I am longtime fan of both CivII and Discover magazine, so when I read an article in a recent issue called Dawn of the ABC's (available online at
www.discover.com/mar_00/breakdawn.html if you want to check it out) something struck me. The article mentions the discovery of the oldest use of an alphabet(phonetic symbols) at about 1800 BC with the prediction of 2000 BC for the very first development. But fully developed logograghic systems of writing go back to at least 3500 BC, with ideographic systems only unable to express abstract ideas or names going back much farther. But in the CivII Tech Tree Alphabet is placed in a position more primitive than Writing. I propose a tech trees wap of Alphabet and Writing.
It would work out perfectly; you can't really get far into a Code of Laws w/o a way of
writing: and the Alphabet is the truest parent of literacy, eliminating thousands of hard to memorize logographs with a few dozen simple symbols. (The article says)Adults can learn a phonetic writing system in a matter of hours, letting many more than just princes, priests, or scribes learn to use it.
It is easy to see how people using modern phonetically written languages would think that the alphabet would come first because that is the way they had learned to read and write when they were young. Even so I'm a bit surprised that I never heard anyone say anything about it before now.
I am eager to hear responses.
Laszlo Oroszvary
Kapuncska@aol.com
