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<h3>3480 C — Cities and Literacy</h3>
<i>The smallest rank of cities (black dots) is labelled on the next map.</i>
<p>The expansion of the <b>literate area</b> since the last map is largely due to the reconquest of barbarian-held territory, but there are some newly literate peoples as well: the Čia and Ša, as a result of Gurdagor conquest, and the Fei, as a result of their conversion to Jippirasti.
<p>One new script has been added within the map area: the <b>Mei syllabary</b>, devised around 2900 on the model of the Xurnese script, in its cursive form. The adapters took the syllabic forms only, ignoring the logograms.
<p>To the north, in 2853, the <b>Nanese</b> king o-Seutsɛ, observing the recordkeeping of Kebreni and Verdurian traders, told his attendants, “As they draw words on paper, so you shall draw words on paper.” His savants developed a syllabary— two of them in fact, as there were symbols to be used only for sacred and royal words. It spread to the Alfonine kingdoms and to Moreo Ašcai; the latter, however, has more recently switched to the Verdurian alphabet (in its Kebreni form).
<p>There are more people in Ereláe, and more people in <b>cities</b>, than ever before— indeed, too many to show using the same symbols as on the previous maps; the smallest symbol now stands for a city of 30,000, and the largest cities shown— Verduria, Curau, Inex, and Ṭetäs— boast over half a million inhabitants each. Such metropoles require new cultural and architectural solutions: Verduria and Inex have partial sewer systems; water is brought to Ṭetäs by aqueducts; Inex and Curau (thanks to their artist rulers) have the equivalent of zoning systems.
<p>Urbanism has reached its greatest flowering along the Svetla valley, in Xurno (Revaudo had its genesis and its earliest successes in the cities), in Čeiy, in Belšai, and in Šura. We should not import our own biases into Almea; the processes which have turned our own cities into slums surrounded by the suburbs of the rich have not begun there. The cities are where culture, science, and commerce flourish; they are richer and safer than the countryside. (Though not healthier; diseases spread easily among the massed populations of the cities.)
<p>Dhekhnam contains more and larger cities than Munkhâsh ever did, but there is still, to the Dhekhnami and particularly to the ktuvok mind, something alien about cities. The larger cities are to be found in Sarnáe, as a relic of Caďinorian settlement, and in Demóshimor, the most advanced section of the country.
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