I stumbled on this nice account of the evolution of writing tonight.
It’s amazing to think that the Greeks invented something that was then adopted by the Romans, who refined and bequeathed it to civilisations to come. Here am I, on the west coast of North America, using a language and a script that germinated and matured elsewhere. Each word that I type here tonight is the product of years of linguistic refinement and mutation. How amazing when you consider it. Where will it go from here?
We think ourselves so evolved, too, until you consider that we’ve only had the written word for a little over two centuries. Compare that to the amount of time that mankind has existed on the planet and you realise that we’re really still in the dark ages. What fundamental inventions are yet to come, that people hundreds of years from now will consider us barbaric for having had to live without, in much the same way that many of us today imagine how dull life must have been before television, when people actually had to engage in the art of conversation?