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The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem Van Loon
page 26 of 493 (05%)
Africa. His home was in Egypt.

The valley of the Nile had developed a high stage of civilisation
thousands of years before the people of the west had
dreamed of the possibilities of a fork or a wheel or a house.
And we shall therefore leave our great-great-grandfathers in
their caves, while we visit the southern and eastern shores of
the Mediterranean, where stood the earliest school of the
human race.

The Egyptians have taught us many things. They were
excellent farmers. They knew all about irrigation. They built
temples which were afterwards copied by the Greeks and which
served as the earliest models for the churches in which we worship
nowadays. They had invented a calendar which proved
such a useful instrument for the purpose of measuring time
that it has survived with a few changes until today. But most
important of all, the Egyptians had learned how to preserve
speech for the benefit of future generations. They had invented
the art of writing.

We are so accustomed to newspapers and books and magazines
that we take it for granted that the world has always been
able to read and write. As a matter of fact, writing, the most
important of all inventions, is quite new. Without written
documents we would be like cats and dogs, who can only teach
their kittens and their puppies a few simple things and who,
because they cannot write, possess no way in which they can
make use of the experience of those generations of cats and
dogs that have gone before.
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