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20.5.06
:: about the discovery of writing ... "Thoth is discussing his invention* of writing with Thamus (also called Ammon), a god-king who tells him: "This discovery of yours will create forgetfullness in the learners' soul, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminescence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the resemblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omiscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without its reality." * According to the Roman historian Tacitus, the Egiptians claimed to have tought the alphabet to the Phoneicians, "who, controlling the seas, introduced it to Greece and were credited with inventing what they had borrowed." According to legend, the aplhabet arrived in Greece with Cadmus, Prince of Tyre, seeking his sister, Europa, who had been stolen away to the island of Crete by Zeus, king of the gods, temporarily disguised as a bull. To protect Europa from those who would steal her back to Phoenicia, Zeus ordered a bronze robot made which, with clanking steps, patrolled Crete and turned back or sank all approaching foreign vessels. Cadmus, however, was elsewere - unsucessfuly seeking his sister in Greece when a dragon devoured all his men; whereupon he slew the dragon and, in response to instructions from goddess Athena, sowed the dragon's teeth in the furrows of a plowed field. Each tooth became a warrior; and Cadmus and his men together founded Thebes, the first civilised Greek city, bearing the same name as one of the two capital cities of ancient Egypt. It is curious to find in the same legendary account the invention of writing, the founding of Greek civilization, the first known reference to artificial intelligence, and the continuing warfare between humans and dragons." ... "The next major structural development is the partnership between humans and intelligent machines" - fragment from carl sagan - the dragons of eden The Curse of Thamus: An Analysis of Full-Text Legal Document Retrieval "Plato gives us the legend of the Egyptian god Theuth, giver of marvelous inventions. Theuth invented geometry and astronomy, games and dice, but his greatest invention was writing. The king of the Egyptians, Thamus, admired many of the gifts of Theuth, but he did not approve of writing, and refused to teach the art to his subjects." - at yale univesity 
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