IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 282

For roughly three thousand years, scribes across the ancient Middle East wrote on clay. While the clay was still soft they pressed into it a cut reed, producing the pattern of wedge-shaped marks that gave the script its modern name: cuneus is Latin for a wedge. Cuneiform was used for temple accounts, royal proclamations, legal contracts, letters, mathematical tables and poetry, and it was adapted to write a succession of languages, among them Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Old Persian. The last datable tablet is an astronomical text from AD 75. After that the skill of reading the script disappeared, and for more than a thousand years the tablets that archaeologists would later dig up were silent.

European travellers began bringing tablets home in the seventeenth century, but nobody could read them. The decisive copies were made by the Danish explorer Carsten Niebuhr, who visited the ruins of Persepolis, in what is now Iran, in the 1760s and published careful drawings of the inscriptions he found there in the 1770s. Niebuhr noticed that the texts at the site were written in three different kinds of sign, and he suspected that each kind recorded a different language. His drawings were accurate enough for other scholars to work from, and they became the foundation of the whole decipherment.

The first real breakthrough came in 1802 from Georg Friedrich Grotefend, a German schoolmaster. Grotefend could not read any of the languages written in the script, and Old Persian was still completely unknown. Instead he reasoned like a code-breaker. In one of the Persepolis texts, the same small group of signs appeared at the beginning of two lines, and each line then continued with a different name. Grotefend guessed that the repeated group meant 'king of kings' and that the names belonged to a king and his son. From the Greek writers he knew the names of the Persian kings, and he worked out that the two rulers were probably Darius and Xerxes. The guess gave him the phonetic value of a handful of signs, and it turned out to be correct.

Further progress depended on better texts. The most important lay at Behistun, on a cliff beside an ancient road in western Iran, where Darius I had ordered a long account of his reign to be carved in three languages. In the 1840s the British officer Henry Rawlinson, who had begun copying the inscription in 1835, completed the work; at first he read what he could from the ground, and later he copied the upper part from the rock face itself. The Old Persian version, the simplest of the three, allowed him to check and extend Grotefend's findings, and the other two versions gave scholars their first long trilingual key.

The second and third versions, in Elamite and Babylonian, resisted for longer. Their signs were far more numerous, and the reason became clear through the work of Edward Hincks, an Irish clergyman who studied the script in his spare time. Hincks showed that Babylonian cuneiform was not an alphabet. It was a mixture of signs representing whole words and signs representing syllables, and the same sign could stand for several different syllables according to context. Thousands of combinations therefore had to be tested, and progress was slow and quarrelsome: Hincks and Rawlinson, working separately, often reached the same conclusions and then argued about who had reached them first.

Because rival scholars could always be suspected of fitting the evidence to their own theories, a public test was arranged in 1857 by the Royal Asiatic Society. Four men — Rawlinson, Hincks, the French scholar Jules Oppert and William Henry Fox Talbot — were each given the same unpublished inscription and asked to translate it without help. When the four versions were compared, they agreed closely on the substance of the text. The experiment did not remove every doubt, but it convinced most observers that the script had genuinely been read.

One problem remained. Some of the oldest tablets were written in a language that was neither Semitic nor related to any known tongue. A few scholars argued that these texts were not a language at all but a secret code used by priests. Oppert maintained instead that they recorded the speech of the Sumerians, the people who had invented the script, and that their language had no known relatives. Once its grammar was understood, the tablets turned out to contain school exercises, hymns, contracts and proverbs, along with word lists that later scribes had compiled to help them learn a language already ancient to them.

Decipherment also brought surprises. In 1872 a young British Museum assistant named George Smith, working through tablets from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, recognised in one fragment an account of a great flood that closely resembled the story of Noah. The Babylonian poem that we now call the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest long poems known, had begun to emerge.

The results transformed the study of the ancient world. Kings who had been little more than names in Greek sources became authors of their own propaganda; everyday life in Mesopotamia could be read about in letters and contracts; the law code of Hammurabi, mathematical tablets and medical recipes all entered the historical record. Tens of thousands of tablets remain uncatalogued, and new readings continue to appear, but the decipherment of cuneiform remains one of the great intellectual achievements of the nineteenth century.

Long before newspapers existed, news was a commodity. In the great commercial cities of sixteenth-century Europe, professional writers gathered information from merchants, diplomats and travellers and sold it in handwritten sheets. Venice was the centre of this trade: weekly bulletins known as avvisi circulated among merchants and officials, and the word gazette, later applied to printed papers across the continent, is traditionally traced to a small Venetian coin. The German merchant houses, above all the Fuggers of Augsburg, ran their own correspondence networks, and their agents were expected to report not only prices but political news. Such letters were expensive and slow, and they reached only the wealthy.

Printing did not create the demand for news; it made satisfying that demand cheaper. The usual candidate for the first newspaper is the Relation, produced in Strasbourg from 1605 by Johann Carolus, a printer who had previously sent out handwritten newsletters to subscribers and who realised that a press could do the work of many copyists. Carolus was not a reporter in any modern sense: he printed what his correspondents sent him, and much of it was several weeks old by the time it appeared. A weekly paper appeared in Wolfenbüttel in 1609, and others followed in Basel, Frankfurt and Vienna. These early papers were modest single sheets, and most appeared once a week, on the day the post left the city.

What did they contain? Mostly news from abroad. Editors depended on the postal service and on letters from correspondents in other cities, so a paper printed in Hamburg reported the doings of the Turkish court or the outcome of a battle in Italy rather than events in Hamburg itself. There were reasons for this beyond the limits of communication. Domestic reporting was far more dangerous: a story about a local magistrate, a bishop or the ruler's taxes could bring a printer a fine, a ban or worse. Foreign news was safer, and it was also what the subscribers — merchants, diplomats and officials — most wanted.

England came late to the business. The first English papers were translations of Dutch publications, issued in London in the early 1620s by Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne, and for years English readers learned about Europe from such corantos. The civil war of the 1640s changed everything. With censorship temporarily in ruins, rival newsbooks appeared in large numbers: Mercurius Aulicus spoke for the king from Oxford, while Mercurius Britanicus attacked him from London. For the first time a substantial English readership followed politics week by week, and the habit did not disappear when the fighting ended.

Authority soon reasserted itself. Printing had been regulated since a decree of the Star Chamber in 1637, and after the monarchy was restored in 1660 a new Licensing Act gave officials the power to inspect presses and to approve publications before they appeared. That system lapsed in 1695, when Parliament declined to renew it, and the number of London titles rose sharply. Control then shifted from censorship to taxation. From 1712, stamps, duties on paper and a tax on advertisements made newspapers expensive, and publishers who evaded the duty were prosecuted. The taxes were reduced in stages and finally abolished in the 1850s and 1860s.

Newspapers were read socially. In the coffee houses of late seventeenth-century London, a single copy was often provided for all the customers, who could read it, hear it read aloud or argue about it. Publishers also discovered advertising: notices for books, medicines, auctions and lost property began to fill space at the back of the paper, and by the eighteenth century some proprietors earned more from advertisements than from sales. Circulation figures are notoriously hard to establish, since printers had reasons to exaggerate and few records survive, but the readership of a single copy was certainly larger than one.

The next step was frequency. The first daily newspaper is generally agreed to be the Einkommende Zeitungen, which began in Leipzig in 1650. In London the Daily Courant appeared in 1702, a single sheet printed on one side, offering foreign news and little else; its first printer promised readers that no comment would be added to the reports, so that they could judge the facts for themselves. Daily publication became common only in the following century, when faster presses and better roads made it possible to gather and distribute news within a day.

How do historians know all this? Almost nothing survives from the first decades of the press. Paper was recycled, and a weekly sheet read to pieces in a coffee house was unlikely to reach a library. What we have comes largely from the great collecting efforts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, above all the thousands of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century newspapers gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney and bought by the British Museum in 1818. Even that collection is uneven: editions are missing, some titles survive in a single copy, and provincial papers are thinly represented. Digitisation has made these pages searchable and has transformed the field, but it has not solved the underlying problem. The newspapers that were censored, confiscated or simply thrown away cannot be read, and a study based on what survives may say as much about the tastes of collectors as about the reading public of the past.

Few subjects attract as much confident advice about how they should be examined as history. The complaint is familiar. School history, its critics say, has been reduced to the memorising of dates, kings and battles, and children who might otherwise have been fascinated by the past are turned away by lists that they forget the week after the examination. In several countries reforms have followed: syllabuses have been rewritten to emphasise skills such as the analysis of sources, the evaluation of evidence and the construction of an argument, and the place of factual recall has been reduced. Behind this lies an assumption: that remembering a date is a low-level activity, while interpreting a document is a high-level one, and that the second can be developed without the first. The intention is admirable, but the argument rests on a confusion.

Consider what a pupil is being asked to do when told to evaluate a source. A letter from a factory owner in 1840 can only be judged if the pupil knows something about working conditions, about who could read and write, and about what the letter was for. The same is true of causation: the claim that a war broke out because of an alliance is empty to a pupil who does not know which countries were involved or roughly when the alliance was signed. What psychologists call working memory is severely limited, and it can only handle a few pieces of information at once. A pupil who has to look up every name will have nothing left over for the reasoning that the question is supposed to test.

There is a further cost, which has less to do with psychology than with politics. A history course built around source analysis can be taught with a very narrow range of material: two letters, a photograph and a poster will do. Curricula that drop the requirement to know a chronological outline often end up with pupils who have studied the same topics — the two world wars, the civil rights movement, the Nazis — several times and have never heard of the Peasants' Revolt or the Meiji Restoration. The students most likely to suffer are those whose families do not supply the missing background at home, because the knowledge that schools no longer teach is precisely the knowledge that educated parents pass on. A topic never met cannot later be chosen, because it will not look interesting.

The point is not that pupils should be asked to recite dates in isolation. A question that says 'Give the date of the Battle of Hastings' tests nothing except whether the candidate has revised the right page, and it deserves the contempt that critics pour on it. But the opposite error is equally serious. An examination that offers a source and demands its 'evaluation', without requiring any knowledge, can be passed by a pupil who writes fluently about the reliability of photographs in general and never mentions what this photograph shows. The interesting question is not whether facts appear in an examination, but whether candidates are required to do anything with them. A paper that asks candidates to use what they know tests both memory and judgement at the same time.

England's experience is instructive. A national curriculum introduced in 2014 deliberately restored a chronological framework, and the examinations that followed, first sat in 2018, required both broad knowledge and the analysis of contemporary sources. The results have been mixed. Critics of the new courses pointed to the sheer quantity of material to be covered, and there were complaints that pupils were being asked to remember too much too quickly. Yet the principle — that a pupil should be able to place an event in time and explain why it mattered — was surely right, and the difficulties that were identified were ones of design rather than of principle. The content was demanding, but it was not arbitrary: it gave teachers a sequence to follow and pupils a story to hold on to.

Much of the debate proceeds as if facts and thinking were opposites, so that every date added to a syllabus must displace a skill. This is a mistake. Knowledge is what makes analysis possible, and analysis is what makes knowledge worth having. The real questions are which facts a pupil should know and how those facts should be assessed. A pupil who can explain why the price of bread mattered in 1789 knows more, not less, than one who can only give the year; and a pupil who can date the French Revolution but cannot say why it happened has learned something, though not enough. The choice is not between dates and documents, but between examinations that connect the two and examinations that do not.

So I would keep dates in the history examination, but as scaffolding rather than as the finished building. A good paper should assume a body of knowledge, test a part of it directly, and then require candidates to use the rest in order to explain, compare and judge. The worst outcome of the present argument would be a history curriculum that produces pupils who can talk confidently about the reliability of a source while knowing nothing about the world it describes. Dates are not the enemy of understanding; they are among its necessary conditions. A pupil who knows when the Poor Law was reformed, and why, has a firmer grasp of nineteenth-century England than one who has mastered the language of source criticism and nothing else.