likely to be one of those blurry areas: things that are definitely writing, yes; things that are definitely not writing, yes; and then a whole large grey area in the middle.
In the beginning was the Word.
And, for that matter, the Book that that’s from.
(I didn’t know that about the word “glamour” – apparently it’s derived from “grammar”. My interesting thing to have learned for the day!)
I also didn’t know that.
I suppose memory aids become writing when it can be properly expressed by someone who sees only the pictures, not the back story. A series of pictograms might tell the story of Running Bear crossing the river at night, attacking the enemy camp, and killing many warriors. Someone who did not know the oral history perhaps would see a brave, a river, a moon, and a scatter of dead warriors but not know if it meant a battle, or that they drowned crossing the river, why a moon?, and certainly not the first person in the sequence was “Running Bear”. but then, since everyone who needed to already knew these fill-in-the-blank details from oral repetition, all the pictures did was cue the sequence; much like how a good speaker would have a list of points to hit, and occasionally refer to them and then expound upon each point from memory.
So is “grimoire”, a magic spell book, because the literate who weren’t priests (and even some of them) HAD to be wizards and warlocks. A “glamour” was a spell cast by a grammarian who obviously could spell.
This article is absolutely electrifying. Thank you so much for posting it- 18 months ago !! 
Apologies for the delay in replying. I hit overload yet again. One day I’ll learn.
Yours is similar to the definition I prefer to use, Chronos but mine is even more conservative. It’s considered out of date by many, but I think of writing as a system whereby a different reader will reproduce exactly the same words as the person who wrote it, purely from reading the script.
My interest is in memory aids. I love experimenting with them and am constantly astounded how effective they are - especially for someone like me with a particularly poor natural memory.
But I don’t get into debates about definitions - they usually resort to theory that is beyond me. I merely ask that whoever I am reading or hearing from define writing so we are on the same page.
These are winter counts - a really effective memory aid.
One of the best known is Lone Dog’s winter count:
From Live Science:
I’m interested in that too. Maybe others would be as well. Have you considered an AMA thread about memory techniques? Or a post about some memory aids you’ve found particularly helpful?