Practice question · Multiple choice
The Phoenician alphabet had about 22 signs where cuneiform had hundreds. What did that reduction actually change?
Hints
- Ask how long it took to train a cuneiform scribe, and what that made scribes.
- Twenty-two signs. Who can now write who could not before?
Show the answer
A. Who could learn to write, in weeks rather than years
Why
Years of training made scribes a guild with a monopoly, and weeks of training destroys the monopoly, the alphabet is a change in access rather than in capability. It is why Greek adoption produced poetry and graffiti almost immediately, where Linear B had produced only inventories.
Practise The Iron Age and the End of Prehistory
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More questions on The Iron Age and the End of Prehistory
- Complete the statement about the threshold.
- Sort each statement: supported, or an instance of technological determinism?
- Why is calling prehistory "the prologue to human history" a mistake about proportion?
- Why is "iron caused the fall of aristocracies" a claim to handle carefully?
- Why was the Phoenician alphabet as consequential as iron?
- The boundary between prehistory and history marks a real change in how people lived.
- What follows from an alphabet that ordinary people can learn?