Story and Truth in Edwin Blashfields The Evolution of...

In 1894, construction neared completion on The Thomas Jefferson Building, the oldest of the three buildings which comprise the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.. With the exterior well in hand, the architects turned their attention to the interior, commissioning extensive murals by well-known artists. The commissioners of these murals deliberately set out to â€Å"personify the ideals of the [American] people† through the medium of government-sponsored art, and provide a relatively young nation with a story about themselves -- a visual â€Å"literature† which would connect them to the distant past.1 Among the most famous of these murals is Edwin Blashfield’s The Evolution of Civilization which occupies the massive dome of the Main Reading Room;†¦show more content†¦In spite of what painters, archeologists, or researchers of the nineteenth century believed about the ancient world, cuneiform has since proven its historical mettle. As displayed by Dari us and his memorial at Bisitun, the early, crude cuneiform of 5000 B.C.E. adapted itself to culture after culture, and morphed into the dusty forerunner of our modern alphabet. The Phoenicians, the original ancient mariners, are responsible for transforming cuneiform into a more efficient writing system by paring down the somewhat ungainly number of 5,000 cuneiform characters into 29 characters. Adopted around 1000 B.C.E., the Phoenician alphabet was not a collection of pictographs like many early forms of writing, but instead a close relative of many modern writing systems.11 The sophisticated navy and extensive trade network of Phoenicia ensured that this new version of cuneiform would quickly spread to its ancient neighbors. Phoenicia’s alphabet would soon be adopted by the Greeks, who also refined and perfected this writing system to meet their own needs; likewise the Romans, eager inheritors of all things Greek, adopted the alphabet for their own use. It could be said th at the highly adaptive descendants of cuneiform formed the basis for the literature of the Classical world. The Phoenician cuneiform alphabet was also adopted by Jewish culture, providing a medium for Hebrew narrative and progressive sense of history, another innovation