The Axemakers Gift: The Gift Of Technology

There are many important technological developments that we have studied; the one I thought was the most important was the gift of writing. It is difficult to talk about writing, without mentioning the first gift of agriculture because they go together. It is said that agriculture was the beginning of civilization. As a result of the advanced techniques from dry farming to irrigation it brought about for the first time the ability to control food supplies to be adequate for the growing population. With the settlements increasing in population and the availability of surplus of food it became important to trade for services from people with specialized skills. With this new skilled people, they were given positions of decision making

40), the second gift of the Axemakers is writing it was one of the most important gifts and would change the way we thought and viewed the world. “It would make possible higher levels of organization required to keep the community viable and to help it survive”. This introduced the need for a leader that could protect his people and organize redistribution of food materials. In order for him to accomplish this he relied on the gift of writing.

The beginning of writing started as numbers, started with sticks they were used to count various items for example one stick one apple. An example, In the morning they had 5 sticks to represent 5 cows, at the end of the day they needed 5 sticks for 5 cows unless they traded a cow for other necessities, then there would be 4 sticks for 4 cows. They didn’t know what is meant but knew it was a measurement of quantity. This method was not very efficient when dealing with large quantities so approximately 12000 years ago the first examples of writing occurred with the use of clay tokens to represent different commodities and specific quantities. They were used for counting and accounting of goods and

The most important development of the written language was from the Greeks alphabet of 26 letters written from left to right. Once this occurred it gave rise to many great thinkers for Aristotle that started analyzing how everything worked. A great library run by the state “Museion” research and technology institute of learning, the first systematic grammar came out from the “Museion” by a pupil remained the same for 1600 years. During this period there was a wide division in labor, between the literate and illiterate, the rulers, and the led. The gift of writing modified the way we though and existed in the community reduced our ancient hunter –gatherer way of life. This was the beginning of a great change for the hunter-gathers that were dependent on nature, no social classes, and no gender division. Everyone had a common goal which was the search of food. Now with the with the control of settlements by the literate elite the ruled the people with written laws. organized settlements and writing there were written rule of law in most cases restricted their rights. In some rare instances these laws benefitted individuals right and duties of