you say:

Quote

The invention of writing would have ended the practice of directly passing down knowledge across generations. People would have wanted to know about the past before writing and would have wanted to "talk" to their descendents. They would have needed to package knowledge in discreet units to give their own children. This might even be what the bible is talking about with the lenghty lifetimes; these weren't the lives of individuals but rather individual units of knowledge passed from father to son.

There is a vast amount of evidence that indicates the orally passing on historical data was too put it mildly very inaccurate. For example the historical oral accounts of various African Kingdoms and Societies The Chronology of Oral tradition; quest for a Chimera, David P. Henige, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974. examines it and finds it very inaccurate for a narritive of events if you go back more than 2 centuries. Of course things like King lists were alot less sensitive to such changes but even so Kings tended to be added, subtracted and their reign lengths lengthened.

you say:

Quote

But rather than fascilitate the transferance over generations, writing impeded it. The writing would be lost or destroyed and not always available as it was passed down. Referants were lost or misunderstood and meanings were changed subtlely over generations until most of them were incomprehensible by the time the bible was written.

Actually those comments are far truer for oral handing down historical material. After all socities do change and from numerous examples it is very easy to show that oraly handede down accounts would be modified so that they would make sense to the "modern" hearers. This is why the the Song of Roland, doesn't describe Caolinian France but 11th century France socially.

If anything memory is even more falible to distortion than writing. the old game of whispering some thing to someone else and then passing it on to other people by whispers until the last person speaks the message he thought he heard indicates one of problems with oral transmission.

You say:

Quote

We've entirely lost sight of our past because of writing but writing has been responsible for technological developement.

If we had never had writing we would have very little idea of the reality of the past, (I'm excluding archaeological knowledge here), because any oral versions of the past would be so heavily modified, in part to make sense to us that we would have no real idea of the past at all.

Pierre