I. Before you read the passage, talk about these questions. 1. What do you know about the education in ancient civilization?

1. What do you know about the education in ancient civilization?

2. When did various writing systems start to develop?

3. Where was the world’s oldest known alphabet developed?

Starting in about 3500 BC, various writing systems developed in ancient civilizations around the world. In Egypt fully developed hieroglyphs were in use at Abydos as early as 3400 BC. Later, the world's oldest known alphabet was developed in central Egypt around 2000 BC from a hieroglyphic prototype. One hieroglyphic script was used on stone monuments, other cursive scripts were used for writing in ink on papyrus, a flexible, paper-like material, made from the stems of reeds that grow in marshes and beside rivers such as the River Nile.

The Phoenician writing system was adapted from the Proto-Canaanite script in around the 11th century BC, which in turn borrowed ideas from Egyptian hieroglyphics. This script was adapted by the Greeks. A variant of the early Greek alphabet gave rise to the Etruscan alphabet, and its own descendants, such as the Latin alphabet. Other descendants from the Greek alphabet include the Cyrillic script, used to write Russian, among others.

In China, the early oracle bone script has survived on tens of thousands of oracle bones dating from around 1400-1200 BC in the Shang Dynasty. Out of more than 2500 written characters in use in China in about 1200 BC, as many as 1400 are identifiable as the source of later standard Chinese characters.

Other surfaces used for early writing include wax-covered writing boards (used, as well as clay tablets, by the Assyrians), sheets or strips of bark from trees (in Indonesia, Tibet and the Americas), the thick palm-like leaves of a particular tree, the leaves then punctured with a hole and stacked together like the pages of a book (these writings in India and South east Asia include Buddhist scriptures and Sanskrit literature), parchment, made of goatskin that had been soaked and scraped to remove hair, which was used from at least the 2nd century BC, vellum, made from calfskin, and wax tablets which could be wiped clean to provide a fresh surface (in Roman times).

Ethiopia has its own ancient alphabet. According to the beliefs of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Ethiopic or Geez is one of the ancient alphabets and languages. The first human to use the alphabet is believed to be Henoch of the Old Testament. Henoch supposedly wrote the Book of Henoch in Ethiopic around c. 3350 BC. In the Ethiopian Orthodox view, the Book of Enoch was written in Ethiopic by Enoch, considered the oldest book in any human language. The original forms of the letters themselves were said to have been invented by the even earlier ancestral figure, Henos. Others claim that Ethiopic is a Sabean alphabet. Still others claim that the classic Ethiopic with its seven vowel expansions was in existence before 3000 BC. It is thought by some that it was during the Axumite Kingdom of around 340 AD that the alphabet gained the vowel forms and started to be written from left to right.