ABSTRACT
There are various different aspects from which the history of mankind may be viewed. One of the most important of these concerns the spread of civilization. In its earliest phases, this is marked by the presence or absence of certain skills and techniques. The domestication of animals, agriculture, writing, and the use of metals are the most important of these. The beginnings of agriculture are prehistoric, but its gradual spread, after a beginning in certain river valleys, occurred in historical times and was not complete until our own day. The use of metals spread with almost equal slowness. The Iron Age in some countries began thousands of years earlier than it did in others. The art of writing, which seems to have developed slowly out of pictures and not, originally, as a representation of spoken language, can be traced through many early stages in Egypt, the Hittite Empire, and Phoenicia, to Greece. Writing in China, which was not alphabetic, appears to have developed independently. It would seem that in Mediterranean countries, but more
especially in Egypt, writing was for a long time a mystery understood only by the priests. In the Dark Ages this had again become the case in Western Europe. It was only gradually that kings decided to teach their children to read and write. As late as 1807 the President of the Royal Society vehemently opposed the extension of literacy to wage-earners on the ground that, if they could read, ‘it would enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books and publications against Christianity’. The long stretch of time from Egypt in the Fourth Millennium, , to the English Education Act of 1870 illustrates, in the case of writing, the extreme slowness which has characterized the spread of culture.
