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06649_Field_TCUM T214.txt
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process is still occurring, it should be easy for us to see that it
was in the armies of Egypt and Rome that a kind of
democratization by uniform technological education occurred.
Careers were then open to talents for those with literate
training. In the chapter on the written word we saw how
phonetic writing translated tribal man into a visual world and
invited him to undertake the visual organization of space. The
priestly groups in the temples had been more concerned with
the records of the past and with the control of the inner space
of the unseen than with outward military conquest. Hence,
there was a clash between the priestly monopolizers of
knowledge and those who wished to apply it abroad as new
conquest and power. (This same clash now recurs between the
university and the business world.) It was this kind of rivalry
that inspired Ptolemy II to establish the great library at
Alexandria as a centre of imperial power. The huge staff of civil