Episode 5.1 -  The development of written language and literacy

[intro music]

Hi, my name is Clayton Mills.  Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History’ - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world. 

Welcome to Episode 5.1 - The development of written language and literacy.  

Next time, we’re going to be taking a look at one of the great stories of the ancient world -  the Iliad.  But before we get dive into that, I wanted to step aside for an episode, and discuss the something that’s crucial to our understanding of history:  written languages.  As I’ve said before, it’s really hard to nail down the dates of ancient events before about 1000 BC.  Part of that is because there really isn’t that much written documentation of the events before that; at least not a lot of documentation that has survived.  

Once written languages became more common, a lot more stuff got recorded, and so our study of history gets more accurate, and much easier to cross-reference between cultures.  

So today, I thought we’d take a side journey into something that I find really fascinating:  the development of written languages.  And we’re also going to do something else a bit different - this episode will be an interview, with someone with much more experience in ancient languages than I have.