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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

I think colonialism and the discovery of the "new world" with Europeans moving there, multiplying and imposing their culture.

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Writing (and printing) enabled them to impose their culture. For example, Pizzaro had the benefit of a thousand years of military history to draw from, thanks to writing and books. The Inca did not. Writing & printing is a huge mind multiplier. It's hard to overestimate it.

(The Inca Empire was, of course, also an Empire formed by the Inca imposing their culture on other tribes.)

Pizarro (one z, two r's) AFAIK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Pizarro

or is it an alternate spelling used in English?

Pizzaro sounds (to an Italian) like an invented word about someone that deals with pizza's.

Pizza has conquered the world, too!

Pizzaro apparently grew up illiterate, fwiw.

Likely trained by officers who were.

The interactions between him and the Incas showed he was quite a bit more knowledgeable about strategy than they were.

The Romans also had great success against the illiterate barbarian tribes, despite the latter being much larger and better armed.

Pizzaro was a very educated man. /s

At the same time that Europe was conquering America, the Mughals were conquering India. But the Arabic script did not supplant Devanagari in India. Had the Islamic empires adopted the printing press as strongly as the Europeans did, one could very well imagine proto-Urdu texts flooding India, literacy in the Arabic script being a requirement for social advancement, and Devanagari being relegated to religious use.

The Arabic script is harder to print using movable types compared to the latin script. It's an important reason for the lack of adoption of the printing press in languages using the Arabic script (historically speaking of course).

Interesting theme for a novel.

I think Mughals were more Persian than Arabic

Persian is written using a variant of the Arabic script, as is Urdu.

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