Fifty years before the birth of Christ, the Romans conquered the land
along the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and among this newly
acquired territory was a country called Egypt.
The Romans, who are to play such a great role in our history, were a
race of practical men.
They built bridges, they constructed roads, and with a small but highly
trained army of soldiers and civil officers, they managed to rule the
greater part of Europe, of eastern Africa and western Asia.
As for art and the sciences, these did not interest them very much. They
regarded with suspicion a man who could play the lute or who could write
a poem about Spring and only thought him little better than the clever
fellow who could walk the tightrope or who had trained his poodle dog to
stand on its hind legs. They left such things to the Greeks and to the
Orientals, both of whom they despised, while they themselves spent their
days and nights keeping order among the thousand and one nations of
their vast empire.
When they first set foot in Egypt that country was already terribly old.
More than six thousand and five hundred years had gone by since the
history of the Egyptian people had begun.
Long before any one had dreamed of building a city amidst the swamps of
the river Tiber, the kings of Egypt had ruled far and wide and had made
their court the center of all civilization.
While the Romans were still savages who chased wolves and bears with
clumsy stone axes, the Egyptians were writing books, performing
intricate medical operations and teaching their children the tables of
multiplication.
This great progress they owed chiefly to one very wonderful invention,
to the art of preserving their spoken words and their ideas for the
benefit of their children and grandchildren.
We call this the art of writing.
We are so familiar with writing that we can not understand how people
ever managed to live without books and newspapers and magazines.
But they did and it was the main reason why they made such slow progress
during the first million years of their stay upon this planet.
They were like cats and dogs who can only teach their puppies and their
kittens a few simple things (barking at a stranger and climbing trees
and such things) and who, because they can not write, possess no way in
which they can use the experience of their countless ancestors.
This sounds almost funny, doesn't it?
And why make such a fuss about so simple a matter?
But did you ever stop to think what happens when you write a letter?
Suppose that you are taking a trip in the mountains and you have seen a
deer.
You want to tell this to your father who is in the city.
What do you do?
You put a lot of dots and dashes upon a piece of paper--you add a few
more dots and dashes upon an envelope and you carry your epistle to the
mailbox together with a two-cent stamp.
What have you really been doing?
You have changed a number of spoken words into a number of pothooks and
scrawls.
But how did you know how to make your curlycues in such a fashion that
both the postman and your father could retranslate them into
spoken words?
You knew, because some one had taught you how to draw the precise
figures which represented the sound of your spoken words.
Just take a few letters and see the way this game is played.