4,993
edits
Social Studies skills: Difference between revisions
→writing
| Line 1,108: | Line 1,108: | ||
=== writing === | === writing === | ||
> create new page for writing | > create new page for writing | ||
* power of writing | |||
* from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs & Steel", p 30: | |||
<pre>Another chain of causation led from food production to writing, possibly the most important single invention of the last few thousand years (Chapter 12). Writing has evolved de novo only a few times in human history, in areas that had been the earliest sites of the rise of food production in their respective regions. All other societies that have become literate did so by the diffusion of writing systems or of the idea of writing from one of those few primary centers. Hence, for the student of world history, the phenomenon of writing is particularly useful for exploring another important constellation of causes: geography's effect on the ease with which ideas and inventions spread.</pre> | |||
and, regarding his analysis of the Spanish conquest of the Inca, p. 81: | |||
<pre>Why weren't the Incas the ones to invent guns and steel swords, to be mounted on animals as fearsome as horses, to bear diseases to which European lacked resistance, to develop oceangoing ships and advanced political organization, and to be able to draw on the experience of thousands of years of written history?</pre> | |||
* from "An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru" by the Incan prince, Titu Cusi (who learned and wrote the book in Spanish), on some of the first Incan encounters with the Spanish: | |||
<pre>we have witnessed with our own eyes that they talk to white cloths by themselves and that they call some of us by our names without having been informed by anyone and only by looking into the sheets, which they hold in front of them. | |||
</pre> | |||
==Culture and Cultural & Technological Achievements== | ==Culture and Cultural & Technological Achievements== | ||