IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 213

Among the goods that Phoenician merchants carried across the Mediterranean in the first millennium BC, the least bulky was a set of twenty-two marks scratched on potsherds, cut into stone or painted on papyrus. The Phoenicians were a seafaring people whose city-states — Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad — occupied a narrow coastal strip in what is now Lebanon and Syria. Their ships carried cedar timber, purple dye, glass, wine and metal, and they founded trading posts as far west as the coast of Spain and North Africa. They also carried a way of writing that the Greeks, the Romans and, through them, most later European scripts would adopt.

Earlier writing systems were far more demanding. Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform used hundreds of signs, some standing for whole words, others for syllables, and a scribe needed years of training to master them. Writing was therefore the business of a small professional class attached to temples, palaces and merchant houses. The script that appeared in the Levant in the middle of the second millennium BC, known to scholars as Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite, took a different approach: a small number of signs, each standing for a single consonant.

The signs themselves grew out of pictures, and the names of the letters preserve that origin. The first was called aleph, the West Semitic word for an ox; beth meant house; gimel, camel; daleth, door. In each case the sound represented was the first sound of the name, a device scholars call the acrophonic principle. By about 1050 BC the script had settled into a fixed set of twenty-two letters, written from right to left and recording consonants only. Vowels were left to the reader to supply.

This economy was its great advantage. Twenty-two signs could be learned in weeks rather than years, and writing ceased to be a mystery reserved for specialists. Inscriptions survive on stone sarcophagi, arrowheads, seals, bronze bowls and fragments of pottery, but the everyday records — accounts, letters, contracts, ships' lists — went onto papyrus or leather, materials that rarely survive in the damp climate of the Levant. What remains is a small fraction of what was written.

That is one reason the Phoenicians themselves appear almost silent. They left no literature, and historians depend on scattered inscriptions and on what Greek and Roman authors said about them. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, reported that the Greeks had learned their letters from Phoenician settlers who had come to Boeotia with Cadmus, a legendary wanderer. Modern scholars treat the story as legend but accept its essential point.

The earliest surviving Greek inscriptions date from the eighth century BC, and the Greek alphabet is unmistakably derived from the Phoenician. The Greeks made one decisive change: several letters that had stood for consonants unknown in Greek were turned into signs for vowels. Alpha, from aleph, came to stand for 'a'; epsilon, from he, for 'e'. In a language where vowels carried meaning this was a necessity rather than a refinement, and the change produced the first alphabet in the full sense, in which every sound is written.

As the script passed from people to people, the shapes of the letters changed. Phoenician letters had been designed to be scratched or painted with a brush; the Greeks, writing with a pen on papyrus, gradually rotated and simplified them. The names were borrowed too, though often mangled: aleph became alpha, beth became beta, and the first two letters together gave the Greeks — and eventually the world — the word 'alphabet'.

Early Greek writing also ran from right to left, like its model. Some inscriptions were written in boustrophedon, literally 'as the ox turns', with successive lines running in opposite directions so that the reader's eye moved back and forth. Only later did Greek settle on the left-to-right direction that its descendants inherited.

Meanwhile the alphabet was spreading east. Aramaic, written in a related script, became the administrative language of successive empires, and its descendants include the Hebrew and Arabic scripts. Whether the Brahmi script of India, and hence the writing systems of much of South and Southeast Asia, also descended from Aramaic is debated; the idea was proposed in the nineteenth century and is widely, though not universally, accepted.

In the western Mediterranean, the colony of Carthage, traditionally founded in 814 BC, developed its own variety of the script, known as Punic, and used it across North Africa, Sardinia, Malta and southern Spain. Punic inscriptions continued to be carved long after Carthage was destroyed by Rome in 146 BC, and the script survived in North Africa for several centuries more.

The triumph of the alphabet was never inevitable, and it did not sweep away its rivals: cuneiform continued in use in Mesopotamia for centuries, and Egyptian hieroglyphs survived into the fourth century AD. But the simplicity of the alphabetic idea — a few dozen signs, easily taught and adaptable to any language — explains why scripts derived from it are now used to write a very large number of the world's languages.

Every large library is also a slow chemical experiment. Books, letters, maps and newspapers are made largely of cellulose, the long-chain molecule that gives paper its strength, and cellulose reacts with water and oxygen over decades. The reaction is slow in a cool, dry, dark room and rapid in a warm, damp, sunny one. Because most of the world's documentary heritage is stored in buildings designed for readers rather than for chemistry, much of it has been decaying since the day it was printed.

Until the nineteenth century, paper in Europe was made from rags — linen and cotton — which consist of almost pure cellulose. Rags were scarce and expensive, and paper was accordingly hoarded, but the resulting sheets have proved remarkably durable: many medieval manuscripts are in better condition than books printed a century ago. From the 1840s, manufacturers began to make paper from wood, which was far cheaper and could be reduced to pulp by machine. Mechanical pulp, produced by grinding, retains lignin, the substance that stiffens the walls of plant cells, and lignin yellows and turns acidic as it ages.

The damage that follows is chemical. Acid catalyses the hydrolysis of cellulose: molecules of water, with the help of acid, break the long chains into shorter ones, and the shorter the chains, the weaker the paper. The process accelerates as it proceeds, because the breakdown itself releases more acid, so a book may seem sound for fifty years and then crumble at a touch. Heat and moisture speed the reaction, which is why a basement or an attic is the worst possible place for a collection.

Alongside these internal processes, paper faces external dangers. Ultraviolet light from windows and fluorescent tubes fades inks and weakens fibres; sulphur dioxide and other pollutants from traffic and heating form acids on the surface of a page; mould, which flourishes after a leak or a flood, digests the paper itself; and insects and rodents eat it. Handling, too, causes wear, particularly at the edges and spines of books. None of these problems can be eliminated entirely, but all can be reduced.

The best-established treatment, deacidification, addresses acidity directly. In its simplest form the document is soaked in an alkaline solution, usually calcium hydroxide, which neutralises the acid and leaves behind a reserve that will absorb acid produced later. Because water damages inks, sizes and some papers, conservators also use non-aqueous methods, in which an alkaline compound such as magnesium oxide is carried in a liquid that evaporates quickly. Whole collections can be treated by spraying or in a vacuum chamber, though mass treatment is costly and cannot restore strength that has already been lost.

Strengthening weak paper has proved harder than neutralising it. From the 1930s, conservators laminated fragile sheets between sheets of cellulose acetate film and tissue under heat and pressure. The result was strong and, at the time, admired; whole runs of newspapers were treated in this way. In the longer term, however, the film proved difficult to remove and prone to its own forms of decay. The episode taught the profession a lesson it has not forgotten: a treatment that cannot be undone may one day be regretted, and reversibility became a guiding principle of modern conservation.

Disasters have also shaped practice. On 4 November 1966 the river Arno broke its banks and flooded the centre of Florence, submerging shelves in libraries and archives under water and mud. Thousands of volumes were soaked, and for a time it was unclear whether they could be saved at all. Volunteers came from many countries to help dry them, and a conservation laboratory was established to deal with the backlog. The experience produced technical advances in the drying and cleaning of wet paper and a lasting conviction that treatment must be planned, documented and reversible.

Some damage originates not in the paper but in what was written on it. From the Middle Ages until the early twentieth century, European scribes and clerks used iron gall ink, made by steeping oak galls in water with iron sulphate and gum arabic. The ink is acidic, and in damp conditions its iron compounds migrate through the paper, weakening it along the lines of writing until letters can fall out as holes. Conservators can slow this corrosion by applying alkaline solutions, but the treatment is painstaking and not always successful.

Much modern practice is preventive rather than interventive. Documents are stored in acid-free boxes and folders, kept at a stable temperature of about 18°C and a relative humidity near fifty per cent, and cleaned of surface dirt before it becomes embedded. Digitisation has become part of the same strategy: a reader who consults an image on a screen cannot tear a page, and demand for the original declines. Conservators point out, however, that a digital copy preserves information, not the object.

Money, inevitably, is the constraint. Treating a single fragile volume can cost a professional a week of work, and few institutions can afford to treat more than a small fraction of what they hold. Priorities therefore have to be set, and setting them provokes argument. Some conservators regard bleaching — a chemical whitening of stained paper — as too risky, since it shortens the life of the fibres; others use it sparingly on the grounds that a document nobody can read will not be consulted at all.

Stand on almost any of the fields where a great battle was fought and you will see very little. There may be a stone cross, a farmhouse, a hedge that has stood for three centuries; there will probably be a car park and an information board. The ground itself gives nothing away. Yet below the surface may lie hundreds of lead musket balls, fragments of armour, buttons and, occasionally, the remains of the dead. Battlefields are among the least visually impressive of historic sites and among the most easily destroyed.

England has recognised the problem for longer than most countries. Since the 1990s a national register of historic battlefields has been maintained by the public body now called Historic England, and several dozen sites appear on it, from Hastings to Naseby. Registration brings no automatic legal bar to building. Unlike a listed building or a scheduled ancient monument, a registered battlefield is not a statutory designation; it is, in the language of the planning system, a material consideration, which means that a council must take it into account but may still grant permission.

Archaeology has transformed what can be learned from such places, though slowly. The systematic study of battlefields is a recent discipline and much of its evidence is fragile. A scatter of lead shot can reveal where a line of soldiers stood and how far their weapons carried; the distribution of buttons and buckles can show how a regiment moved. But interpretation is rarely straightforward. Firing positions are inferred, not observed, and the ground has usually been ploughed, drained or quarried in the centuries since. At Towton in Yorkshire, where a battle was fought in 1461, excavation of a mass grave in the 1990s revealed injuries that no chronicle described.

Much of the finds evidence has come from metal detector users rather than from professional excavations. In England and Wales a voluntary scheme allows detectorists to report what they find, and the resulting records have mapped the extent of several battlefields far beyond what archaeologists could have afforded to survey. The same hobby, however, has a criminal fringe: sites are visited at night without permission, and objects are removed and sold, destroying the context that gives them meaning.

The case for protecting battlefields rests on more than sentiment. A battlefield is an archive in which the events of a few hours are recorded in the soil; once the ground is built over or dug away, that archive is gone and cannot be recovered. The sites also carry a commemorative weight that is hard to quantify but easy to underestimate. Families visit them to trace ancestors, schools use them to teach, and for many communities a battle is the moment at which their town acquired its identity.

Yet the case for protection has weaknesses that its supporters seldom acknowledge. Almost every battlefield has already been altered: farmers have ploughed them, roads have crossed them, and towns have grown over parts of them. The exact location of a battle is also often uncertain and is revised with each generation of research, so to protect a field absolutely is to assume that historians have finished their work. And protection can become an argument against any change at all, including housing that a village badly needs.

Nor is commemoration as simple as it sounds. Battles were fought for causes that many people today would find repellent, and a battlefield can be celebrated in ways that flatter one side and silence the other. Historians have pointed out that the story told at some visitor centres has owed more to romance than to evidence. Protecting a site does not guarantee that it will be explained honestly, and a plaque can mislead as thoroughly as a supermarket.

My own view is that our protections are too weak, but that the argument for them needs to be made more precisely. The distinction that matters is between the core of a battlefield — the area where the fighting was concentrated and the dead were buried — and its wider setting. On the core there should be a strong presumption against development that would disturb the ground, and a requirement that a proper archaeological survey be carried out before permission is even considered. In the setting, change should be resisted only where it would obstruct understanding of the site. A housing estate on the far edge of a battlefield is a pity; a warehouse over the place where the line broke is a tragedy.

It is also worth asking what actually threatens these places. In my experience the answer is rarely a developer with a bulldozer. It is indifference: the field that nobody visits, the plaque that nobody reads, the local plan that nobody comments on until the application has been approved. Battlefields are protected by people who know where they are. That is why the most useful money spent on them is often for interpretation — for paths, maps, labels and someone to explain what happened.

None of this means that every battlefield should become a museum, or that the land should be frozen. Most of these sites are working farmland, and the best of them are places where sheep graze among the earthworks. But a field is not empty because nothing is visible in it, and a society that builds over its battlefields should not be surprised when, a generation later, nobody can remember why the ground mattered.