Writing as a glorious achievement of human civilization

...The intended restricted uses of early writing provided a positive disincentive for devising less ambiguous writing systems. The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots. As the antrhopologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was to ''facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.'' Personal uses of writing by nonprofessionals came only much later, as writing systems grew simpler and more expressive...

...All of the likely or possible independent inventions of writing (in Sumer, Mexico, China and Egypt), and all of the early adaptations of those invented systems (for example those in Crete, Iran, Turkey, the Indus Valley, and the Maya area) involved socially stratified societies with complex political institutions...Early writing served the needs of the those political institutions (such as record keeping and royal propaganda), and the users were full-time bureaucrats nourished by stored food surpluses grown by food-producing peasants...

(Guns, Germs and Steel, The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond)

ای کسانی که در تمدن پرافتخار ایران باستان غرق شده اید. بدانید و آگاه باشید که اقتدار و افتخار یک امپراطوری دخلی به رفاه شهروندانش ندارد. پس حسرت آن دوران را نخورید و به درد مملکت برسید.