Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stated in his Cosmos TV series (2014): “It was around 5,000 years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that we learned how to write.”
This was followed by Egyptian hieroglyphics on papyrus and stone, around 3,000 BC.
The earliest human records appeared about 3,000 or 4,000 BC – Sumerian cuneiform on clay tablets in the Mesopotamian Valley.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson stated in his Cosmos TV series (2014): “It was around 5,000 years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers that we learned how to write.”
This was followed by Egyptian hieroglyphics on papyrus and stone, around 3,000 BC.
Chinese characters in bamboo annals were invented during the reign of China’s legendary Yellow Emperor around 2,600 BC.
Richard Overy, author of The Times Complete History of the World (2010) wrote: “No date appears before the start of human civilization about 5,500 years ago and the beginning of a written or pictorial history.”
Writing originated as an accounting method which scribes used to keep track of everything the king owned. Then writing was used to keep a record of kings’ decrees, king’s genealogies, and astronomy. Only kings, the upper class, and scribes could read, leaving ancient Egypt with an overall literacy rate of less than one percent. The Egyptian National Archeological Museum’s display on “scribes” stated: “Only a small percentage of ancient Egypt’s population was literate, namely, the pharaoh, members of the royal family, officials, priests, and scribes. Particularly popular and lucrative, the scribe’s profession was mostly hereditary. Scribes had careers in the government, priesthood, and the army. They began their rigorous training in their early childhood.”
The thousands of hieroglyphic and cuneiform characters were not only difficult to learn, the lower classes and slaves were not allowed to learn them. This facilitated the government’s control of the illiterate masses. Kings wanted subjects to blindly obey, not think for themselves. Anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss wrote: “Ancient writing’s main function was to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.”
One of the ways a king motivated subjects was to honor and reward those who obeyed him, and dishonor and strike fear into those who did not obey him.
The first well-recorded instance of a nation, with millions of people, ruling itself without a king was ancient Israel when it made its exodus from Egypt’s Pharao
When Moses came down Mount Sinai, he not only had the Law, he had it in a 22 character alphabet that was so easy to comprehend that even children learned to read. The first letter was “aleph,” second letter “beth,” etc. Israel is, perhaps, the first instance in history of an entirely literate population.
Jewish historian Eupolemus wrote c.150 BC: “Moses was the first wise man. He taught the alphabet to the Jews who passed it on to the Phoenicians, who passed it to the Greeks. Moses first wrote laws for the Jews.”
Not only could they read the Law, they were required to, as the Law was addressed to each individual citizen.
E.C. Wines wrote in The Hebrew Republic (Philadelphia: c1853): “A fundamental principle of the Hebrew government was the education of the whole body of the people. An ignorant people cannot be a free people. Intelligence is essential to liberty. No nation is capable of self-government, which is not educated to understand and appreciate its responsibilities. Upon this principle Moses proceeded in the framing of his commonwealth. Ignorant people cannot be a free people. Intelligence is essential to liberty. There is reason to believe that the ability to read and write was an accomplishment more generally possessed by the Hebrews than by any other people of antiquity.”
Wherever there is a king, the friends of the king are “more equal”, and those not friends with the king are “less equal.” Those who are enemies of the king are dead— it is called “treason,” or they are slaves.
For Israel’s first four centuries in the Promised Land, there was no king, they were being ruled instead by the Law. The Law declared there was no respect of persons in judgment; rich and poor were to be treated the same; male and female made in the image of the Creator; even the stranger living among them was under the same Law that they were under. This was the beginning of the concept of “equality” as there was no royal family to seek favors from, no superior or inferior class, no caste system. Israel’s experiment in self-government was dependent on one thing—the priests teaching the people to read the Law.
People were motivated to keep the Law as they were taught:
1) there is a God who is everywhere, who knows every thought and sees every action;
2) God wants them to be fair;
3) God will hold each person accountable in the future.
When the priests neglected teaching the Law, everyone did what was right in their own eyes and the country fell into moral chaos. Thus to get out of their rebellious moral chaos, Israel got a totalitarian ruler, King Saul, who soon killed a large number of the priests, with the exception of Abiathar escaping to young David.
The pattern was clear, for a country to maintain order without fear of a king, there needed to be a citizenry educated in moral restraints and fear of God.
After Independence, large numbers of immigrants arrived in America. The response was to create “common” schools for them. The “Father of American Scholarship and Education” was Noah Webster. He was the “Guiding Light” for education of young people across the whole nation for many years.
Noah Webster attended Yale, which was founded as a Puritan Congregational school. When the Revolutionary War started, Webster left for four years to fight. Then after coming back and graduating, Noah Webster became a lawyer and taught in New York. However, he became very interested in the education of America’s youth.
Noah Webster served 9 terms in Connecticut’s Legislature and 3 terms in Massachusetts’ Legislature where he lobbied for funding of public education, arguing the government should: “Discipline our youth in early life in sound maxims of moral, political, and religious duties.
For generations, American school children learned letters, morality and patriotism from Webster’s Blue Backed Spellers. They were also educated from his catechisms, his history books, and his Webster’s Dictionary. For he published the first English dictionary in a hundred years and the first ever from America.
Noah Webster served 9 terms in Connecticut’s Legislature and 3 terms in Massachusetts’ Legislature where he lobbied for funding of public education, arguing the government should: “Discipline our youth in early life in sound maxims of moral, political, and religious duties.
(Noah Webster was so very, very important in educating and influencing the youth of early America that I am going to here put forward many of his writings so that you can see what he was teaching America’s youth, and how it influenced the whole nation:)
Noah Webster stated: “Society requires that the education of youth should be watched with the most scrupulous attention. Education, in a great measure, forms the moral characters of men, and morals are the basis of government. Education should therefore be the first care of a legislature, for it is much easier to introduce and establish an effectual system for preserving morals, than to correct by penal statutes the ill effects of a bad system”
Webster continued: “The goodness of a heart is of infinitely more consequence to society than an elegance of manners; nor will any superficial accomplishments repair the want of principle in the mind. The education of youth lays the foundation on which both law and gospel rest for success.”
He stated: “To give children a good education in manners, arts and science, is important; to give them a religious education is indispensable; an
Webster further wrote: “Practical truths in religion, in morals, and in all civil and social concerns, ought to be among the first and most prominent objects of instruction, for without both kinds of knowledge, citizens can not enjoy the blessings which they seek. Controlling the mind and the whole conduct, science and literature will not make men what the laws of God require them to be; and of instruction, truths in religion, in morals, and in all civil and social concerns, ought to be among the first and most prominent objects of instruction.”
Noah Webster wrote in “On the Education of Youth in America,” printed in Webster’s American Magazine, 1788: “In some countries the common people are not permitted to read the Bible at all. In ours, it is as common as a newspaper and in schools is read with a great degree of respect. Select passages of Scripture may be read in schools, to great advantage. My wish is not to see the Bible excluded from schools but to see it used as a system of religion and morality.”
In “Advice to the Young,” included in his History of the United States, 1832, Noah Webster wrote: “The brief exposition of the Constitution of the United States, will unfold to young persons the principles of republican government. And the genuine source of correct republican principles is the Bible, particularly the New Testament of the Christian religion. Republican government loses half of its value, where the moral and social duties are imperfectly understood, or negligently practiced.”
Webster added: “To exterminate our popular vices is a work of far more importance to the character and happiness of our citizens than any other improvements in our system of education.”
Webster wrote: Be it remembered then that disobedience to God’s law, or sin is the procuring cause of almost all the sufferings of mankind. God has so formed the moral system of this world, that a conformity to His will by men produces peace, prosperity and happiness.”
In the preface of his American Dictionary of the English Language, republished 1841, Noah Webster wrote: “If the language can be improved in regularity, so as to be more easily acquired by our own citizens and by foreigners, it should be rendered a more useful instrument for the propagation of science, arts, civilization and Christianity.”
Noah Webster published his translation of the Holy Bible, The Webster Bible, in 1833, stating: “The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is ‘good’, and the best corrector of all that is ‘evil’, in human society; the ‘best’ book for regulating the temporal concerns of men, and the ‘only book’ that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity.”
In “Letters to a Young Gentleman Commencing His Education” (New Haven, 1823), Webster wrote: “It is alleged by men of loose principles that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political stations. But the Scriptures teach a different doctrine. They direct that rulers should be men who rule in the fear of God, able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness. And it is to the neglect of this rule of conduct in our citizens, that we must ascribe the multiplied frauds, breeches of trust, peculations and embezzlements of public property which astonish even ourselves; which tarnish the character of our country; which disgrace a republican government; and which will tend to reconcile men to monarchs in other countries and even our own.”
Noah Webster wrote further in Letters to a Young Gentleman: “Men may devise and adopt new forms of government; they may amend old forms, repair breaches, and punish violators of the constitution; but there is, there can be, no effectual remedy, but obedience to the divine law.”
In his 1834 work titled, Value of the Bible and Excellence of the Christian Religion, Webster wrote: The Bible must be considered as the great source of all the truths by which men are to be guided in government, as well as in all social transactions. The Bible (is) the instrument of all reformation in morals and religion.”
Noah Webster wrote in The History of the United States, 1832: “All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.”
