Writing

What characteristics of media do we value? Over time, communication hardware becomes more durable, portable and affordable. Communication software also becomes more flexible. Pictographic writing is an intil stage, but simsymbolic alphabets can lift a civilization into universal literacy.

The alphabet has been called the DNA of Science. See this video, the Code of DaVinci

	"Legal tender. Good for one goat at the corral of your choice."	The earliest writing took the form of picture symbols. By the 4th millenium BCE, picture languages were developing in Egypt, the Middle East and China. This Sumerian symbol is probably meant to represent a goat. It was used like currency but showed animals to be traded. The token was made from clay and baked. Later, Sumerians baked tablets of writing. They were durable but not very portable.
		A Chinese scroll written on silk is an early but expensive way to make communication durable and portable.
		Ancient Hebrews solved the problem in the same way by using rolls of parchment (animal skins) wrapped around a stick. Hebrews and Phonecians solved another problems as well. They developed a symbolic language that broke away from the pictographic languages of Egypt, China and the Middle East.
		The Greeks improved on this symbolic language. Everyone in Greece -- even slaves -- could read and write.
		"In 750 B.C.E., the Greeks, borrowing characters from a Semitic language, perhaps Phoenician, developed a writing system that had just twenty-four letters. There had been scripts with a limited number of characters before, as there had been consonants and even occasionally vowels, but the Greek alphabet was the first whose letters recorded every significant sound element in a spoken language in a one-to-one correspondence, give or take a few diphthongs. In ancient Greek, if you knew how to pronounce a word, you knew how to spell it, and you could sound out almost any word you saw, even if you’d never heard it before. Children learned to read and write Greek in about three years, somewhat faster than modern children learn English, whose alphabet is more ambiguous. The ease democratized literacy; the ability to read and write spread to citizens who didn’t specialize in it." -- Caleb Crain, "Twilight of the Books," The New Yorker, Dec. 24, 2007.