To my dearest...

To my Dearest and most illustrious group members and readers, my fondest affection and greetings.

Like many other people who have grown up in the age of computers, I can probably count on both hands the number of handwritten letters I've written and sent. Of course I write things to people, but it is all over email or facebook. When I all of a sudden had friends on missions who I am not allowed to email, I had to delve into the strange world of lick-and-seal envelopes and the US postal system, on the way asking my mother many questions that for some reason she found incredibly funny (It turns out that one of the things that a return address on an envelope is good for is it lets you know the other person's address in case you want to write them back. I always just assumed it was so that the postal service could return it to you in case they couldn't reach the recipient or something). Last week I had to ask a girl sitting next to me whether the stamp went on the upper right or upper left corner of an envelope. It made me feel very smart and educated.

It also turns out that letter-writing has a long and noble history. People have been writing letters just about as long as they have been writing at all. Some of the documents that have been found on Cuneiform tablets are letters. The one in the picture is from about 2400 BC, and it is from the high-priest Lu'enna to the king of Lagash, informing the king that the king's son has been killed in combat. The picture by the following paragraph is of a letter from a man who lived in Egypt in about 300 AD, and is written on papyrus. This man was on a business trip to Alexandria, and wrote the letter to his mother. Other ancient letters have been found in China, Greece, India, and other places. Basically any civilization that is large and advanced seems to have some sort of tradition of letter-writing.

It makes sense that things would have developed this way. We have talked about early writing being used to record business transactions, but I think that the ability to communicate with someone outside of the range of your voice is possibly even more useful. With letters, people could communicate with friends, business partners, even if they were far away. Kings could communicate with their generals out on the field of battle, and generals could reply and communicate back to the kings. The apostle Paul used letters to great effect. He could not travel back to every little community of saints every time there was a doctrinal question (And considering his tendency towards shipwreck, it may be a good thing he didn't try), so he wrote letters. Because of that, we now have the second half of the New Testament.

Of course, some of this people could do even without written language. People could have a messenger memorize their message than recite it to someone else, but this creates a whole slew of problems that written language solves, the biggest of which is probably the possibility that the messenger will forget the message, or at least forget some important part in the message. Letter-writing also makes it so that people can be very private in their long-distance correspondence. It can be like a conversation just between the two of you, even if you are a thousand miles apart. This made it much nicer to send things like love letters, which are found everywhere that other letters are found. During the middle ages, the art of love-letter-writing even developed formal rules, as part of a larger group of writing rules called the ars dictaminis. It was a big deal.

So maybe next time I roll my eyes about having to write the whole thing by hand or having to use stamps when writing my friends on missions, I can be somewhat comforted by the fact that I am participating in a tradition that is about 4500 years old. It will make me feel cool.

I am, Dear Sirs and Madams, affectionately yours,

Miss. Diane Elizabeth Cardon the first