Literacy and Orality in the Book of Mormon

Humankind spoke before we wrote. In the early stages of the movement from exclusively oral to heavily literate communication, writing was an adjunct to oral transmission rather than a replacement for it. Stephen Houston, Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at Brown University, notes that “The earliest Greek writing is likely to have functioned at first as a mnemonic device, a means of stabilizing memory. But at the same time feats of memorization continued to be highly prized.” From those early beginnings, the burden of preserving information has moved toward written texts, though not as steadily or inexorably as our modern sensibilities might suggest.