History of the family focus groups, and quantitative surveys. In most cultures of the world, the beginning of family history is set in creation myths. In "Works and Days", the ancient Greek poet Hesiod describes the epic destruction of four previous Ages of Man. The utopia that was the Golden Age was eventually replaced by the current Iron Age; a time when gods made man live in "hopeless misery and toil." Hesiod's second poem Theogony, described the Greek gods' relationships and family ties. Ancient Greeks believed that among them, were descendants of gods who qualified for priesthood or other privileged social status. The Judeo-Christian
History of the alphabet the most widely used alphabet today, in turn derives from Greek (by way of Cumae and the Etruscans). Two scripts are well attested from before the end of the fourth millennium BCE: Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs were employed in three ways in Ancient Egyptian texts: as logograms (ideograms) that represent a word denoting an object pictorially depicted by the hieroglyph; more commonly as phonograms writing a sound or sequence of sounds; and as determinatives (which provide clues to meaning without directly writing sounds). Since vowels were mostly unwritten, the hieroglyphs which indicated a single consonant could have been