文档介绍：托福 TPO46 阅读文本 +题目 +答案
1. The Origins of Writing
The Egyptians were not far behind in developing writing, but waining and much practice; inevitably, literacy was largely limited to a small professional class, the scribes.
The Babylonians and Assyrians did the same, and so di d peoples in Syria and Asia Minor. ■ The literature of the Sumerians was treasured throughout the Near East, and long after Sumerian ceased to be spoken, the Babylonians and
Assyrians and others kept it alive as a literary language, the way Europeans kept Latin alive after the fall of Rome.
For the scribes of these non-Sumerian languages, training was doubly demanding since they had to know the values of
the various cuneiform signs for Sumerian as well as for their own language. ■
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The contents of the earliest clay tablets are simple notations of numbers of commodities — animals, jars, baskets, etc. Writing, it would appear, started as a primitive form of bookkeeping. Its use soon widened to document the multitudinous
things and acts that are involved in daily life, from simple inventories of commodities to complicated governmental rules and regulations.
Archaeologists frequently find clay tablets in batches. The batches, some of which contain thousands of tablets, consist for the most part of documents of the types just mentioned: bills, deliveries, receipts, inventories, loans, marriage contracts, divorce settlements, court judgments, and so on. These records of factual matters were kept in storage to be available for reference-they were, in effect, files, or, to use the term preferred by specialists in the ancient Near East, archives. Now and then these files include pieces of writing that are of a distinctly different order, writings that do not merely record some matter of fact but involve creative intellectual activity. They range from simple textbook material to literature-and they make an appearance very early, even from the third millennium B C E