by Jacquline Singer

Created on: October 13, 2009   Last Updated: October 17, 2009

From the beginning of time, man has attempted to record significant events for the benefit of future generations. Whether it consists of alpha-numeric characters or hieroglyphics, man has used whatever means available to him to record information to the best of his ability. In the past, man has used everything from stone and clay to animal skin and papyrus, from the most primitive drawings to the most elaborately decorated alpha characters. Text is knowledge recorded in such a way as to pass from one person to another. Whether we recognize it as sacred or not, someone at some point deemed an event important enough to record it and then took the necessary care to preserve it.

As hard as it may be for us to understand some of man's early efforts, those who recorded events probably did their best to make it easy for any who came after them to understand. The symbols must have had a commonality among men at the time it was recorded or else it would have been useless.

From the pictorial rendering on cave walls by early man, the act of recording knowledge has come a long way. Looking at the current alphabet, you might wonder how some characters came into being. Yet when you research the early writings of the Hebrew and Babylonian cultures, you can see the evolution of the individual characters into the alphabet we have today. In some languages, such as Hebrew, the characters represent more than a sound, they represent items and numbers as well.

The ancient Mayan civilization used hieroglyphs as their means of communicating information. What we find hard to decipher, would have been easily read by an educated citizen of that culture. Each hieroglyph has a specific meaning, and most have astronomical connotations. The history of a people and the future of the world are said to be recorded on everything from the walls of their temples to the approaching stairways and everything in between. It appears that the educated among the Mayans had quite a bit to say.

Through historical and archaeological records, we know that the Mayans had libraries chock full of clay tablets filled with information they felt was beneficial to their tribe or nation. The majority of these were destroyed by well meaning Christian conquerors. However, one monk who was present during the destruction of the vast store of knowledge saw fit to salvage some of the tablets or books. Those salvaged records, were later discovered to be a codex or dictionary, for lack of a better word. Without these salvaged records, we would never have been able to decipher the knowledge contained in the temples and surrounding buildings and artifacts.

So, while it may not be in the form of a book as we are accustomed to, sacred texts must be written, by whatever form or means available to the one attempting to record events for future reference. All sacred texts have to be written, but not all written texts are sacred.

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