Naucratis, in Egypt — a date nobody has

The god Theuth, who invented number and calculation and geometry and dice, comes at last to the king with writing. He is pleased with it. He has been pleased with all of them, but this one he considers his best.

“This,” he says, “will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memory. I have discovered a drug for memory and for wisdom.”

Thamus, who is king at Thebes and has heard a great many demonstrations, looks at the marks. He says that the man who invents a thing is not the best judge of what it will do to those who use it, and that Theuth, out of fatherly feeling for his own offspring, has said the opposite of what is true.

Writing, he says, will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who learn it. They will cease to exercise memory, because they will rely on what is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves but by means of external marks. He calls it a drug not for memory but for reminding. And he says the students will have the reputation of wisdom without the reality, being hearers of many things and having learned nothing.

The exchange is recorded by Plato. In writing. Attributed to Socrates, who left none.

Thamus was right about every particular and wrong about the only thing that mattered, which is that there was no other kind of human available to be protected. The interior he wanted to keep intact had not been built yet. Writing built it.