HISTORY: WAS EVERYBODY BUT EGYPT ILLITERATE? | nationalsalvation.net
I have never seen any evidence that anybody ever actually thought the world was flat.
The reason we don't see what shape people thought the world was is because it was information that one would produce. It takes a LOT of leisure before one begins to talk about things like that.
Such information is not produced and it is not preserved. We try desperately to hook our history to that of Rome, but again, one of the most basic aspects of Rome is totally unnoted.
Rome kept records only of itself. They kept Greek records because of their claim to have come from the Trojan War, but otherwise they kept NOTHING. Yes, they did ignore all the languages of the "barbarians," but they also ignored the Etruscans, who were once their kings and from whom they actually did get a beginning of their knowledge of building.
The only Etrurian title we know of now is "chief builder of bridges." That is because it was a title given to the top man in Etruscan Rome, it was adopted as a title by the Emperors, and now is known as Pontifus Magnus, one title the Pope has.
The point is not the accuracy of that observation. The point is that we have NO survival of anything Etruscan despite the fact that the titanic record keeping capitol of Rome was built there.
Just as it is assumed that all earlier people thought the earth was flat, it is assumed they were illiterate. As a matter of fact, the first thing any Jehovan faith does is burn all writings.
In my youth, no one had any difficulty with the idea that the only writing Nordic peoples had was on rock.
Nobody knew of anything but advanced writings etched into rock. Pretty good, to learn how to etch rock without ever having any place to do your learning. No destructible writings were found, so it was assumed they didn't exist.
Destroying writing is serious business for Jehovans. We do know that when Islam took over Iran, its native script was abolished for Arabic script, as was every other native script. Today, we all know that Yiddish is a simple form of German, you can actually understand Yiddish if you speak Afrikaans
But Yiddish is written in Hebrew script.
When Christianity took over Egypt hieroglyphics was still Egyptian writing. The last hieroglyphic writing dates to about the fourth century.
The Romans outlawed the uniting factor of Celtic society, the Druids. If the Romans didn't leave a shred of Etruscan writing except on tomb walls, what do you think they would do to Druidic writing?
So we all assume the Druids wore robes, totally alien to their society, and that they had large organized seminaries but no writings.
This information is worth producing because it demonstrates that all real knowledge, the world is round, writing, so forth is entirely the product of those who own the Books today. It is one with the idea that we wouldn't have the electron microscope today if a Greek philosopher had not argued with Aristotle about whether the substance of a thing changed if it were cut down to its irreducible size, what ancient Greeks called the atom.
We have learned in the last generation that animal society is NATURALLY much like our own, and that our society is NATURALLY different from what all forms of Wordism tell us. As real history is dug out, we may have to cope with the reality that literacy was much more general, and that our real legacy from Egypt, Rome, and the Jehovan faiths is bigotry.