Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first known record of a transaction was created in the year 3500 BCE by a Sumerian merchant in southern Mesopotamia. This act of marking clay was a desperate necessity born from the explosion of trade and governance that accompanied the rise of early cities. The resulting cuneiform script evolved from a system of tokens into a complex array of numerical signs and ideograms.
Semitic-speaking peoples of northern Canaan invented the consonantal alphabet as early as 1500 BCE. English archaeologist Flinders Petrie discovered a series of Canaanite inscriptions in the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem in 1905. These early scripts were later deciphered by William F. Albright in 1948 using evidence from Ugarit, a site discovered by French archaeologist Claude F. A. Schaeffer in 1929.
By the end of the 1600s, male literacy in England had risen to 45% while female literacy remained negligible. Thomas More claimed in 1533 that up to 60% of the population could read, a figure supported by some studies of London but contested by others. The Second Industrial Revolution brought technological improvements in paper production and distribution networks that enabled the supply of printed material to a mass market.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, 52% of adult women and 68% of adult men are literate. About two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women, a figure that has remained stubbornly constant since 2013. This disparity is deeply rooted in social barriers including child marriage which predominantly impacts girls and tends to reduce literacy levels.
In Malawi, 90% of second-grade students cannot read a single word. In rural India, the figure is 85.4% and in low- and middle-income countries, 53% of children are considered learning-poor. This hidden illiteracy poses a significant threat to global development goals as it indicates that high rates of illiteracy are an early warning sign that the Sustainable Development Goals for education are in jeopardy.
Programs like the Norwegian Refugee Council Pack program have been implemented in 13 post-conflict countries since 2003. These programs use daily routines and predictable activities to help learners transition from war to peace while acquiring literacy and numeracy skills. The integration of technology-assisted reading acquisition systems challenges the commonly held belief that written language requires formal instruction and schooling.