Day 1 The Alphabet

[Summary]
Each day of week has each topic in this book. Monday's topic is HISTORY. It says "A survey of people and events shaped the development of Western civilization" By the way, I found this "Western civilization" interesting and just realized it's the book of "western" culture and education not the whole world. 

Anyway, "The alphabet". The alphabet was invented by the Egyptian at about 2000 BC, 4,000 years ago. Because of the complexity of their written language, they were not able to pass down the orders to their slaves. That's why they needed to make it simple and easy to learn. Actually, only a handful  of Egyptians could read and write their complicated script. In the simplified version, each character represented only a sound and it's the basis of the words that we are currently using in several languages. The Alphabet had completely changed the way of communication it enabled people to establish the writing system and it had spread across in the Near East.

[Note]
It's a bit ironic that they put an end to their own era in the long run by themselves by sharing their privilege which is "knowledge" with the way of sharing the ideas. The invention of the writing system is one of the epoch making breakthroughs in history. People can share their ideas and knowledge with each other and improve their ideas by sophisticating or improving the initial ones as we call the open system. Scientists publish the papers and others draw them to add new ideas or theories on it so as to improve the society and technology itself. And this is the very factor that differentiates a human being from other species. We can record, share, learn, and improve because of the writing system and the speed of the progress of human beings was much faster than the speed of evolution of others. We are living on what we have been passed down from the ancient people. It's a bit romantic, isn't it?

Words and expressions new to me
pass down : to give something to someone who is younger, less important, or at a lower level than you
hieroglyphics : a system of writing that uses pictures instead of words, especially as used in ancient Egypt
cumbersome : awkward because of being large, heavy, or not effective
linguists : someone who studies foreign languages or can speak them very well, or someone who teaches or studies linguistics