Academic Reading — All-Types Test 20

Reading passage

The Origins of Writing Systems A Writing is one of humanity's most consequential inventions, yet it was not conceived in a single moment of insight. Long before the first true script appeared, communities across the ancient world relied on tokens, tallies and pictures scratched onto bone or stone to record quantities and events. These devices were memory aids rather than language: a notched stick could remind a herder how many animals were owed, but it could not capture the words a person actually spoke. The decisive leap came when marks began to stand not for things themselves but for the sounds of speech, allowing any utterance to be fixed on a surface and read back by someone who had never heard it. B The earliest system generally recognised as full writing emerged in southern Mesopotamia around 3200 BCE. Administrators in the temple cities pressed the tip of a cut reed into damp clay, producing the wedge-shaped impressions now called cuneiform. At first these signs were largely pictographic, a small drawing of an ox head meaning an ox, but scribes soon discovered that a sign could be borrowed for its sound alone. A picture of a reed, pronounced one way, might be reused to write an unrelated word that happened to sound similar. This principle, known to scholars as the rebus, transformed a limited inventory of pictures into a flexible tool capable of recording names, verbs and abstract ideas that no drawing could ever depict. C A comparable transformation unfolded independently in the Nile valley, where Egyptian hieroglyphs appear at roughly the same period. Whether the idea of writing travelled from Mesopotamia to Egypt or arose separately remains disputed, since the two scripts share no signs and follow different internal logic. What is clear is that both cultures arrived at the same underlying solution: a mixed system in which some signs represented sounds and others stood for whole words or clarified meaning. Chinese writing, which developed considerably later in the second millennium BCE, took a similar path, and most experts regard it as a genuinely separate invention rather than a borrowing. D For centuries these scripts remained the preserve of a trained elite. Cuneiform and hieroglyphs each employed hundreds of signs, and mastering them demanded years of schooling that only a small class of scribes could afford. Literacy was therefore a source of considerable power, concentrated in temples and palaces where records of taxes, harvests and decrees were kept. The situation changed with the appearance of the alphabet, a far leaner system in which a handful of symbols stood for individual consonants. Developed by Semitic-speaking peoples in the second millennium BCE, probably by workers familiar with Egyptian signs, the alphabet reduced the burden of memorisation dramatically and made reading accessible to a wider population. E The alphabet's efficiency helps explain its extraordinary spread. Phoenician traders carried their consonantal script around the Mediterranean, and the Greeks adapted it by assigning some of the spare signs to vowels, producing the first alphabet to represent both consonants and vowels fully. From Greek, by way of the Etruscans, came the Roman letters in which this passage is printed. Yet efficiency alone does not determine which systems endure. Chinese characters, though numerous and demanding, have persisted for over three thousand years, partly because a single script can be read across regions whose spoken dialects differ so greatly that their users cannot understand one another aloud. F Modern scholarship stresses that writing was invented remarkably few times in human history. The independent origins are usually counted as Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and, much later and across the ocean, Mesoamerica. Every other script the world has known descends, directly or by inspiration, from one of these founding traditions. That so momentous a technology should have arisen so rarely reminds us how difficult the underlying insight really was, and how much of what we now take for granted rests on the ingenuity of a few anonymous administrators pressing reeds into clay.