The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art is a compelling new book by Kevin Ashton

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found a compelling 2026 book by Kevin Ashton titled The Story of Stories: The million-year history of a uniquely human art at my friendly local public library and have been reading through the very many stories told in it. Google Books has a preview of just the first 16 pages. There are eight chapters, titled as follows, containing lots of stories:

 

Chapter 1  A Million Years of Stories  1

Chapter 2  The Eye of Your Mind  34

Chapter 3  Pictures of Sounds  59

Chapter 4  The War of Stories  92   

Chapter 5  The All-Seeing Eye of Providence  136

Chapter 6  One One Zero  169

Chapter 7  Death by a Thousand Stories  210

Chapter 8  The Hyperreal Thing  250

 

Here are four quotations from this book. The third section in the first chapter, A Million Years of Stories, is titled The Universal Story. It begins on page 6:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Our storytelling brains, unchanged since they first evolved, seek and tell stories that follow a simple pattern. This pattern is universal to all cultures, genres, periods, storytellers, storytelling technologies, and styles, and comprises three equally essential parts like the legs of a stool.

 

First, all stories feature humanlike characters as the agents of action. This is still true when the characters are supposed to be nonhuman. Stories that star aliens, Anglepoise lamps, animals, ants, trains, trees, and toasters are really about humans, which is why in stories these creatures tend to walk on two feet, talk, have expressive faces and eyes, feel human emotions, and set human goals. They are all rabbits in waistcoats – people pretending not to be people. Even Dr. Suess, creator of fabulous, apparently nonhuman characters including the Cat in the Hat, the Grinch, and Horton the Elephant, said, ‘None of my animals are animals; they’re all people.’ These humanlike characters are the story’s actors; they take the actions that cause the story to happen. They live at or near the story’s center. They are literally the people the story is about: it embraces, revolves around, and surrounds them.

 

Second, all stories relate a chronology, a sequence of events. The chronology does not have to be told in chronological order – it can have flashbacks, flash-forwards, and meanwhiles – but it has to relate connected events that happened at different moments. We would not call a description of a dozen things that all occurred in the same second a story. A story is always a journey through time.

 

Third, all stories must reach, or at least be headed for, a resolution. The sequence of events must have a consequence, and that consequence must arise from the actions of its human or humanlike agents. We are compelled to give sequences of events consequences, to seek justice for our characters, and to resolve unresolved stories. An unfinished story is like an unscratched itch; if a story we care about is not explicitly resolves, or if we have to wait to see how it ends because of a ‘to be continued’ cliffhanger climax we will often try to finish the story ourselves by imagining possible resolutions.”   

 

The fifth section in the third chapter, Pictures of Sounds, is titled The Ox and the House. It begins on page 69:

 

“We do not have to wonder whether Europeans could have found a way to get from pictures of things to pictures of syllables: They tried. In 1400 BCE the Greeks adapted picture-based writing from another language, Minoan, and used it almost entirely for accounting. Few Greeks could read it, and even fewer could write it. Then around 1100 BCE, for reasons that are still not well understood, Greek civilization collapsed, and the Greeks did not write again for hundreds of years.

 

But while Greece slumbered in its dark ages, The Canaanites, a seafaring people living in independent city-states in what is now Lebanon, and parts of Israel, Palestine, and Syria, solved the problem of how to write languages with clusters of consonants.

 

We can guess how it happened. Canaanites traded with, worked for, and were sometimes enslaved by Egyptians. Some Canaanites learned to read and write Hieratic, a simplified form of Egyptian hieroglyphics developed for writing on papyrus, a writing surface made from a plant that grows in the shallows of the Nile, with reeds dipped in ink. Hieratic was a flowing script that could be written quickly by joining some characters together – a style now known as cursive, after the Latin currere, ‘to run.’ Sometime around 1800 BCE, or possibly a few centuries earlier, one or more of the Canaanites adapted Hieratic so that they could use it to write their own language too.

 

The adaptation was ingenious. The Canaanites selected hieroglyphs of things whose names start with the sounds of the Canaanite language and used the hieroglyphs to represent these sounds. For example, the Canaanites’ word for ox was aleph, so they used the hieroglyph for ox, which looked like an ox’s head, to represent an ‘a’ sound. Their word for house was beth, so they used the hieroglyph for house, which looked like the plan of a house, for the sound ‘b,’ and so on. If you were Canaanite, and could identify what thing a character represented, you would also know what sound that character represented, and could read.

 

Using characters to represent sounds instead of syllables made the writing system very efficient, especially for consonant-laden languages where most syllables are not also words. For example, every native English speaker knows around twenty to thirty-five thousand words, created from about three thousand syllables. A writing system for English that used one character for each syllable would therefore need about three thousand distinct characters. But those three thousand syllables are composed of only thirty-five to forty-four distinct sounds, depending on what definition of sound you use. And so, if you write sounds, not syllables, you can represent an entire language in very few characters. That is what the Canaanites did, and it gave them a complete writing system using just thirty-two characters. 

 

The first two of those characters, aleph and beth, the signs for ‘ox’ and ‘house,’ gave the Canaanites’ writing system its English name, alphabet.

 

Some pictures the Canaanites chose are still discernible today, thirty-five hundred years later, in the Latin alphabet used by 143 nations. For example, if you turn a capital A upside down, you can see the head of the ox, horns and all; a capital B is the plan of a two-room house, the letter c is a boomerang, gimel; l is from lamed, a shepherd’s crook, m comes from mem, water, and is the shape of two waves; and o is an eye, ‘ayin, now without the pupil of its original Egyptian hieroglyph. These vestigial pictures exemplify how our tools improve by evolution more than invention.”

 

The tenth section in the third chapter, Pictures of Sounds, is titled The Secret Life of Stories. It begins on the bottom of page 87:

 

“Writing separates story and storyteller, and leaves readers to determine a story’s meaning by themselves. One of the most important consequences of this separation – and one that applies to all other forms of mass communication too – is that every reader is likely to imagine and interpret the same story differently. What the writer writes is not what the reader reads.

 

And that raises a question: Is a story what is written or what is read?

 

This is not a new concern. Literary theorist Roland Barthes, among many others, wondered about it. Barthes concluded a story is not what is written but what is read; so much so that he proclaimed the ‘death of the author,’ saying: ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. The reader holds together the written text. To give writing its future, the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.’

 

Barthes argued that there are two kinds of story: the readerly story, which requires little interpretation by the reader – the story is readerly because the reader mainly reads – and the writerly story, which requires lots of interpretation by the reader – the story is writerly because the reader does so much interpretation that they almost write the story themselves.

 

Or, some stories are so straightforward that they lead every reader to imagine a similar story, and others are so ambiguous that they lead every reader to imagine a different story. A stop sign is an example of something extremely straightforward and readerly: Everyone who reads it understands it the same way. A Rorschach test – a psychological test in which someone is shown an image comprising nothing but inkblots and asked ‘What might this be?’ – is an example of something extremely ambiguous and writerly: Everyone who ‘reads’ it understands it differently. Neither of these two things are stories, and no stories are as extreme as these two things, but every story lies somewhere between.”

 

The fifth section in the fourth chapter, The War of Stories, is titled Mass. It begins on page 112 and it says that:

 

“Printing came late to Europe, but when it arrived, the consequences were much the same as in China, Japan, and Korea.

 

On the day Gutenberg’s printing press started operating, scribes half a mile away were laboring in the scriptorium of St. Alban’s Abbey, copying scriptures and other Christian writing using goose-feather quills dipped in ink. The best and fastest of them, who were called antiquarii, wrote one or two pages that day. In Gutenberg’s workshop, the printing press produced three thousand pages. This wasn’t just a change in scale – it was a revolution in how ideas could spread.

 

Europe’s scribes produced eleven million documents in the thousand years before Gutenberg invented the printing press. Presses based on Gutenberg’s design produced thirteen million documents by 1500. What once took a century now took four years.

 

Gutenberg invented the mass production of mass communication. His achievement established a pattern that repeats with each successive storytelling technology: that the true transformation comes not from the invention itself but from making it fast enough, cheap enough, and reliable enough for mass adoption. Gutenberg’s press could produce thousands of pages per day, but the revolution he started was not only because of speed or volume; it was also because of what happens when one idea enters thousands of minds simultaneously. That change is far more significant, and far more difficult to quantify or even qualitize.”

 

The 1848 painting of Baku storytelling by August Wilhelm Kiesewetter came from Wikimedia Commons.