Academic Reading — All-Types Test 5

Reading passage

Passage 1: The Origins of Writing Systems A. For most of human history, communities relied entirely on memory and speech to store what they knew. Knowledge passed from one generation to the next through recitation, song and the careful training of the young, yet nothing that was spoken could outlast the people who spoke it. The invention of durable marks that stood for language changed this permanently. Writing allowed a message to travel across distance and time without its author, and it is often described as one of the handful of developments that separated the earliest states from the villages that came before them. B. Scholars now agree that true writing was invented independently in at least three, and possibly four, regions of the world. The oldest examples come from southern Mesopotamia, where clay tablets bearing wedge-shaped signs survive from around 3400 BCE. Comparable systems arose later in Egypt, in the Indus valley, and in China, while a wholly separate tradition developed in Mesoamerica many centuries afterwards. Because these societies had almost no contact with one another, researchers treat each as evidence that the human mind, under the right pressures, tends to arrive at similar solutions. What differed was not the impulse to record but the raw material and the purpose to which the first marks were put. C. The Mesopotamian case is unusually well documented, and it suggests that writing did not begin as a way of preserving stories or laws. Long before the first tablets, merchants in the region used small clay tokens of various shapes to keep track of goods: a cone might represent a measure of grain, a sphere a quantity of oil. To prevent tampering, tokens were sometimes sealed inside a hollow clay ball, and marks were pressed onto its surface to show what lay within. Over time the sealed ball became unnecessary; the marks alone carried the meaning. From these accounting devices grew a flexible script capable of recording anything that could be said. The earliest tablets we can read are overwhelmingly economic — lists of workers, rations and livestock — rather than the poetry that came later. D. A crucial step in every mature system was the move from picturing things to representing sounds. A sign that shows a bull can only ever mean a bull, but a sign that stands for the sound of the word for bull can be borrowed to spell part of an unrelated word that happens to sound the same. This principle, by which a picture lends its sound to something abstract, freed writing from the limits of what could be drawn. Egyptian hieroglyphs combined signs for sounds with signs for whole words, and the scribes who mastered the mixture enjoyed considerable status. Full literacy was rare and jealously guarded, since the effort of learning hundreds of signs placed writing beyond ordinary reach. E. The invention that eventually opened writing to far more people was the alphabet. Around 1800 BCE, speakers of a Semitic language living on the edges of the Egyptian world adapted a small number of Egyptian signs to stand purely for consonants. With only about two dozen characters to learn rather than hundreds, this system could be acquired quickly. Traders carried it around the Mediterranean, and later peoples, including the Greeks, added signs for vowels and passed the idea on again. Nearly every alphabet in use today can be traced back, through a long chain of borrowing and adjustment, to that first modest set of consonant signs. What had once been the guarded craft of a few scribes gradually became a tool that ordinary literate citizens could command.