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1. The Origins of Writing
It was in Egypt and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) that civilization aro, and it is there that we find the earliest examples of that key feature of civilization, writing. The examples, in the form of inscribed clay tablets that date to shortly before 3000 B.C.E., have been discovered among the archaeological remains of the Sumerians, a gifted people ttled in southern Mesopotamia.
The Egyptians were not far behind in developing writing, but we cannot follow the history of their writing in detail becau they ud a perishable writing material. In ancient times the banks of the Nile were lined with papyrus plants, and from the papyrus reeds the Egyptians made a form of paper; it was excellent in quality but, like any paper, fragile. Mesopotamia’s rivers boasted no such uful reeds, but its land did provide good clay, and as a conquence the clay tablet became the standard material. Though clumsy and bulky it has a virtue dear to archaeologists: it is durable. Fire, for example, which is death to papyrus paper or other writing materials such as leather and wood, simply bakes it hard, thereby making it even more durable. So when a conqueror t a Mesopotamian palace ablaze, he helped ensure the survival of any clay tablets in it. Clay, moreover, is cheap, and forming it into tablets i
s easy, factors that helped the clay tablet become the preferred writing material not only throughout Mesopotamia but far outside it as well, in Syria, Asia Minor, Persia, and even for a while in Crete and Greece. Excavators have unearthed clay tablets in all the lands. In the Near East they remained in u for more than two and a half millennia, and in certain areas they lasted down to the beginning of the common era until finally yielding, once and for all, to more convenient alternatives.
The Sumerians perfected a style of writing suited to clay. This script consists of simple shapes, basically just wedge shapes and lines that could easily be incid in soft clay with a reed or wooden stylus; scholars have dubbed it cuneiform from the wedge-shaped marks (cunei in Latin) that are its hallmark Although the ingredients are merely wedges and lines, there are hundreds of combinations of the basic forms that stand for different sounds or words. Learning the complex signs required long training and much practice; inevitably, literacy was largely limited to a small professional class, the scribes.
The Akkadians conquered the Sumerians around the middle of the third millennium B.C.E., and they took over the various cuneiform signs ud for writing Sumerian and gave them sound and word values that fit their own language. ■ The Babylonians and Assyrians did the same, an d so did peoples in Syria and Asia Minor. ■ The literature of the Sumerians was treasured throughout the Nea
r East, and long after Sumerian cead to be spoken, the Babylonians and Assyrians and others kept it alive as a literary language, the way European s kept Latin alive after the fall of Rome. ■ For the scribes of the 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. ■
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 u soon widened to document the multitudinous
标准工时制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 ttlements, court judgments, and so on. The records of factual matters were kept in storage to be available for reference-they were, in effect, files, or, to u the term preferred by specialists in the ancient Near East, archives. Now and then the files include pieces of writing that are of a distinctly different order, writings that do no
t 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.
1. The word “key” in the passage is clost in meaning to
O frequent
O esntial
O original
O familiar
2. The word “virtue” in the passage is clost in meaning to
O price
O design
O desirable quality
O physical characteristic
3. Which of the ntences below best express the esntial information In the highlighted ntence in the passage? Incorrect choices change the meaning in important ways or leave out esntial information.
O In part becau of its low cost and ea of u, clay became the preferred writing material throughout Mesopotamia and well beyond it
O Clay was cheap throughout Mesopotamia, so clay tablets from Mesopotamia became the preferred writing material as far as the Mediterranean.
O For a while, the day tablet was the preferred writing material in Crete and Greece.
O Moreover, becau day was ud as the writing material of choice in Mesopotamia, Syria, Asia Minor, Persia, and the Mediterranean, it was cheap and popular.
4. What can be inferred from paragraph 2 about clay as a writing material?
O It had to be baked before it could be written on
O Its good points outweighed its bad points.
O Its durability was its most important feature for its urs.
O It was not available in Egypt.
5. In paragraph 2, why does the author discuss the Egyptian u of papyrus as a writing material^
O To describe the superiofity of papyrus over leattier and wood as a writing material乐毅论
O To explain why writing in Egypt did not develop as quickly as it did Mesopotamia
O To explain why archaeologists' knowledge of the early history of writing relies mainly on Sumerian cuneiform O To explain why the Sumerians preferred clay tablets for writing over papyrus
6. According to paragraph 3, all of the following are true of cuneiform writing EXCEPT:
O It was compod of very simple shapes
O It was perfected by the ancient Sumerians.
O It influenced the choice of material on which it was written.
O It was understood by very few Sumerians.
7. According to paragraph 4, how did the Akkadians u the Sumerian language?
O They ud Sumerian for speaking but ud their own national language for writing.
O They ud the complex cuneiform signs developed by the Babylonians and Assyrians rather than the Sumerian signs.
O They developed their own cuneiform shapes on clay tablets to replace tho ud by the Sumerians.
O They assigned new sound and word values to the signs of Sumerian cuneiform.
8. Paragraph 4 answers all the following questions about Sumerian writing in the period after the Sumerians were conquered EXCEPT:
O Did Sumerian literature continue to be read?
O Did Sumerian continue to be spoken?
O Did scribes compo new texts in Sumerian?
O Did Sumerian have the same fate as Latin had after the fall of Rome?
9. The word "document" in the passage is clost in meaning to
O include
O influence
O organize
写给爸爸的信O record
10. According to paragraph 5, writing was first ud for
O simple bookkeeping
O descriptions of daily events
四字横批O counting the contents of clay tablets
O government reports
11. The phra “Now and then” in the passage is clost in meaning to
O always
O occasionally
O sooner or later
O first and last
12. According to paragraph 6, large batches of clay writing tablets were stored becau the tablets
O were being produced quickly and in large quantities二年级二班
O did not rve any practical purpo for most Mesopotamians
O contained information that needed to be available for future reference
O could not be ud again once they had been written on
13. Look at the four squares [■] that indicate where the following ntence could be added to the passage.
However, the Sumerian language did not entirely disappear.
Where would the s entence best fit? Click on a square [■] to add the ntence to the passage
14. Directions: An introductory ntence for a brief summary of the passage is provided below. Complete the summary by lecting the THREE answer choices that express the most important ideas in the passage Some ntences do not belong in the summary becau they express ideas that are not prented in the passage or are minor ideas in the passage. This question is worth 2 points.
Drag your answer choices to the spaces where they belong To remove an answer choice, click on it.
To review the passage, click VIEW TEXT
The earliest examples of writing have been found in Mesopotamia and date to shortly before 3000 B.C.E.
Answer Choices
Writing was invented in the same areas in which civilization began by the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and the Mediterranean.
The development of cuneiform is known becau it was written on a long-lasting material and becau it was long and widely ud throughout the ancient Near East.
Cuneiform tablets generally dealt with business and factual matters, but other topics, including literature, were also recorded and valued.
Writing was developed first by the Sumerians using wedge shaped marks (cuneiform) on clay tablets and then by the Egyptians using papyrus paper.
Scribes using cuneiform in Assyria, Babylon, Syria and Asia Minor had to learn all
the languages that ud the cuneiform script.
银汉无声转玉盘Batches of clay tablets, sometimes with as many as a thousand tablets each, are often found by archaeologists.
2.The Commercial Revolution in Medieval Europe
Beginning in the 1160s, the opening of new silver mines in northern Europe led to the minting and circulation of vast quantities of silver coins. The widespread u of cash greatly incread the volume of international trade. Business procedures changed radically. The individual traveling merchant who alone handled virtually all aspects of exchange
evolved into an operation invoh/ing three parate types of merchants: the dentary merchant who ran the "home office," financing and organizing the firm’s entire export-import trade; the carriers who transported goods by land and a; and the company agents resident in cities abroad who, on the advice of the home office, looked after sales and procurements.
信息技术基础
Commercial correspondence, unnecessary when one businessperson oversaw everything and made direct bargains with buyers and llers, multiplied. Regular courier rvice among commercial cities began. Commercial accounting became more complex when firms had to deal with shareholders, manufacturers, customers, branch offices, employees, and competing firms. Tolls on roads became high enough to finance what has been called a road revolution, involving new surfaces and bridges, new pass through the Alps, and new inns and hospices for travelers. The growth of mutual trust among merchants facilitated the growth of sales on credit and led to new developments in finance, such as the bill of exchange, a device that made the long, slow, and very dangerous shipment of coi
ns unnecessary.
The ventures of the German Hanatic League illustrate the advancements. The Hanatic League was a mercantile association of European towns dating from 1159. The league grew by the end of the fourteenth century to include about 200 cities from Holland to Poland. Across regular, well- defined trade routes along the Baltic and North as, the ships of league cities carried furs, wax, copper, fish, grain, timber, and wine. The goods were exchanged for finished products, mainly cloth and salt, from western cities. At cities such as Bruges and London, Hanatic merchants cured special trading concessions, exempting them from all tolls and allowing them to trade at local fairs. Hanatic merchants established foreign trading centers, the most famous of which was the London Steelyard, a walled community with warehous, offices, a church, and residential quarters for company reprentatives. By the late thirteenth century, Hanatic merchants had developed an important business technique, the business register. Merchants publicly recorded their debts and contracts and received a league guarantee for them. This device proved a decisive factor in the later development of credit and commerce in northern Europe.
The developments added up to what one modern scholar has called "a commercial revolution." In the long run, the commercial revolution of the High Middle Ages (A D 1000-1300) brought about radi
cal change in European society. One remarkable aspect of this change was that the commercial class constituted a small part of the total population—never more than 10 percent. They exercid an influence far in excess of their numbers. The commercial revolution created a great deal of new wealth, which meant a higher standard of living. The existence of wealth did not escape the attention of kings and other rulers. Wealth could be taxed, and through taxation, kings could create strong and centralized states. In the years to come, alliances with the
middle class were to enable kings to weaken aristocratic interests and build the states that came to be called modern.
The commercial revolution also provided the opportunity for thousands of agricultural workers to improve their social position. The slow but steady transformation of European society from almost completely rural and isolated to relatively more urban constituted the greatest effect of the commercial revolution that began in the eleventh century.意境
