 The classics professor, Eric Havelock, whose work influenced Innis, makes a similar point when he argues that this alphabet enabled the Greeks to record their oral literary tradition with a "wealth of detail and depth of psychological feeling" absent in other Near Eastern civilizations with more limited writing systems.Innis himself quotes scholar Richard Jebb's claim that the Greek language "'responds with happy elasticity to every demand of the Greek intellect...the earliest work of art created by the spontaneous working of the Greek mind.