The beginning of communications | thearticle

Communications has many meanings. Nowadays it mainly means transfer of information between two or more persons. My interest is in a different kind of communications — one that was first

developed historically as an Early Warning System in order to protect a city from the attention of hostile powers. Let’s assume it is the dawn of civilisation. If your aim is to found a

city, what is the first thing you do? You put up a wall double-quick. Obviously. What is the second thing you do? Build an Early Warning Communication System. For that you need to have a few

mountain peaks, each one with a few observers and having some flammable material at hand that could be lit if a hostile army appears on the horizon. The information could then travel from

mountain peak to mountain peak until it reaches the city. Using a contemporary measure we must realise that it is only one bit of information that we have: can you see a hostile army or not?

But for a city, this is the most important piece of information. There were many Early Warning Systems of this kind in history. The one best known in England is probably the beacons that

reported the arrival of the Spanish Armada in the Channel in 1588. This system is vividly depicted in Macaulay’s narrative poem, “The Armada: A Fragment”: _From Eddystone to Berwick bounds,

from Lynn to Milford Bay,_ _The time of slumber was as bright and busy as the day;_ _For swift to east and swift to west the ghastly war-flame spread,_ _High on St Michael’s Mount it shone:

it shone on Beachy Head._ _Far on the deep the Spaniard saw, along each southern shire,_ _Cape beyond cape, in endless range, those twinkling points of fire._ That was for England in the

16th century. Obviously there were many such warning systems before that time. Which was the first such system? We don’t really know. One that might qualify is Mari, a Mesopotamian city

built on the banks of the Tigris some 4,000 years ago. I know of it thanks to the research of Stephanie West of the University of Oxford (Mari and Karana: two old Babylonian cities, Longman,

London 1984). Mari disappeared from history before the close of the century, when the Babylonian king and lawgiver Hammurabi’s forces razed it to the ground. It reappeared in the 1930s when

a group of French archaeologists excavated it. They found an amazing amount of information about the city and about all those with whom the kings of Mari kept regular correspondence. The

various chambers of the excavated palace yielded over 20,000 clay tablets written in Akkadian, an East-Semitic language, in cuneiform script. They give accounts of all kinds of activities:

for example, a register of people from the last census, records of incoming and outgoing goods (including such disparate items as garlic and gold), legal documents on various disputes,

commercial transactions, correspondence with foreign rulers and reports on administrative and political problems, the state of roads, on weather conditions and also about our main interest,

fire signals. One might expect that there would be no need to write reports when the signalling system worked smoothly. Letters written to the king would more likely be concerned with the

various difficulties. The following two letters are indeed of this genre: “Yesterday I went out of Mari and spent the night in Zurubban and the Yamanites all raised torches from Samanum to

Ilum-Muluk as far as Mishlan. All the towns of the Yamanites in the district of Terqa raised their torches in reply. Now so far I have not managed to find out the reason but I shall try to

find out the reason and I shall write my lord the result but let the guards of Mari be strengthened and my lord do not go out of the gate.” The second letter has a similar message: “Speak to

Yasmah Addu thus Habil-Kenum. My lord wrote to say that two torch-signals were raised but we never saw two torch signals. In the upper country they neglected the torch signal and they did

not raise a torch-signal. My lord should look into the matter of torch-signals and if there is any cause for worry an official should be put in charge.” Unfortunately we do not know whether

an official was ever appointed and, if he was, whether he made the warning system more reliable. The letters found in Mari clearly show that our civilisation, that we like to call Western

civilisation, had one of its roots in those fertile grounds between the Tigris and the Euphrates. To finish this account of communications by fire signals I want to mention one more that

existed only in the imagination of the Greek playwright, Aeschylus. He starts his play Agamemnon with Clytemnestra’s vivid description of the news that arrived from Troy to Argos via fire

signals. She names all the mountain tops that served as relays declaring victory after ten long years of fighting. She is a bit doubtful, though, as to how she should welcome back her

husband: it is the age-old problem of a choice between the lover and the husband. A further complication is that Agamemnon’s spoils of war include Cassandra, Priam’s daughter, a relationship

Clytemnestra is not happy with. And there is of course Clytemnestra’s old grudge against her husband for sacrificing Iphigenia, their daughter, for a favourable wind for the Greek ships. I

seem to remember that there are no survivors. Everyone dies before the end of the play, as should happen in a Greek tragedy. What is the moral of the play? Good communications between

husband and wife are insufficient for solving all marital problems. Laszlo Solymar is the author of Getting the Message: A History of Communications (Oxford, 2nd edition 2021). A MESSAGE

FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help

to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation._