MBA Level Term Paper

Atlantic Journal of Communication, 18:227–240, 2010

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1545-6870 print/1545-6889 online

DOI: 10.1080/15456870.2010.521469

The Origins of Strategic Communication: Precedents and Parallels in Ancient States

Simon Moore

Department of Information Design and Corporate Communication

Bentley University

When, where, and why did communication strategy originate? Global communication strategy is a

present-day preoccupation, but ancient states were the first to manage messages over large distances

and time periods. They did this to entrench a permanent, convincing identity that embodied political

power. To achieve their goal other forms of power were exploited and expressed as organized

communication including religion, armed force, and administration. Early states created a distinct

process to legitimize leadership and counter time and space obstacles like slow communication

media, regional diversity, and the challenge to collective memory posed by limited access to written

information and instruction. This article examines historical research and suggests that advanced

strategic communication knowledge existed in premodern societies.

INTRODUCTION

When, where, and why did large-scale, organized communication strategy originate? What did

early societies know of it, and how important was it to them? Never has communication seemed

more pervasive, influential, and unprecedented. Yet, as Churchill once remarked, “All wisdom is

not new wisdom” (Hansard, 1938, p. 367). This article discusses how communication was orga-

nized, understood, and practiced by some of the first organized states. It discusses the possible

origins of communication strategy, the obstacles it faced, some of the problems and advantages

of the early media it had to work with, and its influence in making public consent an important

element of power relations. Finally I ask if these approaches—often shared by diverse cultures

across time—can enrich our own understanding of communication’s relationship with power.

THE ORIGINS AND NATURE OF COMMUNICATION STRATEGY

Communication strategy is a logical response by organizations to unfamiliar circumstances

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Simon Moore, Department of Information Design

and Corporate Communication, Bentley University, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02452-4705. E-mail: smoore@

bentley.edu

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or an enlarged scale of operation. It emerges—in fits and starts over time or from a single

premeditated decision—when an organization can no longer trust spontaneity and must prepare,

control, and manage what it says and how it says it to large or diverse audiences. Some of this

activity would today be called propaganda. Today it is an organized plan or plans devised and

executed by specialists. The ancient world was no different, save that some of the artifacts that

rulers or bureaucracies used were not deliberately coordinated around a plan and some were, yet

all contributed to the objective of building legitimacy. The first communication professionals

may not have seen themselves as such, but that is essentially what they were.

Communication strategy is also one-sided, at least in the sense that it is devised by one

group to reach at least one other group; however, it may have originated in the shared desire

of both groups to constrain personal and communal uncertainty. The distant past was, as many

places are today, a physically uncertain place. This obvious point has a special meaning for

communication. In the small kinship groups, bands, and tribes that preceded ancient states,

continuous uncertainty appeared in everyday life as famine, drought, premature death, war,

sickness, civil unrest, or reduced food supplies, or simply in the sheer effort of seeking

and keeping a living. Personal uncertainty increased the possibility of societal uncertainty,

meaning a breakdown of the cooperation needed for survival, for instance, when hunting

large game, fighting rivals, or crossing a dangerous landscape. Averting social uncertainty and

offering certainty helped to keep premodern communication strategy alert, coherent, relevant,

and creative, as is shown. The earliest attempts appear to have developed from using various

media to invoke spiritual or unconscious worlds, a process that over long ages led to organized

religion under a politico-military and religious hierarchy. This process may be speculatively

traced archaeologically in the great cave paintings and rock art surviving in France, Spain,

Australia, South Africa, and the southern United States, or the “Venus” figurines found across

central and eastern Europe, to the astonishing ceremonial sanctuaries like Gobekli Tepi in

Turkey and other burial chambers and temples of seminomadic and more settled societies of

later hunters and early cultivators in at least the Mesolithic and Neolithic, under excavation

in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. These first great attempts at organized as opposed

to spontaneous or personal communication are, so far as can be known, ritualistic or proto-

religious. They were seen by the members of a band or community regularly, or at significant

times, or restricted to a certain powerful section of the group. They seem concerned less with

daily life and more with hopes and fears concerning the powers that underpin them.

Organized communication, then, may have spread from the power of religious ritual and

symbolism to constrain uncertainty, promote certainty, and hold together groups and later states.

Secular authority needed religion and its time-validated communication customs to achieve

acceptance and lasting success. At some point before the rise of the Mesopotamian city states,

religious power merged with secular power. “Every day is a festival in Uruk,” proclaims the

epic Mesopotamian poem Gilgamesh, written down around 1700 BCE, “with people singing

and dancing in the streets, musicians playing their lyres and drums,” going on to describe the

priestesses of Ishtar “ready to serve men’s pleasure, in honor of the goddess” (Mitchell, 2004,

p. 81).

The case for the religious-political origins of communication strategy is also suggested for

other reasons. First, as is shown, archaeological and historical research suggests that premodern,

large-scale communication was, regardless of time or geography, a prerogative of a central

state or constellation of states around a unified culture. In premodern times, only premodern

ORIGINS OF STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION 229

states had large-volume communication needs and abilities. For them, just as for the modern

corporation, nonprofit, or government, communication was concerned with the control, design,

management, and transmission of ideas, feelings, and data using media whose forms and

functions had potential to influence big, diverse, and widely distributed populations. These

media often look limited to us. Their limitations are important and are examined. However,

rudimentary media does not mean rudimentary strategy. The obstacles facing ancient states

made forethought even more important. Careful planning and execution was essential to master

flaws inherent in the media.

Those flaws meant strategy had to be fairly rigid. Today’s strategy could include numerous

subjects, demands, and issues sleeplessly flowing from diverse media to fall under continuous

public scrutiny. This could not be allowed to happen in ancient states. As has been said,

there was flexibility and creativity but only within a strong framework of social assumptions to

ensure consistency and aid memory. The media achieved less saturation than modern media and

was limited in what messages they could convey. This made content changes difficult, though

possible. Key messages, accordingly, often had to last. These conditions made communication

strategy a state-sponsored activity.

State control was also needed because, as the ways of exploiting ancient media grew, that

media grew in power. Its peculiar power over feeling endowed it with some of the same assets

as modern media, with less speed and flexibility perhaps, but with an authority that was all its

own. Remnants of that power can still be sensed in many surviving ancient locations. If such

potent tools were not “owned” and used, a rival might use them instead. Such media could

attract or detach a state from its subjects. Supervision was therefore required. The lesson is

periodically forgotten. The investment in public diplomacy to communities beyond national

borders made by several states after 9/11 included a concerted attempt to be credible in a new

kind of media, which had for several years been ceded to dangerous opponents (S. Moore &

Bobiash, 2009; 9/11 Commission, 2004).

The media were also the public face of change or renewal. Officially sanctioned changes to

rulers or religion meant coordinating existing and new rituals, art, or architecture. In the absence

of change, old assumptions had to renew themselves, like the seasons, to remind subjects of

the precepts under which they were governed. The objective at all times was to entrench a

permanent and convincing identity for the state. Communication was a way to project and

protect authority other than by military or administrative means as competing states organised

and extracted more resources from their inhabitants.

Therefore the problem of shaping perceptions over time and space was then, as it is now, the

problem of those with an interest in reaching widely scattered publics and the means to do so.

All this also suggests that at least by the time of Gilgamesh, communication strategy, created

out of uncertainty, was being catalyzed by increasingly sophisticated relationships between

rulers and governed.

The period covered in this article is undeniably daunting, encompassing the rise of Egypt

around the late 4th and early 3rd millennia BC, the early Mesopotamian empires, the first

rulers of China, Greek city states, the Roman Empire, and the various tribally rooted polities

that replaced it in the 5th century AD, the Andean empire of the Incas and the Mesoamerican

polities of the Maya and Aztecs. Nevertheless, it is a distinct period for communication strategy.

It is apparent to the student of communication that these disparate and unconnected states,

separate fields of scholarship in their own right, shared many problems and solutions before

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accelerating technological and industrial change diverted more communication power into the

hands of individuals and nongovernment organizations. Until that time, several assumptions

behind strategic communication had changed little. The term “premodern,” which is also used

here, refers to that long period in which the media were essentially unchanged, before new

developments such as mass literacy, printing, and increased global trade seemed in the last

6 centuries to help loosen social structures, redistribute communication technology, and force

alterations to tactics and elements of strategy. These changes arrived at different times for

different states, not at all for others.

The physical space covered is also considerable. A state had to take care when cultivating

its identity among subject or allied peoples divided by distance or culture. The approaches

taken regardless of epoch, empire, or location shows that many premodern polities divided

by time, space, and beliefs had a similar understanding of communication because they had

similar needs, obstacles, and available solutions.

Any strategy, if it was to work, had to overcome two initial obstacles that are less daunting

today. In his highly influential books Empire and Communication (1950/1972) and The Bias of

Communication (1951/1984), Harold Innis, a political economist, declared, “We are concerned

with control not only over vast areas of space but also over vast stretches of time” (Innis,

1951/1984, p. 64). In other words cultural, administrative, and economic activity depended on

media that was “time conquering” or “space conquering”: better able to endure or better able

to circulate. This insight is helpful when considering the earliest communication strategies, and

more recent historical research also has much to offer. Historical research repeatedly validates

Innis’s identification of the spatial problem, for instance. Several premodern states had to build

“an imperial system of structural connections and dependencies among diverse regions and

cultural traditions” (Sinopoli, 1994, p. 163). We order and examine what is known of large-

scale communication designed to link regions and cultures, including conquered peoples. What

is known suggests that many approaches taken were creative, were not random or accidental,

and exceeded the rudiments of strategic understanding.

OBSTACLES TO COMMUNICATION STRATEGY

Nevertheless, ancient states had serious obstacles to overcome. Rulers, among them King

Hammurabi of Babylon (Van De Mieroop, 2004), could draw from only a certain number of

sources, some of which existed in history or the imagination. These were military prowess; the

person or myth of the ruler; cultural, mythical, geographical, theological, and divine legitimacy;

respect for the law; prosperity; and the promise of peace in the land.

Emerging or established states like Babylon used those sources to build a vivid and enduring

identity. In our own time a monopolistic communication of unchallenged ideas would be called

propaganda, but in earlier societies that interpretation seems less helpful. The communication

relationship between states and subject peoples was more complicated. This stemmed in part

from other obstacles presented by space and time.

Spatial obstacles, for example, imposed limits on how much control could be exerted,

which affected the kind of communication that could be attempted. In all premodern states,

including imperial ones: “The diverse polities and communities that constitute an empire

typically retain some degree of autonomy—in self- and centrally-defined cultural identity, and

ORIGINS OF STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION 231

in some dimensions of political and economic decision making” (Sinopoli, 1994, p. 160). A

further limitation involved speed. Consolidating an identity took time. The fact that space or

distance could not be rapidly crossed made it harder to monitor, respond to, and impose ideas

on nascent turbulence and hard in turn for a triumphant rival power to stabilize its authority.

Another limitation, particularly when a state was in crisis and urgently needed to reinforce or

alter its public identity, was a dearth of media for carrying complex, lengthy public messages.

This affected what could be attempted. Change was hard to explain let alone justify at short

notice. With rare exceptions, the problem was usually countered by exploiting familiar, existing

values. Usurpers or established polities were alike portrayed as worthy guardians of existing

and understood beliefs, traditions, and laws. Such approaches were easier and often more

palatable to favoured local elites. The Roman Emperor Constantine (280–337 AD) exemplifies

this tendency. He converted to Christianity and bestowed Imperial Roman favour on it in 313

but took care for many years thereafter to “tailor his statements according to the religion of

his audience” (Elliot, 1990, p. 351). In polities and lives shadowed by instability, pledges of

stability were valuable. Even Rome’s final collapse saw its conquerors communicate fealty to

many Roman traditions, titles, and laws.

One other barrier confronted ancient states: time’s dominance over memory. Today a limited

memory is an affliction put down to information overload. In earlier times the cause was the

opposite. Without accessible written foundations, illiterate audiences were vulnerable, as Bauml

suggested of the Anglo Saxon and Norse worlds “to the fallibility of voice, the selectiveness of

memory” (as cited in Waugh, 1997, p. 291). Oral tradition, the poetry of the scop and minstrel,

rooted a culture but not a bureaucracy. Those who governed depended “on the memory of the

individual, which often clashes with the memories of others” (Waugh, 1997, p. 291).

COMPENSATING FACTORS

Although there were impediments to what could be said, and how, and how fast, there were

also counterbalances. First, the desire for order was often universal. If a state faced political

threats from rival states or internal cliques, the long-suffering inhabitants were also harassed by

malnutrition, famine, seasonal vagaries, premature death, disorder, and sickness: times “when

grief walked the land” in the words of one witness to civil upheavals in ancient Egypt (Wenke,

1989, p. 129). In these circumstances, conquered peoples might want to hear, as Alexander

the Great pledged during his conquests, that familiar autonomies or traditions would not be

supplanted. After taking Egypt, Alexander famously travelled across the desert to consult with

the ram-headed god Ammon, finally melding his own public identity into a hybrid Zeus-Ammon

(Lane Fox, 1973/1986, pp. 200–218). The extremity of that approach in Egypt and Persia

threatened his own cultural base and triggered a mutiny among Alexander’s own Macedonian

officers. Nonetheless, by “admitting the gods of conquered people to the pantheon” (Innis,

1950/1972, p. 29) or upholding regional values, established or new rulers were presenting

themselves as the legitimate guardians of established rights and opponents as threats to custom

and tradition. Traditions were better embraced; to reject them discomfited subject cultures

and strained a ruler’s resources. From this base the imperial religion could infiltrate local

observances, fitting itself to local customs, as the classical Romans did with the Emperor’s

Divinity, and so too the early Christian Rome, and later still the Jesuits.

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Scarcity of communication media was also offset by the rich ways ancient societies inter-

preted words, symbols, and images. One classical scholar observed how experiencing something

for its own sake is something which is outside time and space, but tends to be taken for granted

since the Romantic and Impressionist movements. Yet it is so rare in the ancient world, where

everything seen was bound up with religious, mythological and historical associations. (Radice, as

cited in Pliny, 1969, p. 32)

This point is made in studies of other societies, including the Maya who famously used the

calendar to fuse messages about politics, production, the activities of the gods, and ritual (Fuson,

1969, p. 511). Glimpses of this former symbolic richness are sometimes visible in publicity

initiatives by modern religious organizations that Tilson and others (Tilson, 2000; Tilson &

Chao, 2002; Tilson & Venkateswaran, 2006) called “devotional promotional communication,”

and which “may weave cultural, ethnic, political, and other socio-political/economic elements

into a complex communicative tapestry” (Tilson, 2000, p. 1).

Conjunctions between earth, heaven, mortals, gods, and daily life infuse ancient history and

prehistory (Stonehenge, and Carnac in Brittany). This was communication equity, a resource to

increase the political potential of lifeless or distant elements like stone or stars. Authorities could

lay down rich layers of meaning by using simple symbols or mottos, confident that their target

audiences could interpret them correctly. It can be communicated by particular techniques and

media, and its durability combats the shortcomings of memory. The historian Polybius demon-

strated this when he famously wrote, “I conceive that what in other nations is looked upon as a

reproach, I mean a scrupulous fear of the gods, is the very thing which keeps the Roman Com-

monwealth together” (Polybius, 1962, p. 505). Augustus applied the principle when presenting

himself as savior of the Roman Republic, ultimately entering the pantheon himself as a god.

EARLY MEDIA AND THEIR MESSAGES

Evidence suggests that many ancient states managed the obstacles created by time and space,

delivering an impression of permanence through media that worked together: public perfor-

mances and ceremonies; myth and music; stone works; the sacred landscape; coinage; and

the calendar, poetry, and symbolic memory. For example, in the Greek world after Homer,

Simonides of Keos prospered in the 6th and 5th centuries BC composing and reciting great

praise-poetry paid for by states and their ruling families. The Roman orator, lawyer, and

politician Cicero claimed 400 years later that Simonides “first invented an art of memory”

of the things which they desire to keep in memory, symbols must be conceived in the mind, and

ranged, as it were, in those places; thus the order of places would preserve the order of things,

and the symbols of things would denote the things themselves; so that we should use the places

as waxen tablets, and the symbols as letters. (Cicero, 1986, pp. 186–187)

A complete review of all the methods adopted, monitored, controlled, and communicated by

states—song, dance, ritual, colors, light, sounds, the sky and the earth, myth, parades, and

festivals—would be rewarding but superficial within space constraints. Therefore, to explore in

detail what premodern media could offer premodern states, this article considers some of the

ORIGINS OF STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION 233

most enduring media—stonework, the sacred landscape, coinage, and the calendar—and uses

them to further assess how strategic communication was understood.

Buildings, Monuments, Public Images

The time-conquering link between physical form and human feeling was exploited by ancient

states in their public art, especially by using the durability and expressiveness of robust materials

such as stone. Because premodern states, much more than many states today, grounded their

public identity in changeless, timeless, and sacred values, “eternal” media were a necessary

prerequisite. I therefore begin with what is known about “robust art”: sculpted imagery and

architecture.

In an idea probably emerging from sacred imagery, ancient states perceived the political

value of distributing or encouraging images embodying the ruler, the state, or preferred inhab-

itants of the pantheon. Sculpted or painted representation translated sacred values and secular

identity at a particular place and moment. The ancient mind mostly viewed such art not for

art’s sake but, as previously suggested, through its ritual function and spiritual meaning. “Such

charged moments of religious experience were the energized product of centuries of careful

cultivation of sacred images” (Elsner, 1996, p. 518). The use of “periodically dressed, paraded,

washed and worshipped” statues in Classical Greek rituals, for example, was “a key element in

their incorporation into the imaginative and spiritual life of antiquity” (Elsner, 1996, p. 518) that

became civic and political acts as well. Images of Roman Emperors were similarly important

sacred and secular media. In letters written in the 1st and 2nd century AD, the Roman jurist

Pliny the Younger showed his perception of loyalty, piety, secular civic pride, and public

communication when he asked Emperor Trajan for permission to add his likeness to statues of

other emperors donated to the town of Tifernum (Pliny, 1969, p. 263).

Sculpture’s power has been defined by its ability to use space, time, and form (Crone, 1982,

p. 28). These are more general communication assets, and architecture has them also. New

architecture might praise a state or deified ruler; older structures might be publicly rededicated

to other gods or functions; a message could be transmitted by architectural style, or merely

by choice of residence as with Diocletian’s preference for Ravenna over Rome or a Moorish

Caliph who worked inside the cities of Spain and Portugal, rather than a palace farther off

(Coope, 1998, p. 861). Buildings, sculpture, and large monuments communicated with assets

used separately or in combination: the structure’s purpose (whether memorial, temple, theatre,

or palace), design, lighting, decoration (the statuary, friezes, paintings, symbols or inscriptions,

the use of screens or small rooms to demarcate zones of influence and meaning when performing

key rituals), site, and orientation. Pharaoh Ramesses II combined these features in the temples

to himself, his gods, and his family at Abu Simbel completed around 1264 BC, fronted with

statues of himself, decorated inside with painted reliefs of Ramesses worshipping himself and

defeating the Hittites at Kadesh (in reality a probable tie). Abu Simbel faces the Nile on the

southern border of Egypt. The location was important to awe the Nubians to the south. The

orientation was important because it was first thing travellers to his land saw as they journeyed

downriver. The function and decoration were important because they defined the Pharaoh’s

public personality. As a World Heritage Site Abu Simbel continues to reinforce Ramesses’

potency, his enduring retort to the view of professional Egyptologists “that the reputation of

Ramesses II is somewhat greater than he deserved.” (Bull, 1943, p. 219).

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Without the Nile, Abu Simbel was of limited value. Like a fiber optic cable, the river and

those travelling on it released Abu Simbel’s time-conquering message into space. Another

way of achieving this in architecture was replication: The Romans and Greeks repeated

an idea of themselves throughout their worlds in forums, baths, theatres, and arenas. The

Incas built at least six “New Cuzcos,” conceptual replicas of their capital (D’Altroy, 2002,

p. 241). Whatever their purpose, culture, architecture, and power joined in them and would be

necessarily imprinted on subjects: There were perhaps 100,000 ethnic Inca out of 12 million

diverse inhabitants (DeMarrais, Castillo, & Earle, 1996, p. 27). Rivers and replication distributed

messages embedded in a great public building, but more abstract tools were available. This was

the case with the Mayan interest in mathematics, astronomy, and time. A traveller might simply

conclude that Mayan authority, like its Roman or Greek equivalents, was being communicated

in a replicated urban plan with fortifications, hydraulic engineering projects, temples, palaces,

or ballcourts (Cioffi-Revilla & Landman, 1999, p. 565; Fuson, 1969; Tate, 1992, p. 27). Yet

the Mayans also shifted their urban architecture over time according to changes in a region’s

magnetic declination (the line of local magnetic north). This was a way for Mayan cities to be

“locative” and “tradition directed,” conveying “a sense of belonging to a system of order, and

ritual repetition or archetypal models” (Tate, 1992, p. 27).

Such activities caution us against only seeing ancient constructions as vehicles for sensation-

charged special effects. Not that special effects should be overlooked: Interesting work has

been done, for example, on the relation between the architectural, ritual, verbal, and nonverbal

impacts of pre-Columbian Andean ritual plazas “suggesting the importance of these rituals

in the creation and maintenance of legitimacy and power” (J. D. Moore, 1996, p. 798) and

the use of light in the sacred structures of Romans, Greeks, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Christians,

Taoists, and Muslims (J. D. Moore, 1996; Weightman, 1996): “Natural light, deftly manipulated,

reveals, clarifies, and structures emanations of the divine in sacred places” (Weightman, 1996,

p. 63). Abu Simbel, for instance, used light dramatically on 2 days of the year, in February and

October, when the rays of the rising sun enter the hall until they illuminate the statues in the

inner sanctuary. Controlled effects of light, space, and sound could not build belonging without

successfully integrating popular religious, ceremonial, or mythical custom. These unified assets

encouraged collaboration between rulers and subjects.

State buildings and “robust art” remind us that communication media were binding agents

in the ancient world as well as ours. The sculpture and architecture of a polity, and other fixed

assets that expressed an identity—the preferred gods, social hierarchy, myths, or lineages—

must be correctly interpreted, incarnated, and communicated. Rivers, replication, or changing

celestial alignments achieved this. What other media made fixed messages mobile?

Sacred Landscapes

Sacred landscapes could have been imagined from the earliest conscious application of deep

feeling to physical symbolism. They still exist and can be found along the indigenous Australian

Songlines and in highly urban 21st-century societies. In such places, premodern states imposed

themselves to transmit and magnify themselves in art, construction, belief, and the heavens,

asserting their “communication ownership” of, or partnership with, natural places or things

where deep meaning already existed. Among the Aztecs, “Topographical features and man-

made symbols were joined at certain points to form a ritual network for religious communication

ORIGINS OF STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION 235

between the people who embodied the social order, and the natural forces, deities and ancestral

heroes” (Townsend, 2000, p. 137).

Sacred gardens like Huaxtepec, combining the natural with the cultivated landscape, also

suggest that the Aztecs were like other ancient peoples in combining faith, landscape, identity,

and the legitimacy of their state. In special landscapes the powerful might show their ability

to connect with the divine. Much the same has been said of others, for instance, the Inca and

Dark Age Germanic peoples (Bates, 2002, p. 58; D’Altroy, 2002, p. 155). Interacting with the

invisible world is a widely shared human trait connected to the emergence of memory and

dreams, perhaps visible in the cave art of the Upper Paleolithic, evolving over millennia, and

leaving in its wake a landscape that radiated meaning.

Some natural sacred features, similar to large public monuments “may be visible to vast

populations across broad geographic areas” cutting across the social and other differences

of those who could all see them (DeMarrais et al., 1996, p. 18). Others might be visible

but not immediately visible. In the 1st century AD the Roman P. Cornelius Tacitus recorded

of a German tribe, “The grove is the centre of their whole religion. It is regarded as the

cradle of the race and the dwelling place of the supreme god to whom all things are sub-

ject and obedient” (Tacitus, 1970, p. 134). The greenwood “dominated the imagination” of

old English mysticism (Bates, 2002, p. 44), which of course endowed its guardians with

earthly authority, as did sacred features in the Andean and Mesoamerican pre-Columbian

landscapes.

Sacred landscapes shared by a community predated the rise of large organized administration.

The possibly seasonal experiences at culturally important sites like Windmill Hill in the sacred

Neolithic landscape around Stonehenge may have been managed by loose kinship groups and

chiefdoms, until sophisticated states like the Aztecs or Inca and others controlled them to

project authority in the secular and spiritual realms.

Landscape was therefore packageable, a space-uniting communication instrument, conveying

time-conquering truths about a polity and its founding ideas.

Coins

Circulating coins moved at comparatively high speed. In ancient times they could be used to

introduce new rulers, confirm the status quo, or announce adjustments to the state’s preferred

identity. They probably developed around 635 BC in the kingdom of Lydia in Asia Minor,

replacing rods and ingots. The Greeks took up the new invention and mined its civic propaganda

potential, because a coin must be marked to identify the guarantor of its integrity. Alexander

the Great appeared on coins “adorned with a curling ram’s horn” belonging to Ammon to

display his newly acquired Egyptian credentials (Lane Fox, 1973/1986, p. 200). His warring

successors, including Lysimachus and Seleucus I, also used coins “to crystallize a tradition

about the founder himself and about the dynasty” (Hadley, 1974, p. 51). In classical Rome

there was a “close involvement of the coinage with the fortunes of the emperor, the health

of the economy, propaganda, pay and taxes” (Reece, 1975, p. 299). One reason for this was

that coins could change messages more easily than architecture, monuments, or landscapes.

In 69 AD, for instance, Rome suffered civil war under four successive rulers, all of whom

struck coins to prop up their reigns. According to the eminent scholar of Roman coins Harold

Mattingly (1950),

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[Roman coinage] lent itself admirably to the purpose of informing the public of what the govern-

ment meant them to know and of enlisting support for imperial policies. Its value as propaganda

was fully realised by those who had the control of it. (pp. xlvi–xlvii)

Ancient polities used money’s value as a billboard-like vehicle for propaganda sporadically

or systematically, Greek city-states, Syrian caliphates, Norse kings, and Frankish monarchs

among them. States of all sizes exploited this medium, and widespread trading capability

certainly helped to circulate the message. Money also has a high communication value because

it does not have to seek out people: People seek money. This helps official communication

because there is less need for government to overtly intrude. Target audiences circulate the

message themselves using every means of transport. A coin is a portable, authoritative means

of delivering short but necessarily simple and strong messages to homes, neighbourhoods,

markets, ports, and other countries. Money is also enduring. The message stamped on the

coin is viewed over many years, repetitively and in volume. Less obtruding than laws or

proclamations, coinage continuously and silently informs citizens of a political unit’s identity:

its continuity and values, the chosen legitimacies of its leaders, and which worldview to adopt

when coming into contact with authority.

The coin’s formula—desirable, durable, repetitive, portable, desirable, subtle, values-rich,

and rapid, extensive circulation by the target audiences themselves—is particularly close to

current information age communication practices (in branding for example) and priorities, as

practiced by governments, nonprofits, or corporations.

Calendars

Calendars master time and associating identified periods (such as months) with particular

names, ideas, or identities is a natural temptation, and in consequence a communication

opportunity.

The calendar’s political role grew with organized religion. Astronomy’s divine information

was used to guide agriculture, medicine, or the hunt, which gave it earthly power. The calendar’s

power could be communicated on its own or by other media—architecture, natural events, and

ritual—by changes to dates and productive activities. It evolved into a sophisticated model—

perhaps the first—for symbolizing and melding natural, social, and political orders. The druidic

calendar system was shared across loosely knit tribal cultures. Caesar observed that Gallic and

British druids alike “hold long discussions” about the heavenly bodies, the universe, “the

physical constitution of the world, and the power and properties of the gods” (Caesar, 1983,

p. 141). In more centralized polities, the calendar was deployed as a political mechanism.

Chinese emperors derived ritual and status from “the task of observing the movements of the

heavenly bodies, and from them promulgating the calendar for the guidance and control of the

seasonal activities of the people” (Smith, 1957, p. 185). The ancient Chinese knew the study of

astronomy as li and yiang. “Li referred to the calendrical methods and yiang to the instruments

and records of observation” (Zezong, 1981, p. 458). With Li and its associated rituals,

The emperor imposed order on the world through inauguration ceremonies, the diffusion of the

calendar, the bestowal of titles and names, the classification of various cults and deities, the diplomas

he granted them, and the general organization of space. (Gernet, 1985, p. 105)

ORIGINS OF STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION 237

The Aztec state asserted itself in customs and rituals based on a 365-day calendar of 18 months

of 20 days and a dangerous transition of 5 days between the old and new years in which hearth

fires were extinguished and pregnant women enclosed in granaries (Townsend, 2000, pp. 138–

140). By defending its subjects from the calendar’s perils, the Aztec state offered further

justification for its existence.

The Romans combined the calendar’s symbolism with a pragmatism that made it particularly

vulnerable to interference. They believed the first calendar of 10 months originated with Rome’s

legendary founder Romulus (around 700 BC). It survived 7 centuries with the addition of

2 extra months, becoming an intensely political communication instrument under the Caesars.

Augustus, presenting himself as saviour of Roman order after prolonged civil wars, gave his

name to what was now the 8th month (originally 6th) of Sextilis. August had potent significance:

It was the month Augustus was admitted to the Consulate, three times entered Rome in triumph,

won support from the legions, conquered Egypt, and ended the civil wars (Duncan, 1998, p. 47).

When Augustus died, the Roman priesthood decreed “the whole period between his birth and

death should be officially entered in the calendar as ‘the Augustan Age’ ” (Suetonius, 1989,

p. 111). The fact that this phrase and month has survived for 2,000 years testifies like Abu

Simbel to the wisdom of this time-conquering decision.

Augustus’s predecessor, Julius Caesar, had famously reformed the entire calendar, creating

a system named for him. The Senate changed the 7th month of Quintilius to Julius in his

honour (Duncan, 1998, p. 46). Senators made a less successful effort 150 years later to name

September and October after the Emperor Antoninus Pius and his wife, but the emperor refused.

Less modestly but equally unsuccessfully, Nero changed April to “Neroneus.” The Emperor

Commodus tried to name all 12 months after his own adopted names (Birley, 1976).

It would be a mistake to see Roman calendar changes as a by-product of individual

megalomania. This was not the case. They used administrative machinery, were backed by

opinion leaders or state resources, and intended to vanquish space and time to consolidate

the imperial edifice. Early Christian missionaries in Europe and elsewhere were very aware

that the calendar and its associated rituals could be made use of. Once Iceland converted at

a meeting of settlers and leaders at the “Law Rock” the second item of business was “the

observance of the Lord’s Day and fast days, Christmas and Easter, and all the important feast

days” (Magnusson & Palsson, 1960, p. 226). Much later, Revolutionary France attempted and

failed to permanently rename the months, and later still Mussolini instituted a new calendar

starting at Year 1, the year he took power, and including its own holy days.

In separated and scattered regions, the calendar and its associated rituals were deployed

to overcome obstacles of space, limited memory, slow communication, and cultural diversity,

cyclically reminding the governed of the presence, concern, and powers of their sometimes

far-off governors.

EARLY COMMUNICATION STRATEGY AND THE NATURE OF

PUBLIC CONSENT

How did state coordination of powerful media and messages like those just described work on

subject peoples? In part, as we have seen, by carefully integrating popular preoccupations into

a rigorously enforced idea about legitimacy and power. Over time this process might become

238 MOORE

reflexive and self-perpetuating, for as Innis argued, control of communication methods creates

monopolies and ultimately monoliths of opinion. Alternative viewpoints are harder to circulate;

political and technical innovations become hollow under pressure from unchanging symbols and

principles. Such materialization (giving an idea concrete form): “Makes it possible to control,

manipulate and extend ideology beyond the local group. Ideology becomes an important source

of social power when it can be given material form and controlled by a dominant group”

(DeMarrais et al., 1996, p. 15).

Tacitus put it more brutally in his account of his father-in-law, Agricola, who governed

Britain in the 1st century and introduced Roman settlements and amenities: “The unsuspecting

Britons spoke of such novelties as ‘civilization,’ when in fact they were only a feature of

their enslavement” (Tacitus, 1970, pp. 72–73). Such accounts provide valuable insight into

one reality behind “the means of control over associated settlements” (Dietrich, 1995, p. 297).

What has also been said about Mayan texts and inscriptions can also be readily applied to

political perception-shaping generally in the ancient world: “These texts record intentionally

manufactured mythico-historical propaganda intended to sanction and reinforce contemporary

sociopolitical realities” (Ball, 1994, p. 1433). The process often seems to have been subtle. A

central authority could not invent all sociopolitical realities, so its communication needed

an existing reality it could work with to encourage a collaborative element and common

values. Early states preferred subject communities to willingly participate in rituals or fes-

tivals, to accept them as signs of political, spiritual, and daily stability. Attractive media

like verse, art and architecture, landscape, portents, money, correspondence, or conversation

could capture, encapsulate, and echo popular themes that kept imperia stable and eased the

cost and burdens of government. In all this, as today, many states encouraged official or

private representation of its chosen themes, especially by respecting their variety in local

cultures.

CONCLUSION

This article examined a number of historical media that were used to meet the communication

needs of premodern states. Viewed together, these media represent the first concerted, successful

attempts to construct and control perceptions within the first large, sophisticated, and often

multinational organizations.

Despite the technological limitations, these organizations generated a wide variety of tech-

niques and messages. Evidently early states tried hard to extract as much communication as they

could from what was available. The most effective approaches were similar regardless of time

or place: simple messages, symbols, words, and images used interchangeably and repetitively,

duplicating them on multiple communication platforms that were somewhat flexible even when

set in stone or stars. They were—as good messages are today—grounded in the priorities of the

target audiences by explaining or promising stability, justice, and understanding of the natural

forces that dominated productive activity.

Ambitious, organized, and expanding states could achieve a consistency modern govern-

ments might envy—by imposing an identity replicated from the centre, as the Aztecs largely

did, or integrating it with regional customs and cultures, as the Romans did. By such means,

communication offered a justification for the state and a bulwark against chaos.

ORIGINS OF STRATEGIC COMMUNICATION 239

Success depended on the successful integration of time and space. Harold Innis’s two

divisions were often merged and should be modified for this particular context. The symbolism

of time conquering but spatially fixed media like public buildings, public ceremonies, the

polity’s centre, or the heavens could be readily transmitted by spatially oriented media: song

and poetry, coins, the duplication of images, building and ceremonies, use of landscape, and

the cycle of the calendar. Premodern states could harness both space and time to communicate

a sense of themselves.

Which elements of what we call communication strategy did premodern states know about?

They apparently understood that symbols rich in meaning must be owned and communicated

as tools of identity and instruction. They adapted communication to diverse cultures without

losing a central message. They were familiar with a number of communications technologies

and explored the limits of their malleability and durability. They realised the potential of “word

of mouth” by providing songs, sights, and events that encouraged their targeted audiences to

spread the message of authority. They were fully aware of the obstacles posed by time and

space. They knew that different communication media drawn from these elements could work

productively together. They understood the obstacles presented by memory. They—whether

Gilgamesh’s Uruk or the early Christian Church—sought to create moments when memory

and emotion could be stimulated, assisted by control of the calendar. Finally, at least some

premodern states (e.g., Rome and Alexander) knew that projecting their identity to diverse

peoples might occasionally require adapting to local custom.

On the whole, Churchill’s remark at the start of this article that all wisdom is not new wisdom

seems accurate for communication strategy at least. The wisdom of one period is translatable

into that of another. We have more tools at our disposal today, but in communication strategy we

recycle or relearn older wisdom. Like ancient states, we distil complex messages into simple

symbols and phrases shaped by the technology and beliefs of our own time. Governments

and other organizations today from the United States to China, from campaigning nonprofits

to large multinationals, must evoke belonging or consent using similar strategies that their

long-vanished predecessors regularly mastered.

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