Literacy in the classical world

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A reference to check out is Carlo Cipolla: Literacy and Development in the West. I don't have it right here, and can't find an online version (it's a book from 1969) but found a review here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3786234 which quotes:

By 1750 at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, almost 5000 years had elapsed since the first rudimentary appearance of the art of writing. Yet more than 90 percent of the world's population had no access to this art.

There are many more numbers for specific societies in the book. Of course, the methods used will be open to challenge. Another approach would be to look at todays' worst-off countries and posit that it was even lower in all countries a long time ago; for example, the CIA World Factbook gives a literacy rate for Afghanistan in 2000 at 28.1%.

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