"At or around the ninth century, Western civilization began to greatly expand its range of externalization of symbolization of thought through the practice of silent reading, greatly aided by the invention of the Carolingian miniscule, with ascender, standard, and descender letters graphically separated into easily distinguishable words, obviating the need to analyze each letter into its phonetic segments. This silent-reading-made-easy technique increased exponentially the value of reading, becoming a human faculty (Fischer 2003: 161).

Combine that innovation with an earlier bureaucratic invention of the library cataloguing system by Callimachus of Cyrene (c. 305-340 BCE) a little over a thousand years before at Alexandria, and a people can start collecting and organizing enough texts to create entire domains of knowledge. Drama, oratory, lyric poetry, legislation, medicine, history, and philosophy were just a few knowledge domains reflected in the original bureaucracy of the library at Alexandria (Fischer 2003: 59). Such innovations in the production and consumption of the external symbol systems made it possible to organize later generations into even larger groups, such as constitutional monarchies, republics, nations and states, all held together by the "magical powers" of the written word..."